The Dove's Necklace

Azza, on the other hand, has to open everything and rummage through it. She has to burrow down to the bottom of every box she sees, and the angels have made a note of that habit.

Being able to jump is a miracle.

I know you’ll laugh at me, but:

I used to be too worried to sleep on my front in case I damaged my perfectly shaped breasts. I never let anyone touch them, not even myself. God knows what Azza did with that perfection. She used to tease me: “What’s the point of having those perfect, perky breasts? What have you ever done with them?” They’re like the breasts of a mannequin, but it’s not as if I had them molded and formed and brought to life.

I failed to discover either body: human or bionic.

If Azza ever had to deal with a computer, she’d wear it out by running programs, and hooking up peripherals, and adding more memory. Me, on the other hand, I’d run away from the buttons at the first warning beep. That’s why I’m going to die before ever discovering the basic boot-up functions of my own body-device.

Can we diagnose my condition as a life’s blessings inferiority complex? Azza might have called it a mental inferiority complex, but I would call it a self-awareness inferiority complex.

My emotions and fears and desires, my frivolity — is there anything frivolous about me? — in boxes, with their documentation, sealed up to keep you out.

Azza and I would’ve stood like that before the angels of death: me and my boxes all sealed tight, she and hers licked clean. Am I just passing through? Is she the permanent one, the permeating? I wonder.

Impossible P. S. I wish I could sit with you one last time with all my boxes laid out before us. We’d open each one together and drink it down to the dregs.

P. S. Boxes of chalk, left over from my days as a schoolteacher, collecting dust. What was I supposed to do with a box of chalk? But then as soon as I gave them to Azza, look: she moved them and the world followed.

If only you could see Azza’s room. Spaces packed full of black and white figures, which have surpassed the limited range of their colors and who move constantly, going in and out of the Lane of Many Heads as they please.

P. P. S. Even my breathing is short. It’s rapid, it doesn’t last a whole second, so that none of my cells split open. That was until you taught me how to breathe. Deeply. Count to ten as I breathe in. Hold it for ten seconds as every cell explodes and its stores burn up. Then for ten seconds as I breathe out, right up to the very last molecule of CO₂. And for another ten seconds, I leave my body empty. Forty seconds of life in a single breath. God, pleasure is so slow. Pleasure hides between the oxygen of life and the two in carbon dioxide.

I can live for forty seconds in a single breath.

The pleasure hidden within a single breath is so intoxicating. Forty tick-tocks of joy spent between oxygen and carbon.

In the ten seconds of emptiness, I make sense of the thirty seconds of burning.

P. P. P. S. This is the music of de Falla. Once again, I wonder: me and Azza, which one of us is Sancho Panza and which one is Don Quixote?

From how many to how,

Azza is the one who deserves to be transferred into life.

Because she is able (without having the means to be able) to exist beyond the circumstances of existence. She wasn’t given the opportunity to be educated, like I was, let alone the access to books that I had.

Her skeleton is made of gold (pliant and hard). It jumps into the fire and comes out in never-ending life-shapes.

Final P. S. Love is all there is to life.

That is to say, to live is to yearn. Or, to love. Or to love by yearning for what you can never have back.

My name is Aisha, not Hayah. It means living, not life. That sums me up, don’t you think?

Aisha

Nora wailed and wailed until her tears ran dry, as de Falla’s music reverberated in her bedroom. Her breathing slowed as if she were under a strong anesthetic. The words jostled her and tore at her clothes. Everywhere she looked there was blood. Her heart fell out onto the paper before her, buzzing, followed by her lungs, and the words penetrated through her cranium, sinking all the way to the bottom of her spine. That crossed-out name stopped her short. Who? And who crossed it out? A deep sadness was troubled.

As Nora went through the small stack of emails, her fever rose higher. Through her veins flowed mutual betrayal, between her and the author of these emails: was this Aisha? The one who presumed a personality that wasn’t her own? Wearing her face? Her features? Her reactions to life? The Aisha who stole the girl who resembled her, who stole her name and hid her in the ruins, while she lived off the death of the girl who resembled her? Angry knocking at her door ripped her from that other world. She discovered that she’d spent the entire night reading and crying; she hid the documents and opened the door.

“Why’d you lock the door?” Her hazy look raised his suspicions. He scanned the room as though looking for evidence of a crime and repeated the question. “What’s the matter?”

He embraced her roughly, pushing her head down against his chest, staring deep within her. “Your eyes look blindfolded like a falcon’s. What are you hiding from me inside that head of yours?”

She shut her eyes. She collected the saliva in her mouth and swallowed, worried that her breath would give away the smell of emails. “It’s because of the sleeping pills. I haven’t slept ten hours straight in months,” she said, trying to sound blithe.

“I can’t detect any Valium on your tongue though. Give me a taste of the truth.” He clamped his lips onto hers, jealously, possessively. She covered him quickly, in fear. Might he taste the bitterness that overpowers the bitterness of waking up from a strong anesthetic? The bitterness that discovering the emails poured into her throat: the awakening of her clouded mind, which was proceeding toward her end, with trepidation, as though it were trying to delay it.

Abraham’s Palm

FOR DAYS AFTER MU’AZ’S PHONE CALL, YUSUF MOVED ABOUT FEVERISHLY AND agitatedly, torn between the tree that was revealing itself to them on the wall and the woman he’d dreamed of, for all those months, being dead and risen, in her death, to a place where she could no longer be sullied. News of the phone call had disturbed Mushabbab. They shared the task of going out to gather information that might lead them to the one they called Long Belt. Where was he? And what possible link could there be between him and Azza?

IT WAS DIFFICULT TO SAY HOW LONG IT TOOK THEM TO UNCOVER THE TREE CREATED by the guide Ayif al-Ghatafani, who had traced, over the course of his own lifetime, nearly three quarters of a century of Sarah’s branching lineage in the Sabkha Tribe, and her son’s marriages outside the tribe. Finally they arrived, with surprise, at the abrupt end of the tree’s branches, presumably marking the point when the guide himself died. No matter where else they scraped at the wall, they found no other word or branch.