polisci degree

Cairo

We were very lonely in Cairo’s Coptic quarter. Our surgeries had yet to heal and we undoubtedly looked frightful to the inhabitants on our evening walks. We received only looks of terror or menace, except for some of the children who seemed to accept us. But even some of them couldn’t help but burst into tears at the sight of us. Passing two buildings full of pigs and chickens being fattened for eventual slaughter, we imagined the exclamations of the proprietors, as well as the community members, not to mention the sounds of the animals themselves, if an escape was fashioned and the future meals spilled and dispersed raucously out onto the cobble-stoned boulevards, running madly, for the first time, out in the world. The crowing and squealing of the beasts, the shouts of the people. Then we imagined the scene again, this time with the jailbreak conducted in utter silence on all sides, excepting only the sound of hooves and chicken nails scraping the road surface, the fevered flapping of wings in the alleyways. And then we rolled through it once more with the Coptic quarter’s thoroughfares carpeted with the lushest and deepest and most sound-muffling of fibers, these billions of fibers stained and/or dyed the royalest of royal blues.