The Giver

Samira Jafar

U r not short to me. U r beautiful <3, M wrote in a way I could only describe as earnest, potentially sarcastic. My feet were up on the heater in the living room, my heels cooking. I loved the thickening of my skin, the smell of myself in the air. I ate from a bag of SkinnyPop. It was paradoxical because I placed a jar of Nutella in the microwave and poured the hot liquid over the kernels as I looked at my matches.

I am five feet tall and the criteria for dwarfism lists four ten and shorter so yeah I would describe myself as short according to science. And being short doesn’t mean I think I am ugly because I’m actually not? I meanly thought of M as obtuse. He was younger than I was, which was a deal breaker to me, since I preferred older men who would tell me what to do so that I didn’t need to tire myself with thought. I didn’t tell him this because a Tarot reader on TikTok alerted me to the fact that anyone, yes anyone, could be my soulmate. Three hundred thousand people liked her video. All of us were too picky and particular, and needed a message from the universe to broaden our horizons. I was sure there were caveats. My soulmate probably wasn’t alive a thousand years ago, for example, because the thought of needing to explain SkinnyPop and TikTok to someone made me sick. My soulmate was neat because I wasn’t. We had to balance each other out—I could lie on the couch and watch Real Housewives while he cooked and cleaned and turned on the washer and then the dryer and vacuumed in tandem.

And I knew my soulmate was not a person who left dirty dish rags on the floor in front of my unit. I made eye contact with the thing three days prior, gasping when I did. It was as obscene to me as genitals. It was red and marred with streaks of black and brown—potential shit stains. The red itself was the faded kind, not the pretty kind. I knew the rag was not the work of the only neighbors on my side of the hallway. Miss Li and her husband pitied my obvious solitude and once told me that red was a lucky color so it was highly unlikely that they would do such a morbid thing to a red object.

The apartment complex was relatively small, six floors, and everyone knew everyone else. I wasn’t a good neighbor, per se. I hated other people’s happiness and would complain to the concierge when things got too rowdy. People would smile at me in the elevator, and I would rarely smile back. It wasn’t my fault. I was usually preoccupied with other thoughts, too immersed to acknowledge them, and I suspected they were jealous of my rich inner world. I was especially cold when my father died, but I did not tell anyone about it. And I had lost my mother as a child, which seemed like a larger mountain of grief that made his death look tiny in comparison.

My phone dinged. M had sent a response.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and I think we can look at things in many different ways. I was unsettled by the thought that M may be smarter than he first let on. It disarmed me. His whole profile had, actually, from the single initial as a name to the fact that he was a Libra. His photos concealed his face behind a monkey-covering-eyes emoji, and I had suspected him of being married but he assured me that he was not. I worked on a response, fishing a corn shell out from in between my front teeth with my fingernail.

Yeah but you can’t say that I’m not short because factually I am. Anyway whatever it’s not a big deal tell me more about yourself?

I learned that M worked in auditing. It sounded so boring that I was afraid to ask for more information. He was the youngest child (also boring), studied finance (yawn), and liked to rock climb and surf and lift weights (blegh). He once backpacked across Hawaii with his father, the highlight of his biography.

What about you what are you into?

I pondered my real interests: Twitter astrology, reality television, cyberstalking my exes, people watching on the treadmill at the gym. In the end, I told M that I volunteer at an animal shelter and do yoga and like to write. I spend most of my time with the animals tho because I feel guilty if I don’t idk I just am such a giver maybe to a fault.

M told me that he really admired me. I felt like that monkey-covering-eyes emoji was an extension of his body, a shy commendation that seeped through the screen, amalgamated with shame and inferiority. He was half-animal and half-man, maybe more animal than man, primal, incapable of my level of human complexity. I told him that my favorite color was yellow, and I found out that his favorite was red.

࿓

I lived alone because my father’s death made me an orphan. Otherwise, despite my muted disdain for my parents and being in my mid-twenties, I would have chosen to live with them, even if it meant being sequestered in the suburbs. I still remember my mother’s pinched face and her slim fingers gripping the extra skin around my stomach and asking me what I was "going to do about that." I was nine. When she died of cancer two years later she was bone-thin and I felt proud of her because I knew she would want me to. My father was not much better. He was like me, quiet and resigned and antagonistic. But I would have lived with them because, like I said, I liked having people do things for me. I missed my mother’s borderline OCD, the way she would slide the vacuum under my feet when I watched cartoons or scold me for touching any glass surface. She was sharp with her tiny hands, always ready to slap. When I moved into my first adult apartment, the one with the red rag outside my door, my eyes took note of all the dark corners overrun by dust and germs. I couldn’t bring myself to ever clean it properly, and so it stayed the way it was. When I thought of all those specks of dirt belonging to those who came before me, I felt a little less alone.

࿓

M suggested we meet in person. It would be my first real date with someone from the apps, and my first date in three years. He was busy, however, and it would need to wait until next week. I snapped at him when he told me this.

Really babe I’d love to meet earlier but auditing is like crazy stuff and I have to work weekends I swear it’s the worst because we don’t even make overtime and I have a side hustle too so I’m barely sleeping

Sensing that M wanted my pity, I decided not to give it to him.

I work weekends too sometimes its not even a big deal but yeah ur right next week works better for me too because I am so busy with friends

I wasn’t busy at all, really. I would visit my neighbors biweekly because they pressured me to. They were trying to teach me mahjong but I was abysmal at it, and so they slowly gave up without saying that outright, they just hid the board from my line of vision so that I’d never bring it up again. Miss Li and her husband were childless and I think we mutually believed, at first, that we could be a makeshift family, although that was quickly disproven. Sometimes I would snap at Miss Li the way I would my mother as a child. When she would pick up my plate to put it in the dishwasher I would say something like “I’m still eating,” even if I wasn’t. She had a kind, wide smile. Square teeth and skin so clear it was near translucent. I admired the blueness of her facial veins. I pushed her away because I wanted love, but what I wanted even more was to feel esoteric past the point of understanding.

During that week’s visit, I told Miss Li about M, but I embellished some details. I said that he was my boyfriend and we were going steady and that he was taking me out to celebrate a promotion I never received, somewhere fancy and of my choosing. That he was tall and fit and kind and had dimples in his cheeks. This part could have been true—I still hadn’t seen M’s face. But he did look tall and wide in that monkey photo, and I thought everything else I said was harmless. Beneficial, even, when I saw the joy spread across her lips. The veins in her forehead throbbed as though in celebration of me.

࿓

When I walked across the hallway to get back to my unit I noticed that the rag was still unmoved. Perturbed, I opened my phone to the preexisting email thread between myself and the concierge. I hated speaking to people and so our conversations always took place like this. It was titled: rag??? My eyes glossed over their last email where they told me they would look into it.

Hi sorry to bother you again but it’s been two days and the rag is still here? And it may even have a new stain that wasn’t there before but I’m not sure, I really don’t want to get close to it? Could someone please come throw it away?

They responded a few minutes later. Apparently, maintenance hadn’t been able to locate the rag. I attached a second picture.

What do you mean it’s literally right here? Right in front of my unit I could pick it up myself but there are some corners that look really foul like I really think someone used this to wipe their butt

I sensed that they did not like my tone or my insinuation that picking up the rag was beneath me but would be acceptable for them. My email went unanswered for a full day before they told me that maintenance, once again, couldn’t find it at all.

M wanted to exchange more pictures. He sent another body shot that concealed his face while I sent a two-year-old mirror selfie that I edited to make my waist look smaller.

Oh my god. You are ethereal. You are like a god from the olden days whose beauty was worshipped by the masses

Idk it bothers me that I know you didn’t write that yourself. Did you use ChatGPT? It sounds so much less genuine idk I’m second guessing everything and weren’t gods male and goddesses female, are you saying I look like a man?

M assured me that he did not think I looked like a man, but my mood had already been soured. I changed the topic of conversation to our upcoming date.

Oh yeah babe I’ll get back to you on that because my schedule is a bit messed up right now with work stuff and I’m really close idk it’s hard to think straight right now

Yes but you said next week right? So will it not be next week at all or what? I need to know because I am a person too and I have a busy schedule that I need to plan around

Duh babe I want to see you ASAP I would literally come pick you up right now if I could but you know it’s late and we have work in the morning and my mom would wake up if the front door made any noise and it hasn’t been oiled in a while but I swear ur all I think about 

The whole time we were texting, I was overcome with an overwhelming nervousness I couldn’t place until it clicked. I was actually hopeful that this could work out. Despite his flatness, he seemed to enjoy speaking to me, and I liked having someone to send silly texts to throughout the day. It was my first experience of anything other than resounding failure, and it felt so close and so real that in the dark I could reach my hand out and grasp it, my fingers meeting resistance and weight. I wasn’t sure what it was yet. Just that it was a presence, finally, aside from my own.

࿓

I know M sounded banal but there were things about him I liked. Shockingly, he concealed his face and name from me because he was the founder of a famous male fitness podcast and previously had many stalkers. He only chose to reveal this to me on day five, when he was sure he could trust me and I was not only after him for his "fame." He had to be serious about his privacy and safety. It nearly doubled the income he made from auditing, and he was up until five in the morning most nights filming content "for the bros." He wanted to know me "inside and out." I envisioned myself as an oyster shucked poorly, he definitely would have no idea how to do it well, and that my innards would reveal to him something unbecoming and mossy in color. M encouraged me to have big dreams. In the handful of days that we knew one another for, he set up a plan that would enable me to leave my job and teach yoga full-time, but only in the case that I created content on the side. He had an older brother and wanted me to meet his family, maybe, someday. He asked about mine. He sent a crying emoji when I told him that my parents were dead. I tried to envision M sitting in the living room of my apartment, my parents flanking him on either side of the couch. In the fantasy the monkey emoji enveloped his face like a Venetian mask. It was an impossible thing to imagine; they were from such separate worlds.

࿓

I finally contemplated picking the rag up. It had a new white stain in one corner that could have been either white-out or bird droppings. What upset me the most was that the rag looked sad. It was discarded, presumably for its dirtiness or uselessness, and was not even given a proper disposal. I would have been sad if that were me, if I were that rag. Miss Li exited her unit as I crouched before it at a safe enough distance.

"Miss Li, do you know who put this here?"

She just wrinkled her nose and shook her head, like she smelled a fart. "No, no, don’t touch that."

"Maybe they left it here because it would be bad luck or something. Do you have any enemies, Miss Li?"

Miss Li could not recall her enemies, and I could not recall any of mine. I didn’t think anyone cared enough about me to hate me. Briefly, I remembered my mother. What would she have done about the rag? She would have gone nauseous at the sight of it, but picked it up and thrown it away regardless, because the need for orderliness would have triumphed over her disgust. Maybe with tongs or biohazard-proof gloves. It would have been easy, actually. I had tongs in my kitchen. I could pick up the rag and throw it out and even throw the tongs away too if I were that afraid and just buy a new pair. I contemplated this for long enough that it felt too long. The rag looked comic at some point, blending into the carpeting in its omnipresence. Miss Li had long left and I was alone. The moment of action had passed. I left it exactly where I found it.

࿓

M and I finally set our date for next Friday. I spent the entire week preparing. I waxed for the first time in months and plucked at my errant eyebrow hairs until the skin bled, and then I covered up the dry blood with enough concealer to glue two bricks together. I got a lash lift and a blowout. On the day of, Miss Li helped me choose a dress from my closet. I could tell that she was judging my space the whole time she was in it. My laundry hamper was overflowing with clothes I hadn’t gotten around to washing and there was barely space to walk around in my bedroom. In my panic, I had pulled out items of clothes I hadn’t worn in years and no longer fit me, willing myself to shrink two sizes in one day. I was feeling faint from having consumed nothing aside from lemon water.

"Don’t look so shocked, Miss Li. It’s not usually like this." I didn’t know if I was referring to my apartment or to myself.

"You own a lot of clothes," she said carefully, "but you don’t go out much, right?"

I held up two different floral dresses. One of them was snug but I could keep the waist buttons open and replace the closure with a loose belt. "Which one?"

Miss Li pointed to the larger one. "Better fit. But you can wear anything. Just be yourself. You are great. And he already likes you!"

I nodded, having remembered my lie about our relationship. "You should go now. He’ll be here any minute."

Miss Li clasped her hands together in a gesture of either luck or prayer, I could not decipher which. And then she was gone.

M arrived thirty minutes late to my doorstep. His body looked like his pictures, but his face was square and plain like a field of corn. He wore beige trousers and a beige polo. His arms were moleless and speckled with sandy hair. His real name was Fred.

"Why go by M?" I asked. It upset me that M had nothing to do with his name, that I couldn’t even predict the predictable parts of him. But I was not as upset as I might have been had he been handsome. In my mind, M—Fred—was already someone I could imagine losing, whose face in all its blankness I had already begun to forget.

"It throws off the stalkers." Since we never spoke on the phone, I was thrown off, too, by the slightly nasal pitch of his voice.

We were going to a bar down the road from my building for a drink before dinner. As I was locking my front door, I heard sharp breathing coming from behind Miss Li’s unit. My heart warmed at the fact that her face was likely glued to the peephole, overcome by her curiosity and worry over me.

࿓

The bar was as loud as our walk there was quiet. Behind the bravado of the monkey mask, Fred had so little to say. He probably shared a similar thought about me, that I was a waste of his un-ironed beige trousers. He walked with his head angled downward, a sullen younger boy. I could not imagine his grunts of pleasure nor his penis in his own hands. When we arrived he stood for ten minutes trying to get the attention of the bartender. The awkwardness sickened me, and I tried to see him as the listeners of his podcast did, through eyes that were not my own. In the end, I was too much of myself for it to work.

"So, Fred," I began once we sat down, biting back a comment about how he had spilled half my drink, "can you tell me more about your podcast? Do you prefer it to auditing?"

"Oh, yeah," Fred replied. I distracted myself by studying his teeth. "The Man Cave is my true purpose, you know? Auditing just pays the bills. A lot of them, anyway. I predict that by this time next year I’ll be able to quit and focus only on my podcast. I’ve helped so many men become more confident and get their shit together." He said "shit" like someone who was not allowed to swear. "Men get pushed around by women all the time. And we’ve had enough of catering to their moods. When I say 'women,' babe, I don’t mean you. I’m talking about feminists. Their constant complaints. Do this, do this, don’t do that, hire us."

"That’s really fascinating," I lied.

"What would you say your purpose is?" he asked.

"My what?"

"Your purpose. The reason you’re alive. You mentioned something about helping animals." He shifted in his chair, nervous. It was at that moment that I realized I had it all wrong. He wanted to impress me, to show he remembered things. Fred cared more for me than I cared for him.

"Yeah, yeah. I love animals."

"Where do you volunteer?"

"What?"

"Where do you volunteer?"

I was saved by a big, burly man knocking his stomach into the side of my chair, causing the rest of my drink to spill on my lap. He was holding the hand of a much younger woman.

"What the hell, man?" I grabbed a fistful of napkins and pressed them to my dress. "I just bought this." I thought the lie would intensify his guilt. He just shrugged.

"Sorry, sweetie. It’s packed in here."

Fred stood up in a way he might have perceived as menacing. His ears were bright red with what initially looked like anger but was probably anxiety. "The lady said you ruined her dress. Apologize properly."

The big man had at least five inches on Fred and scoffed at his demand. "It was an accident, dumbass."

Fred kept moving until they were chest to chest, eye to clavicle, and shoved him with minuscule force. "I said you need to apologize properly."

The big man nodded and did not hesitate before punching Fred square in the face. His body let out a cartoonish thwack as it hit the ground. No one in the bar rushed to help. We were all too shocked. My features cinched together like I was about to cry or laugh. Fred helped himself stand again by placing his arms on my chair, but the big man and his date had long left the bar. His eyes were already swollen half-shut, and his nose gushed a rich fountain of blood, so dark it mesmerized me. He pulled something out of his back pocket and used it to cover his nose.

"What the hell was wrong with that guy? Why isn’t anyone doing anything? Call the fucking police!"

"What’s that in your hand?" I asked. My heart thumped loudly in my chest.

"What?"

"Is that my rag?"

"Yeah, I found it outside your door. It was just lying there and so I took it."

"It’s an old rag," I said loudly. People around us were frozen by the flurry of events. "It’s an old and dirty rag covered in stains."

Fred looked at me like I was the insane one. "What, did you want it or something? Why did you leave it out, then?"

"I didn’t want to touch it because it was old and dirty. Who knows how many shoes have stepped on it? And you just picked it up and took it without asking. Without washing it. Without washing your hands. And now the rag is on your nose and you’re breathing in its dirt. Just placing the rag straight on your face. You took it without asking me if you could. You didn’t stop to think, ‘is this her rag?’ What kind of person does that? What kind of person uses something they found on the floor without washing it? People probably used it to wipe their butts and now you’re using it to wipe your face."

"It’s just a fucking rag," Fred hissed. He was preparing to toss it at me. "Just take it and shut up, okay?"

I held my arms up like they would protect me from the both of them, in a makeshift cross. "Do not come near me with that."

I felt a gentle presence at my back. It was a waitress who had scared and sympathetic eyes. "Do you want to go home, doll? Is he bothering you?"

I sniffed and nodded timidly, and the eyes of everyone who was watching us softened with pity. She escorted me out like Moses parting the sea. What a poor, kind girl, they all probably thought. What a sociopath that man is. What kind of a person just uses something they found on the ground without washing it?

࿓

I knocked on Miss Li’s door thirty minutes later carrying a takeout bag with two pizzas and a ginger ale for her. I knew they always settled her stomach. When she let me in, I asked if it was a bad time. Her hair was up in rollers, and she wore a shiny robe decorated with delicate blue and yellow flowers. It was so beautiful a garment that it moved me emotionally. She told me it was fine, that her husband had just gone to bed, but she was having trouble sleeping.

"What happened to your boyfriend? Where is he?"

I shrugged. "Jail, maybe? I don’t know if they’ll hold him liable for starting that fight. Maybe he went home."

Her eyes widened in shock. "Jail? Fight? What’s going on?"

"Don’t worry, Miss Li. It’s not a big deal. We ended things, is all." I made myself

comfortable on her couch as she unboxed the pizzas. The scent of cheese hit the air, and my mouth watered. "Can you believe that he took the rag that was on the ground? The red one? He just put it in his pocket and used it to wipe his nose."

Miss Li staggered like she might collapse; my words were all too much for her. "What? He just took it without asking? Did he wash it?"

I shook my head solemnly.

"It is good you ended things with that boy. He isn’t right in the head."

"Would you like to play mahjong, Miss Li?"

"I would prefer not to. You are terrible. We can watch television. Supermarket Sweep is on."

“My mother loved that show,” I told her. “We reached episode two thousand three hundred seventy-four when I was a child. David Ruprecht wore the best sweaters.” 

Miss Li nodded enthusiastically. “They don’t make programs like this anymore!”

We agreed that nothing today was as great as it once was, and that it probably would never be again. She took a big swig of her ginger ale. I felt that she had stayed up on purpose to make sure I came home all right, but I wasn’t completely sure. It didn’t feel like the right kind of thing to ask about. Miss Li told me that the next day she would teach me mahjong from scratch and try to get the stain out of my dress as best as she could.

࿓