Khushkhash

Jerusalem Blood Moon

36

His family are all born backwards: from prophets to traitors, then martyrs—as if anyone could forget the pregnant wadi of grapes or who turned them into wine. Lately, he sells light, pulling my windows and balconies open, offering me the sweetest bits of a summer watermelon. Sometimes I wonder how he breaks through its shell—parting it like unpinned hair, thick and stubborn as a water moon. The blood cradles him, recognizes and loves him. I’m always mopping the floors after he’s had a bad day, when he lets the blood unclot, pulling itself into a river, the width of a paltry lake on my clean floors.

Whenever he pulls the windows open, I climb out and straddle the clouds, pretend I’m giving birth to our fifth daughter. All this man has are girls. It’s my fault for the entire year when our tongues were still new and fresh. I kept calling him on top of the cotton bedding. He swears one day we will bear a son, but I think one of the girls will pledge herself to the moon and leave our country for Greece, all sea and always hungry. Her tongue is just like her father’s, that’s how I know she’ll kiss the shell of others too sweetly. It’s all about giving them a grave at the end. Keep pulling the earth to make space for the next layer of dead.

He and I, we’re from split ends of the country. I’ve watched his heavy accent cleave a soldier into two, then four with every ق. He splits them open like his grandfather sowed the land. I dilute the sea and sun, so when a soldier comes, I dice them in their dreams till they hang themselves. The snakes are all that’s left of their blood. But that’s not true, I tell my daughters. The snakes erupted from Hawa after every birth—pardon my language—and like Maryam are our mothers.

If you pull enough from the sea or a man steals too much from you, shrinking you like lo mein going bad, then they come to remind our countrymen whose blood reaps. It’s all a haunting, I tell my daughters. Your father may have cheekbones of glass and is mirrored in Issa’s gaze, but he’s still a man. Never forget that. You need to burn his family name and steal his village, sliver it so he loses his origin and calls on you, like an orphaned bastard. Then, he’ll learn to appreciate names—the same way he appreciates flesh: how he curls himself, all blue and bloodied, grasping a nipple in his mouth like he’s half asleep and rests atop my breasts. Men love anything that shines. Sometimes I wish they could see the look on their father’s face when my legs are wrenched and locked around his back, and his hand, dense with sinewy muscle like a gun, has my throat bent backward. I tell our daughters to swallow pearls every time we go to the sea, so as to never be forsaken. A cut of eternity flooding their atoms with every gem.

If you ever cry too much, he tells our beautiful daughters, the sea will come and make an angel of you. Do you want Baba to be left alone? One day Mama will leave me. Ha! As if I haven’t been kneading this man’s bread since we were in our twenties, suckling leaves and fresh pits off my grandfather’s mango tree. The great thing about my country, your grandfather’s country, I tell our halo-kissed daughters, is that we have endless water that cuts the world so we can grow in the rain, sprouting as tall as our rice. He loves that. The blessing of my mouth when we kiss. How each fracture of our being pulls us into a breaking light.

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Ghosts

36

He pulls a taffy from the bra strap, grasping for a chance of wetting—milk, breast, blood, rinds, cream. It doesn’t matter to him. Anything he can suck fresh from a woman is a practice he adores. That’s a man who knows submission; his dead weeping and cackling behind him, symphonic on the radio every time I try to turn it on.

Every morning I bake my husband a fresh load of bread; I pull the cheese the way my mother and our ghosts taught me; turn the dates in a bubbling paste, letting it ooze like Maryam giving birth all over again. The girls are hanging on the windows, trying to find our clouds. They like to make the same sounds I make whenever I annoy my husband, stretching my birth canal open all over again. Ishaq, Lou’ay, Omar, I scream out, splintering the sky like a wild storm.

My husband always thinks that somewhere in his genes he’s finally filled me with his son. Our son. As if God hasn’t given him the door into heaven with each daughter my body dutifully carried. They never appreciate what they have until you’re spitting gums out, all splintered bones at the dentist, demanding your fleeing bone marrow be returned to you. It was Beit Sahour all over again. Cows hiding, cows working. Cows lining up at a checkpoint for women, as if they can ever undo the injustice of man. No boycott this time; the farmers had the cows gathered round for women who had been pregnant. Pregnancy is more than you think. My nutrients were stolen for my children in utero, taking my bones for their feeding. My husband had to keep feeding me rich broth and fresh liver so I could stand upright. I heard the cows speaking at the checkpoints, wondering if he would take only milk or recite the adhan on them before he swung his blade through them. Now I’m on calcium vitamins, all for childbirth.

If I do raise a son, the world would crawl its shadow up me like a bad tease. Almost like the way he rubs himself on me. I love my husband, I do, and maybe you can’t tell, but when he sugars the lemons and cuts the persimmons for me, I see his parents making his hands tender for his wife. Sometimes at night I steal his teeth from his mouth and try to fit them into my face, watching his bite reshape me. I pull them out in the morning because my husband loves my face, married me for it. That’s why every morning and night I have to dive into a bath of oil, so I can keep my skin for him to stay in love with me.

Meanwhile, his chest has been gray since he was twenty-seven and I only ever adored it! The abhorrence of aging between us. You would think he’d love the shape my hips became after he permanently altered my body with our daughters, but I still catch him lying on the field with al-Buraq murmuring strange wishes to God. That’s how you know a man is from Jerusalem, when half his time is bent in prayer. To be fair though, his cousins’ ghosts are usually running in his spine, forcing him into worship. The remembrance of the living is fickle.

My husband wanted to keep the ghosts from being busybodies. They’re bad neighbors, watching us get dressed and weeding our garden for no reason. Why they don’t move on and rest in Barzakh, I don’t understand. They’re already buried and dead. But instead, they keep blowing raspberries in my husband’s big ears, drenching him in their cacophony. The ghosts find it funny to irritate him, except he ended up calling the Sheikh for a silencing ward, but the man only laughed, his own ghosts shaking our house and pulling our hairs like a bad comedy show.

I spent hours scrubbing the walls after the Sheikh left, removing stone after stone so I could undo whatever curse befell the city. My husband thinks it’s our ghosts who cursed us in response to bringing the Sheikh, but I think it’s bigger than us—a silencing ward isn’t anything new, but a wave of tar has crept over the city, blackening the sky and stones. We haven’t seen such a drought since the occupation was still alive. In cases of an emergency, my husband keeps a Kalashnikov tucked under his chest now. We both know he’ll never pull the trigger. Not unless the grape thieves come by—but even then, all of his dead family members would cajole and scare away the thieves until they’re running like the eleven brothers abandoning a child in a well!

After the hassle with our family ghosts, we decided to refresh ourselves. Our daughters deserved a break from the constant jokes the ghosts played on their Baba and his incessant annoyance. He went and stole a quarter of the sea to give it to our daughters for a month instead of taking us to Haifa for a weekend trip. We don’t need a permit for this anymore, so we celebrated, passing the salt water around for everyone to lick. We walked around the city with sea-kissed hair, letting the townspeople know my husband carried a sea on his back for his daughters to fall in love with. That day, we had seven men at our doorstep asking for our daughters’ hands! As if they could ever be sold, their father sneered.

One of the girls wanted a wedding dress so desperately that for her birthday that year, he visited Milan and stole all the gems to stitch into her hair. Let her be a bride of this country, he pressed, passing his coffee fortunate to our other daughter. My thrice-great-grandmother taught her how to read the grounds, shifting time like grains of wheat. I never wanted to see the future—only when I was younger and impatient, but then I fell in love with the first man who left me bleeding in the street because he tried to steal my heart out of my rib cage. It stayed in the local papers for weeks until he was sent to the prison, my blood dripping from his forearms like a telling.

After that I gave up on sight, leaving the future to my ghosts who beg to litter pieces of fortune everywhere for me. The only moment I ever let them speak of time was when my husband asked me on our first date, and I knew immediately if anyone were to take my bride-price and make a joke from it, it would gladly be him.

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Worship

33

I used to pray to be with the man who tried to open my torso down the street from the flower shops. I was twenty-one, fresh-faced, and thought he loved me. I hadn’t known the difference between obsession and love. When he attacked me in the street after I called our relationship off, I realized what a fool I had been, having spent that entire year kneeled on the floor praying to God for a man.

I’m a married woman now; hips grown from childbirth and hands exhausted from living. It changes your perspective. When I was younger, I was naive. I never thought about God. Life has changed me—marriage, death, birth. I now wonder about what God wants. What part of us, silly, messy, too-bloody humans, knows what is good for us? I’ve prayed for the worst things not realizing that I was dooming myself. It’s part of being human.

You’ll never know your life, your future, your grave. Maybe you spend all your time waiting for the right moment, the perfect story, the flash bang that will kick-start your story—but all you’ve done is let time slip by you. Politely, quietly, in between blinks, and suddenly you’re at the other end of it all, looking back and wishing you could restart. That’s the crux of this. Humans are humans. None of us are God. I’ve wished for so many things, and every time I reach the end of another storyline in my life—another death, another life, another day—all I keep realizing is that I don’t know much about anything. Sometimes, I can barely fathom how to be alive. My husband has always been more grounded than me. Water and fire, you know?

He’s good at loving time. Letting it pass him like a lover, a friend—I’m scared of it. He has to hold me upright half the time when I’m too scared to look over his shoulders. Maybe that’s the perk of his phone line with God, his descending from prophets. God knows I’m filled with fear when I think about it all—time, death, life, the hereafter. He spends his time trying to calm me down when I’ve worked myself up into a fright. I don’t want my daughters to see my panic or fear, but sometimes I feel they can smell it on me. Wolves, like their father, are too quick and too sharp sometimes. Everyone is good at reading the ones they love, even if they aren’t so great at reading themselves.

Humans, we’re too messy. Disasters. It’s as beautiful as it is heartbreaking. I don’t want our daughters to pray for their own doom by mistake. Don’t be like me, don’t make the same mistakes I have or your father has, I beg them. Watch, listen, learn, wait. Be patient. God will always come back for you. Don’t let yourself be covered in hubris. You don’t know where your grave is going to be.

I asked my husband, How do you know what’s good for you? He got a look on his face—the big-eyed and shameful teeth he can’t stop when he realizes I’ve caught him in the middle of something I wasn’t supposed to know. The man literally goes around bleeding storms when he’s throwing a tantrum, and he still thinks he can hide like a bad stain or rotting flowers! What soil would ever cover his lies? He continues standing there, half frozen, looking like an idiot. You know what this man says to me? You really want to know? Here I am, wondering how to know when to trust myself, even after so many years of being alive, and this man pulls us back. I told you he’s always been more grounded than me.

He mentions the first time he saw me—on a passing, foggy April morning, washing my windows; he went and rung God up! Listen, I need to know if I’m supposed to meet this girl because right now I’m dying to be with her. Imagine that. Your husband calling the Creator himself because your body is a little too nice. All the while I had been cleaning the windows, legs half thrown on the railing to reach the outside. I was twenty-three when my husband found me like that. My husband summoned me out of Cairo and into Jerusalem for his own wishes and desires. I’ve always wondered why my husband opens a bag of seeds and watches me when I’m cleaning, but now I’m more concerned he’s been having all this time with himself because he didn’t want to tell me what he had done to get me. You see how selfish men are? I could’ve been with my husband, and instead this man went hiding like the coward he is.

But apparently that’s not the message I’m supposed to understand. Maybe I asked for you to be fated to me a bit earlier, he admitted looking all rueful, his eyes half up like a not-ripe pomelo. I laughed! He thought I never knew! The first time I saw him was that same day and, mind you, he did try talking to me. Sure, he was handsome, but his voice was wobbling like a volcano that entire conversation—then he tried to correct my language! How are you getting my number like that, habibi?

He broke the damn plate when I laughed in his face at his explanation, and now I have to walk to Khalil for the ceramic shop and make a new set entirely, which means the girls need to go hunting for clay outside—but he broke the plate as if surprised I know. I never understand how men think they’re ruling the world. Of course I knew! You think I left my city and couldn’t figure out why? Imagine! All these years together, he thinks I never realized what occurred! As if I left my own perfectly good home behind, beautiful stones and hand-pulled rugs still ringing with seeds of weavers’ blood, all to turn up in his capital for nothing!

Here’s the thing about blood. While my blood loves my husband, makes itself soft for him, it’s still not his. Blood is an ode; thousands of ancestral women binding themselves into a tender, oppressive being. It is as holy as our country, drenched in Palestine. It is not the blood of man, but the blood of women. Yes, you too will bleed in it, but it began under a palm tree, Maryam screaming in oblivion as she gave birth. It is the sacrifice of the women in our land; the string of fate tying us all together in the kinship of womanhood.

But it is at once both ode and sacrifice; it is born from the bleeding of women, no matter how she bleeds. Paper cut, period, childbirth, it doesn’t matter. How it falls from you is irrelevant. What matters is that it is the hymn of hundreds, thousands of women across time, coalescing into beings that follow us, regardless of where in the world we are. I always tell our daughters this. There is only so far you can trust it. Don’t let the past write over your future. It’s simply no way to live. And if the blood could turn back into women, they would agree.

But like I was saying—blood. My aunts have grown swindles reading my palms, and one day, three days before I decided to leave my city, they took my fate line and traced it to my heart. He’s calling for you, they all jeered. That’s the best way to have a marriage, my mother said, The man begs for you. That’s the only way it should be. I tell my daughters the same.

They don’t know how fickle their father is, all wrapped in Gemini like a bad split of the moon. They only know him as Baba, not the way I know him as a man. We made a choice to become parents together, but before any of that we were lovers—bride and groom, husband and wife. I knew the man I learned to want, grew to love. He was birthed from the air, and so he’ll always stay that way: dodging and running. He is a man, no matter what.

I trust the blood enough to take care of our freshly washed daughters—I know, I know. But blood is reliable, telling—only foreigners don’t see it when they come to take their strange photographs, breaking our language into little raw bits, separated entirely from the roots and throats of us. Today, the blood tried to trick a few of the girls. It always does this when the moon is too busy crying to notice; the blood forgets its face, who it once belonged to before it fell out into a ringing heap. This morning, the girls were walking back from school. They don’t want their father picking them up, even though their father halts every production and staircase to go argue with the sun. You never thought you’d see a man like this! Always leaving me surprised. The girls know their father has God on speed dial, and normally we don’t go around abusing that, but sometimes the man tries to bend fate for their little silly wishes! He loves them too much, as if the girls are strawberries getting bruised by simply being picked up.

The blood and its trickery. I told the girls this is why their father walks them home; the scenic route lazing in between the mountains are its favorite places to kill. It doesn’t mean to, our littlest one said, but her father stepped in, back as straight as the day we met. It means to, he told them, grasping her little face into a bruise. The blood is not your friend; it is blood. I know, so serious for a man who lets it leak off him like he’s coming. But it’s true.

The blood only goes so far, and these girls, they’re still young. Let one of their friends show up, bones half-gone and face wiped blank, all because the blood wanted to feel itself in flesh again. Not so pretty now, is it.

That’s the past, though, and these girls—they think the old worlds still have things to show us. That’s not the way a woman works, I always scream at them. The past comes when it needs to; not when you need it! One day a silly girl whose father doesn’t walk her home will crawl back into Jerusalem, her face eye-less and entirely emptied, the blood swishing at her feet, a sated feast. The girls will understand who time is then.

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Cairo

33

I know my daughters think I am a little cruel, and that is all right. It doesn’t bother me, but the knowledge that they could avoid their own hurt digs like an arrow in my ribs. I’m their mother—there is a duty, an honor that shimmers in that. Before I was their Mama, though, I was a girl and a daughter, equally foolish and impatient, phoenix-fire curious and excited about the sheer wonder of living.

I had been in the battles for liberation, and before that, in my childhood home, I was loved by my parents, and I loved my brothers and cats and neighbors and the sounds of my home. The donkeys’ trots, the biiiiiiiiikyaaaaaaaaaa, the call to prayer, the trees singing every morning and evening, their leaves dancing a symphony, or the language of the cars’ horns. Three beeps for I love you.

Let me tell you a bit about Cairo, my first home. It sprawls, taking a deep breath and expelling red bricks with each exhale. Our river splits the city, each ripple hiding islands throughout its body. Felukahs snake through it; people turning boats into homes. It is a loud city—awake, thrumming, and leaves me resplendent and exhausted, covered in grime and grinning. I grew up in my city, head tilting up to apartment buildings with dozens of floors and a ring road that would inspire Nintendo. I could tell you about the flowers—majnuna growing reckless, how they reach out to brush against residents; or the fields of mango trees leaning down to pass farmers their fruits; or the quiet mornings on the metro, warping through black holes to tunnel us to different stations, stopping only for a moment to let us watch the city shake itself from slumber and stretching its shoulders out into daybreak. The donkeys and horses weaving through traffic, their humans covered in sand, expertly weaving through the storms; the scores of baladi dogs running, full burst, their paws clinging to the flames that push them faster and faster; or the street cats, eyes hypnotic, trapping tourists in an endless slumber. The accents of my people; the cleverness of twisting Arabic, the endless jokes and our light-bloodness—they do not have the weight of blood taunting them, tracing their steps. Egyptians are light, the sun itself washing them. They tilt their heads back and eat chaos itself.

All cities are different. Alexandria is not Cairo, for instance. The sea, Mediterranean and shared between so many countries, gives them a softer love than Cairo could ever have. We are river, and they are sea. So let me only tell you about my Cairo. My family has been in Cairo for generations, our family line as long as the Nile. We have been everything: worshippers, travellers, teachers, merchants. I’ve watched men dive into our river, greeting crocodiles as old friends. They listen as the perches and tilapias tell them about the currents that day; where the Nile monitor is asleep and where schools of lung and tiger fish are passing through in welcome.

I could tell you thousands of things about Cairo, but let me make it plain. Cairo is my home; it is my first love.

Once in my city, I laid under my Geddo’s mango trees and tried to befriend the blood. It appeared slowly over the years, drops gathering from me—skinned knees, fallen teeth, paper cuts—until the shape of an altar began to stand, heavy and slumbering, silently shadowing us. It stained the pavements of Cairo, dragging itself across our garden and city streets, an apparition terrifying my neighbors. Cursed, they began to whisper, sidestepping the three of us—my brothers and I—as we played, our laughter ringing like gunshots across the air.

At first, I believed her to be my friend, until the garden cats began hissing at her like a stinging wasp. Mama waited until the blood grew into form before she collected my brothers and I, hiding us in the cellar, and began to explain her country. Our blood is full, restless and hungry. It is the martyrs, the wombs, the honor, the battles—so much blood from all of us, warped and haunting.

It wasn’t that I didn’t believe her. I did. I was only six years old. I trusted Mama implicitly, but I was curious. I wanted to feel the blood. It had come from our bodies, so surely it should hold some loyalty toward us—remember us, those who it bled from.

Blood is blood. A memory, a mirror.

Mama handed us daggers that evening. Baba grew heavy lines on his face as she stood like a weeping fig tree, her dense hands holding a palm up, staining our window panes in a rich dăphoinós.

Our blood dripped, a quiet conscience, onto our floors from the thin sliver in our window frame.

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Liquid Smooth

36

I can never tell you I miss the way he kisses me, all melting sunbeams and thick storm clouds, because the man is always kissing me. My face, my eyelashes, my stomach, my spine. He doesn’t leave a single part of me for myself. He eats and devours whole, as if every night is the harvest and I am land newborn.

It’s refreshing when every other month the women and I gather to pull the sugar wax across the tile floors, knowing I get to keep a piece of myself for me, given on my own accord in community with the women I love. Last month, Noor complimented the glow of my skin, and I told her it’s all from the oil baths and none from the lovemaking. When my husband and I first married, it was all fire; but after the second year, it melted into a slow intimacy, like the lush plains of snow in winter. There’s always a flood and a river; love is like that. Making bread and a river in its seasons. I tell my daughters to find a man who claims the sea, because he knows what eternity entails.

When we came together for the first time, he tried to eat my face. I know he loves it but still, after so many years of being with him, I find it all a bit strange for a man to be so devoured by a silly set of bones and eyeballs. In my first pregnancy, that man was wrecked with fear. As if I wasn’t the one carrying the girl, body splitting open for a new life to crawl her way out of a ten centimeter tunnel. Have some mercy on me. I’m the one whose breasts were being bitten for months all for the punishment of milk. My bone density went to hell after these girls, and sometimes I jump off the roof so I can fly, my bones as hollow as birds whenever my cycle comes over.

He lays in the garden and watches me overhead, as if I’m a cloud or a star, grasping for a return into the sky. But I’m a woman, and all I ever crave is land and sea; to fall asleep in the wildflowers of our home, to pull the honey fresh from the bees, and pluck every carrot from root. It scares me, the seeingness of the world; how everything has eyes and a recorder. Where can intimacy prevail when our metal-scrap bodies listen to us making love? It’s a horrible question.

I have a friend who I’m convinced wants my husband; her gaze—there’s always something fearful in it, like fish the day before it is caught and begins to rot in its death. I remember how she spent ages turning the wind, trying to make it blow the wrong way so I would lose my head off at him, opening my throat in a dense, clean slice. But God is merciful, and He protected us from the hunger of others. As a little girl, I used to wonder how much power praying—There is no power and no strength except with God—could do until I uttered the same words and watched the eyes of jealousy go blind.

He always notices when I’m in these moods—honestly, any mood. Sometimes he’ll spend weeks following me around, nagging to know who turned my entire head upside over and sideways, and I still don’t know what to say. So I stand and look at him, begging my eyes to say the ugliness in my chest that only he can put out. That’s the good thing about him. I look at him and, like a deluge, it all breaks, happens. Every time he kneels down to my height and cradles my face, I know he’s pulling the curtains and blinds, pulling the black bile at the edge of my throat, airlifting my soul and throwing it in the wash, all so I can finally collapse back down into my lungs and breathe.

People have always been too scared about the practicality of love. Eventually, everything fades and has been lived too many times to keep hanging. It goes threadbare. You need realism, I tell our daughters. It’s why we signed a contract. I can tell you I will love my husband for the rest of my life, but it’s not guaranteed, is it? It’s a commitment we both make. We can only live together in honesty if we know how to throw axes at each other and still dodge.

My daughters are smart though, a shade of Cairo always prowling inside them like my own. The ghosts in Cairo would rather die than leave these girls to die; it’s touching. I know my country gave them steel and fire, unlike their father’s country, all land and prayer.

There was a girl in the city whose mother was always going around using awful magic. Netherworld so blackened, a thick tar used to sludge behind. One day, the mother realized her daughter is nowhere to be found, so she summoned some jinn from a nearby forest to scope for the girl. They whispered to the crone the girl is in a field of honey, a man thick inside her.

The wicked mother—a witch, let’s speak frankly of what she had become—let’s say the girl went flying like a stray grenade, her body tearing open and unfolding like a watermelon. My mother was beguiled in shame, all of us were. We’d seen the woman’s house slick, the space between each stone and the crack inside the concrete dripping in filth—chicken bones, rotted organs, the material of nightmares.

That woman was so jealous, even before she was ever married. I remember her nasty face when I first arrived in Jerusalem, how her bones looked sickly, as if wet with an unfathomable liquid all the time. It shook me, reminding me of the magic on top of one of our mountains, and how even my own qareen always begged me to turn my head. I never need someone to tell me to beg; that movement feels so unnatural, your whole body shivers.

Everyone wants to talk about the way angels constantly walk around in this country, but they forget angels have no free will. That woman deserved to have been drowned in the river as a child, lest her horrid self grew up; but instead, she grew and grew, got swollen as a grapefruit then rotted herself, let the shayteen fill her like her husband once did. And she really wondered why no one could look at her anymore! As if none of us could see it. Even the angels crossed the street when she walked by.

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Triumphs of Horror

17

The good thing about being young is that you can die young. I barely know my life, its shape, the pleasure and the blade of it all—maybe I know suffering—Mama will know suffering when I am dead, dead, and dead. It all comes in twos.

I was born, so I will die.

I have a body, so I will become.

I have a soul, so I will enter Barzakh and wait, wait, and wait for Judgement.

Thousands of years will pass. I will not feel it. The tank is blown into shrapnel. The enemy paid over two million dollars for this piece of shit. I have a sword, he has a gun. I try not to think of my grave.

You don’t always get to be buried where you are born. Sometimes, you don’t get to be born at all. Sometimes, you are born in a stranger’s land, the colonizer’s land. Do you think our ancestors fled to Rome, too, for economic safety? For proximity to empire? They wouldn’t bomb themselves, you know. I know you know. They never see one as one, but one of them as a hundred of us. They lost their humanity long ago.

Expendable. My people, everyone I love, is expendable under empire. Fleas. Even children. How am I supposed to marry and become a mother in this situation? How can I give birth in this violence? I am floating outside of myself.

I do not know how to surrender my mortal body or abandon my flesh. I do not know—do not remember how to be only a soul once more. It is difficult to even imagine that I will no longer be human, the material irrelevant to my hums. What will I care for when I am only a soul again?

Their soldiers are my age. They fight for nothing but conquest. Just as they always have.

I fight for those I love. My bones are not yet hallowed like Mama’s. Maybe they never will be. Maybe I will be martyred here, dreaming of giving birth, suspended in an eternity that may not yet come for me. If I die here, I won’t have the life I wanted to live. If I die here, I get eternity. I am still scared of the graveyard soil. It’s a new fear. You take nothing with you but your deeds. I do not know how to reconcile that.

I cannot tell you who was the last person I even touched. I’m lying to us both. I kissed my brother’s eyelashes before his burial. He is dead by enemy hands. Martyred. Massacred.

Loss is a belonging to me. I was born in it. Fugitive, exiled, night-washed. I miss the sun in Cairo. I miss my home. I miss my family. I never wanted this. I did. I did. I did. I did. I did. I did. I did. I did. I did. I did. I did. I did. I did. I did. I did. I did. At sixteen, I chose liberation. I thought I knew, and I did, but now I am no longer bright-eyed.

I wanted to live for my country. I did not want to die for my country. I did not think death was real, despite the ghosts and blood I grew up inside. I thought I would make it to liberation with my brothers by my side. I did not think this would happen. I had nightmares that this would happen. I did not want to fight. I did. I did.

Let me tell you about the blood: it is also a pact. I walk alongside my brothers, even when it means I am at their graves. That is what being a sister is. My blood is my loyalty, my love, my fire, my weapon, my killer, my honor, my everything. I am desperate enough for it to be wielded, to be merged again with my flesh. I have no reason not to take them all for what they did to my family. Rage, incandescent and rancid, ferments inside my marrow. I bite my teeth and suckle onto the blood that is let. I will raise her as my arrowhead, the steel of my blade.

I have made my choices. I hate them. Can I tell you a secret? I am terrified I will never see my family again. I already will not see my brother again, not unless he visits me in dreams or until I die too. The enormity of it all terrifies me. I cannot think about Barzakh or God or the horror, the fear, the grave. I am terrified.

Mama stitched my initials in my socks. I was never good at tatreez. Sorry, Mama. I will learn when I come back to you. If I become a wife, I will be better. I will shed my rage. I will shed it all, Mama. I will become everything you taught me to be. I will keep myself beautiful and let my husband scream when he wants. I do not want to remember this, Mama. I understand your silence, now, Mama. Mama, Baba, I love you. Please pray for me. I need more prayers than I did during tawjihi.

I’m better at holding a rifle and screaming. I’m better at taking my ballet lessons and surviving the world collapsing. I will shed and forget it all if I survive this.

The blood shrieks, wrathful. It is faster than a ballistic, piercing through the occupier as if it is simply shredding paper.

The blood, at least, understands the enemy. It calls us home.

I hope the birds, at least, can live a while longer.

▴ ▴ ▴

Sirens

36

The gunfire is indiscriminate, totalling itself against gravity through walls and dressers. Bits of clothes and pieces of blush scatter, origin roots interrupted against the market return. A visceral closure. My daughters think the shelling can stop, but their father and I know more than only the shade of war. Violence is becoming of us; saturated like a thick beef broth, milk and eggs spilling inside. What was once nourishment is going missing. My husband and father are worried; go back to Cairo, Mama and I hear them. It’s like the first strike all over again.

We weren’t always free, but the last twenty years we have been greedy in our liberation—full, lush, pulling the flesh of figs, sucking our land in the sweetest kiss. I still dream of the radio call of liberation and return.

Some of the other women have fled with their families across the country. For the most part, everyone is refusing to move past the borders like last time. Let the weaponry come! Let them massacre us all! It’s so easy to say that, I sob to my husband, until we are helpless and the mouth of a gun is pointed between our daughters’ eyes. Think of them, I beg until I go as blind as Prophet Yusuf’s father in sorrow. I want my husband back. I want to return into our old lives, the sun blinding and love inescapable and uncontained.

I spend my days and nights worrying for our family. The ghosts are too scared to come up to me. Our middle daughter has spent weeks in hushed tones with them, playing a dangerous game. She never listens to us. If I’ve told her once, I’ve told her a thousand times. Her elder sister pretends she does not sneak to the house next door, burying herself under another. Our littlest one pulls her stuffed bunny—what was once mine, how many decades ago now—asking for sweets.

I pull the dough as I always have, first for my mother, then for my husband, and now for our family. I bake cinnamon rolls with butter blooming the brown sugar; shift yansoon for ka’ak bel ajwa turning the dough a subliminal gold; sfeeha with tongue dripping dibbis roman; fatayer with cheese freshly made, its brine salted; blanching dates into ajwa for cakes; cardamom and olive oil crushed in the harvest topped with candied blood oranges from Yaffa. I roll out threads of pasta, asking my husband to sacrifice a lamb to pull into the broth. I gather bundles of sage and dried mint, all the while pretending I cannot hear the shouts of fire so close by.

One day I will cook, and one day, soldiers will burst through our door gleeful to burn our home down. My husband has been on the phone the last few days while I whip cream for love buns, pull roses to adorn water for sweet frosting. My husband, my darling, heart-eyed, beautiful, stupid husband. I know he is trying to convince God of whatever he thinks; possibly to bargain for our freedom and safety. And yet we have not left this country. God knows best.

I know that witch burying herself alive in the tomb has ruptured something. These soldiers aren’t normal, and the sounds of their war, the heat of their fire, is not the same as the wrath we were raised on. I want to go find the grave of the girl, pull her split body out, and drop it off at her mother’s. What would that do, though? We agreed to hide the girl so her wicked mother cannot use her body even after death. We wanted the girl to have peace for the first time since her soul was sent off.

I asked one of the ghosts why the girl agreed to be born as this woman’s daughter. She looked at me, sorrowed and split, her frame going in and out of the light before she simply closed her eyes and left me in the middle of the sitting room, my husband’s coffee still too hot in my hands.

I spent the night curled around my husband, letting him try to comfort me. He refused to tell me whatever God was telling him. I tried to find an angel the other day to interrogate, either over tea or fury but my husband forbade me from exiting our home. I had a sick sense in my torso that if I cross this threshold, if I ignore my husband, my head will be skewered from my body.

The girls and their grandparents, on both sides, are playing backgammon. When the gunfire came to us, my husband pulled some of our stones out, prying open the backs. The man stockpiled dried goods—lentils, dates, sugar, flour, spices. Our garden—thanks to our hands—has always been enough to feed us and the neighbors. I know whenever my husband deems it safe, he pulls the ghosts out as agents to deliver parcels to those who are lacking.

The drones have been hovering, unusual as it is. Normally the angels burst them into flames, a staunch refusal of surveillance. Never again. The other half of the world almost ate us the last time. Who wants to live in terror?

It is the holy month, and, like the past, we are forced into witnessing. Every day we witness, but there is an indeterminate shift in a gaze when the fire is so close to scorching you. My husband is building a ladder to the moon, since the drones sliced his last one. I am pulling mastic from the trees, chewing them into glue to hang each step for him. I do not want to go to the moon, I want to cry alongside it. I know my husband will not let us leave, not forsake land and sea. I know he is crawling upward to the moon to knock on heaven’s door, hoping not to be shot off by the angels or drones. Fallen star, the foreigners drool wondrously. As if it is not an eavesdropper at the gates, stealing secrets.

When I’m not chewing mastic or broiling in the kitchen, I am sewing my husband another space suit. I hem his suit jacket, tailor each stitch to show his sharp features, so like myself, and dye each piece accordingly. You will not walk into a funeral, I shouted when he asked why the stitches are blooming hibiscus. Focus on your work. If I drop to my knees, will God answer me?

▴ ▴ ▴

Blood

37

Another heatwave. The seventh month has not arrived yet, but here we are: drenched in slick sweat, waiting for the sky to cool a few degrees. My husband is cutting fruit while the eldest soothes her younger sisters with ice before we head to the river. I am slicing cucumber and mint, finishing the salad while my father finishes marinating the fish, ready to be cooked in a quickly assembled fire nearby the bank.

My husband rolls his cigarettes in quick moments every time he lifts it to his lips to lick close. I always enjoy watching him in the few short seconds it takes to close it all before he lifts it to his lips. I love lighting his cigarettes for him; the fascination of flame eating the few leaves of tobacco he had not slid inside properly, until the fire gets into the actual cigarette for him.

Back in our early days, before my husband began courting me, he used to buy us sliced watermelon and cheese from a café we spent our days in. I adored it, the way he brought respite and relief to my doorstep from the shattering heat, splintering itself across my back and down my face.

All my husband does lately is bring me pleasure. I try to teach my daughters not to be so used to kindness, but their father always goes behind my back and makes them princesses. Today I woke up and set the table for breakfast before their father and I got ready, and when I came back with the plate of labneh, what were my daughters doing? Dressed in ball gowns, tiaras titillating on their heads like birds calling. I asked my husband what exactly he had done—the entire shtick screamed his name. I doubt my daughters went off and crafted stones in the riverbed, pulling emeralds and sapphires from the rocks. No, no, I find out, my husband did that when we went to the river the day before last. He’s always doing this, turning the wind into gems for our daughters. What am I supposed to do with that?

I want them to be realistic; not to be swept in their father’s fanciful fits. He’s whimsical, like I said, a man born from air, Gemini lover and moon. All he does is walk atop the land whenever he’s showing off like a bloody peacock, making me spit flames. My parents always laugh when I throw myself in the sky to upset him when he acts like he’s made the world. I’m so close to stealing this man’s mobile and calling God myself—but unlike my husband, heaven rests under my feet, so I fall into a prayer and beg God to give my husband a clue.

He heard me and laughed right in my face. How will I be with you if I’m a ghost, habibti? God. I threw a knife at the wall when he left the room, still laughing away. Go buy tea, you son of a dog! I screamed when the knife severed the wall. Our daughters giggled, and I should have known he was distracting me for their sake.

It’s fine. He took us to a field of strawberries and picked the best ones. I kissed him, strawberry seeds stuck between my teeth, while he shooed the blood away. It almost looked like the original one had returned, the ringing of the blood shuddering into a woman. When we turned to look though, it was lying on a heap, soaking into the ground.

My husband was confused, lost. Where did they go? he asked, and I realized the women of the blood had gone back home. I told him as much, watching it seep and seep, not even sentient enough to crawl toward us, to try and kiss my husband again, seeking to hear the gameela he calls me, spinning my city’s accent in his mouth for a single moment to love me inside.

Like I told our daughters. Never let him forget your flesh; any tragedy, any love, any lightning bolt, and he’ll pull the hinges off the door to devour you. Let them love you, I say, but don’t forget the silence of the blood, the lineage of ghosts watching in our lands.

A variation of the first section of this story appeared in AAWW's The Margins as a flash piece.