“Please! Have mercy! This is a human being,” he entreated, tearing apart the plastic to reveal the hideous skeleton patched with decaying flesh. The ER team spent a goodly amount of time just working out whether or not the body was still alive and deserving of medical attention. Frustrated, al-Ashi grabbed an oxygen mask and fitted it over the gaping skull, covering the murine teeth — but it wasn’t the surge of oxygen through the arteries so much as al-Ashi’s faith that sent a shudder of breath through the large ribcage, which was followed by a hacking cough that sprayed the disgusted faces surrounding the body with mucus. The spray of slime left the medics with no choice but to examine the body. From the plastic bag, they pulled a woman with a crushed chest and abdomen swollen with fever, most noticeably around her pubic region, and they hesitantly began cleaning her body, though they expected it to collapse in on itself at any moment. The stench of bodily decay grew with every stroke of the alcohol-soaked sponge. It took the team more than an hour of routine examination to establish that they should indeed treat the body as a living being. Yet at the very moment that the doctor touched her stomach, the body reared up angrily and tore away the hand that had dared come near the swelling in her pubic region.
It took five Filipino nurses to hold the thrashing body down so they could inject her with anesthetic. The hard swelling in her pubic region puzzled the medics; they were astounded all the more when their probing hands met solid metal. The radiologists and medics stood, amazed, looking at the images of the woman’s vagina and uterus. “Is that an earring?!” asked one. “I’ve been on my feet in the emergency room for twenty-four hours receiving one casualty after another. I’m beginning to wonder whether my eyes are playing tricks on me and all this chaos is just my imagination!”
“Wait, is that a necklace?”
None of the people who’d been lured by the hubbub to come gawk at the strange X-ray could believe their eyes. When the doctors decided that surgical intervention was necessary, al-Ashi assumed the role of the woman’s next-of-kin and signed the consent form.
“She’s got a vagina like a bank vault! We dug out all kinds of twenty-four-karat gold jewelry from there: necklaces, bracelets, earrings, solid gold coins all lining the woman’s vagina and womb!”
The riddle demanded police intervention, and of course the fingers all pointed at al-Ashi at first, but further investigation soon revealed the woman’s true identity. “It’s Umm al-Sa’d, the milkman’s granddaughter and the only girl among four brothers. Just look at that flat chest, like a man’s, those wide shoulders, the gaping mouth with mouse teeth — those features can only have come from her grandfather al-Labban. Her brothers announced her death a while back. And they kept their father locked up, saying he’d gone mad, until Azrael the angel of death came to save him from their ingratitude.”
“We suspected they might be keeping someone prisoner in the back room — you could see that mop of hair through the bars on the window. It was their sister they’d locked up in there. The only thing they gave her to eat was pieces of stale bread and apple peels, and in the meanwhile they took her share in the Arab League building — the same inheritance that had led them to get their father declared insane so that they could stop him from giving it away to any young man from the Lane of Many Heads who was allowed to build another floor on top.”
“Finally, after she’d been locked up for years, they thought she’d died and tossed her out in the alley for the dogs to eat her. That’s when al-Ashi found her.”
“She inherited all that jewelry from her mother. She was determined not to let them get their hands on it, no matter how badly they starved her for all those years. She never cracked. Never revealed where it was.”
“Noah’s treasure buried in a vagina! No one could ever dream that up, not even a Hollywood director. And to think, it was all the work of an innocent teenage girl.”
“Even if her brothers had had suspicions, who would dare dig for treasure in a hiding place like that? Who would dare profane his sister’s virtue, her womb? That girl was something else!”
The drama swept through the lane like a tornado. People began saying that Umm al-Sa’d had fallen from Azrael’s jaws, loaded with unimaginable riches, and they crowned her with the title: the neighborhood’s roomiest vagina. In order to get her to drop the charges against them, her brothers agreed to let her marry her savior al-Ashi, and they gave up their claim on the first-floor apartment in the Arab League building. Nevertheless they never truly gave up their attempts to rob her of her fair share, even as they watched each year — in horror — as she littered the alley with crates of apples and showered the neighbors with roasted seeds whose husks would be sucked on and spat out in celebration of her heroic survival, which had left her ever more robust and ravenous. For a quarter-century, whenever Umm al-Sa’d relapsed into silence, al-Ashi followed her inside her head and alongside her he traversed those many years of imprisonment in that back room where she’d lost her innocence. He kept the starving teenage girl company as she exposed her womanhood in the darkness and carefully dug down into her own vagina, hiding hard metal away within her soft flesh, her stomach swelling and hardening, in preparation for the day when she’d be freed from her imprisonment and begin a life built on those riches.
Al-Ashi’s eyes would fill with tears when he looked at her. “This woman is the treasure life has granted me. She and the massive hoard she used to buy me this kitchen and invest in the stock market.” He embraced her every untiring effort to transform her inconsequential treasures into a small fortune. She’d paid a heavy price: her womb had become too hardened ever to be able to accommodate a soft human body.
“Any fetus of her own flesh and blood would just stay in her womb, hoarding gold. The infernal girl brought the curse upon herself!”
I pressed the wisdom of all my heads into service to mock Umm al-Sa’d, without the slightest compassion. I was afraid that if her womb were to be taken seriously it might swallow me right up. I watched al-Ashi on the nights when his anger was too much for him, when he’d take the burning logs from his ovens and march out into the alley, threatening to burn my heads in an attempt to stamp out my snickering. Umm al-Sa’d didn’t need fire’s help to defeat me, though. She’d been rearing a tech-obsessed genie inside of her, and it finally appeared in the form of a laptop and an AwalNet modem that connected her phone line to the Internet. She defeated all of my macho heads by getting to the stock market first.
In record time she announced her victory with a vivid red sheen upon her lips, giving away her bloody methods. The other women imitated her style; it was open rebellion.
“The women see her as a symbol of perseverance in the struggle against men. The men, on the other hand, can’t stop fantasizing about her savage vagina. They are drawn there compulsively, only to drown. That’s why they’re so keen, so passionate, about donating their hard gold to her famous box. Following, in a waking dream, as the donations take shelter in her vagina and never come back out.”
“Don’t be deceived by her flat boylike chest. Look further down, at her pelvis. That will always be the source of devilish pleasure …”
“Some might envy her husband, al-Ashi, but mostly he’s pitied. Just think about that teenage girl excavating her womb with her own fingers. That means she wasn’t a virgin when they got married. What kind of a fool agrees to that? They’ve both been cursed for it. Now al-Ashi’s paying the price for having been a jackass: the orphan they adopted, the Eunuchs’ Goat, is a jackass in human form.”