Hananah Zaheer

Family History

“You remember,” Ma says. “He was so handsome, your uncle. Too handsome for this world.”

She is wrapping the pillowcase around her hand and when she is done, it looks like she is ready to box with the mulberry tree, like you sometimes do when Abba is away and Ma is sleeping her yellow sleep beside the bottle of yellow pills in the yellow room. Red streaks her arms down to her elbow.

You are kneeling on the ground, broom in hand, trying to clear the shatter. Two sweeps around her feet to gather the mirror off the floor, a quick feel and slide of your bare hand on the floor to find, then tuck one of the bigger pieces inside the pocket of your shirt. The rest will go under the bed until Abba returns. Beside the back steps where the veranda touches the grass, there is an anthill lit bright by the sun. It swarms with life. Families upon families of ants moving in and out and out and in.

The book about ants that you stole from the hospital waiting room many days ago says ants find their way no matter what. If one of them gets lost, the rest of them know. It creates chaos, a mourning happens. The arc of your arm is wide when you sweep. You understand, you think. You feel concerned about how dark it must be on the inside of their home, how sometimes they one of them must get lost. So you are building them another home, an outside home, a maze of tinfoil and pebbles with walls of glass that multiply the light.

Ma burrows back into her blanket, curls her knees to her chest. Only her dim face peeks out. “Tell me about him,” she says.

So you do.

You tell your mother about the day your uncle was born. She was four, maybe five. She hadn’t even known her mother was pregnant, just came from school and there he was, a baby in a sling across her chest. He was all the things you worry you will stop being soon: cute, round, cuddly, happy, intelligent, active, alert, strong, loved. He never cried, only whimpered for attention. He never needed to cry. Your mother was so happy every time he reached for her, every time her mother let her cradle him in her lap. When he was older, other little kids from the neighborhood would come to play with him. It was almost like he was their doll, a plaything for all the kids on the street. He was so loved. The older he got, the more your mother knew he was going to be someone special; he just had that glint in his eye, the sparkle of understanding things beyond the obvious, the kind of alive only the really special people get. He helped everyone. Once, when he was thirteen, he saw a kid run after a cricket ball and fall into a ditch. He climbed in, rescued the kid, used his shirt to bind his bleeding arm. Didn’t even call anyone for help. That’s when Ma and her mother knew he was going to be a doctor. He was going to save people. Once, he rubbed mulberry juice all over his face and jumped out from behind a door and scared Ma. Another time, he was racing a friend on his bike, and the friend stuck his foot out and pushed him off and then Ma went to the kid’s house after school and took the chain off his bike. They were so loyal to each other, took care of each other. It was almost as if they knew one day their mother was going to say cancer and die three months later, leaving them to hold each other’s hands under the table, trying to eat the food their father brought home from the chargha shop she had so loved, telling them he would find them a new mother by the end of the year. If it hadn’t been for your uncle, you might not even have been born. He had introduced her to Abba—they took physics together, or chemistry, something right before Abba decided to bury his dreams of studying medicine and do something sensible like find a job at a bank. Her brother had kept his magic, though: finished medical school, stood up for her when his father insisted she marry that awful man nearly twice her age, and when their stepmother refused to loosen the neck of the family purse, sold his motorbike and took her shopping for wedding clothes and gold bangles and that ruby that hangs on her neck even now. He had such good taste. He always knew what she would like, what would look good on her. He even helped Abba pick gifts for her after they were married. He was there were you were born, pacing the hallway outside, worrying for his sister. He was the best brother anyone could have asked for. Ma was the luckiest sister in the world. One could only imagine a love like theirs.

Ma sobs. You set the broom beside the bed, stand up slowly. Soon, she will ask you to leave, and then you will have to walk away quietly, trying to make sure the door does not creak, trying to not let even a sliver of light in. In the evening, Abba will return and disappear into the darkness with her.

“You forgot about the pine nuts,” Ma says.

“He loved pine nuts,” you say. Her tears come harder, her body shakes. And you wonder if she cries because her mirrors have no light to multiply. You wonder if that’s why she keeps on breaking them.

A dullness (1470)

My life is dull. My mother thinks it peculiar that she has a single daughter my age sitting on her couch day after day, no job, no husband, no motivation. She recounts all the things people might say about me. I am fat, I am lazy, I am unmarried, I am getting old, I am too picky in men, I am too arrogant, I am dumb, I am stupid, I am no help to my mother, I am a waste of a daughter. May Allah give you direction, she says. Each day, I wake up and think this is the day I change everything, I am going to go for a walk, I will feel the sun, I will find success, perhaps find a husband. I put on my clothes, my shoes, plug my ears with whatever headset I can find. But each morning, before I can walk out the door, something or the other happens and I end up sitting down on the sofa, on my phone, my email, my Facebook, like I am waiting for something to happen. This goes on for hours.

Today, I had just taken my usual place on the sofa and opened my computer when I saw that an email had arrived overnight in my inbox. It was from the last lover I had. A birthday greeting, my heart pounded. I opened it quickly. The message was short. He was going to die, he said. He wanted to say goodbye. I felt my mouth twist. He had been particularly difficult as lovers go, jealous and absent and irritated with almost everything I said or did. I made many offers. I could groom better, style myself richer, need a little less attention. But he refused to announce to anyone that we were in a relationship, even when the threat of me being married off became real and a parade of potential mother-in-laws marched their sons through my mother’s living room for a few months while we were together. Even when I promised to take my own life, he found a reason he had to keep me a secret: his mother’s heart, his father’s reputation, the timing. At the end, there had been nothing left between us. No, my memories of him were not great, and yet again he had forgotten that it was my birthday. I decided he didn’t deserve my kindness, dying or not. Still, we had spent all those years together and I wanted to be charitable for my own sake. Goodbye, I typed, just the word and a period, and emailed him back. Fuck you, he sent a message back immediately.

The words struck me in my teeth, like his words often did, and I closed my lips after them, as was my habit. But just as I was about to swallow, my throat tightened and I felt tears burn my eyes. There were so many times I had wanted to throw his words back at him, and now that he was dying, I would never again have the chance. I ran my tongue along the edges, hearing one letter then the next click and clack against my teeth, feeling the lines and curves and each tip and corner until I was satisfied that I had touched every single bit. I wanted to savor the feel of them. After all, he had no hold on me anymore, and this was the last I would have from him forever. If he only could see how far I had come from our days together, never thinking about him anymore, never wishing he had gone ahead and bought me those diamond earrings he had promised or taken me on that cruise across the Mediterranean. I didn’t miss anything about him. Even this, the news of his impending death, had not stirred even an ounce of regret or empathy in me. The thought gave me a particular kind of thrill. I wondered if he remembered all he had taken from me, all the blood and tears and hours of my life spent lying in bed, waiting for him to come to the motel where we used to meet. Probably not; he was not one for remembering or for sentiment or tenderness. He was the movement, I the keeper. I imagined his beautiful mouth, his beautiful teeth clenched, the way he must have pounded on the keyboard with his beautiful fingers, sending those little words hurtling towards me. Fuck me? Fuck him.

I had always let him off easily, I was thinking. I let everyone off easily. I took no revenge at all. But no more. I had been looking for change, hadn’t I? What if this here, me taking revenge, me not just sitting here taking his shit was the change? Having started thinking about revenge, I became excited, and the harder I thought the more excited I became, and the more excited I became, the faster I swirled his words around in my mouth. Soon, they were swirling so fast in my mouth that the skin on them started to separate and I could taste the flesh underneath. It was strange, like rubber, and cold. It gave way under my teeth, and a juice that tasted like salt and earth and coins filled my mouth. I knew that flavor. My pulse quickened. I could recall easily what each part of his body tasted like, his sweat, his blood, but I had never quite experienced him this way, almost as if I was on the inside of his anger. I had not even known it was possible. I sucked at the same edge, trying to see if there was more but once again his words sat against my tongue as they always had, sharp and bland. Cautiously, I bit the edge of another word. Again it gave under the pressure and again that same juice leaked from it, flooding the sides of my mouth. I put my computer down, and sat up straight. Holy Shit, I was thinking. I’m practically eating him alive! I tore at the words one after the other, peeling the skin off with my teeth. I wanted to break his words down to their skeletons, I wanted to crunch their bones, I wanted then to die with him.

Then one of the words moved, rubber like, against my cheek. Another, then another, and soon his words, stripped of their skin, were teeming like worms inside my mouth, sliding between my teeth and underneath my tongue. I panicked. I tried to spit them out, but they clung on, to my teeth, my tongue. I could feel one of them snake into my throat, so I swallowed, and then another reached and I swallowed again, and I kept swallowing but no matter how many I forced down, more and more kept appearing in my mouth. I stood up, tried to pull them out of my mouth with my hands, tried to bite into one, into many, to see if I could chew the life out of them, but every time I crushed one between my teeth, a gush of bitter liquid ran down my throat. Little blisters appeared all along the sides of my tongue and burst, too, filling my mouth with more and more words and that sweet earthy coiny taste. Fuck him, I was thinking. Fuck him for even making these words. Fuck him for putting them inside me.

Before I could know why or how, with the single burst the words dropped down my gullet and into my chest like a blast of fireworks. They entered my heart valves, my lungs. I could feel them in my kidneys and my liver and rushing through my veins like an acid stream. It wasn’t long before the words had taken over my entire body. I looked down at it, the very body which till morning had seemed boring and unremarkable, and which I had wanted, intended, to do something better with than sitting on a sofa all day. Every bit of it was pulsing now, alive and angry, every bit of it was alive.

If this had been yesterday, or the day before, I might have told myself that I was imagining something fantastic, or that his message had sparked some kind of nostalgia in me and persuaded my body to believe there was something of his I could still have. But this was today, and today was the day everything was going to change. I lay back and stared at the cobwebs hanging off the fan. I felt like I could float.

What might my mother have said if she had walked in just then, seeing me here with my mouth full like this. Didn’t you just have breakfast or stop stretching your face out. What might have I said in return?