She was submerged now. Above her and around her, soft granulated soil. Her feet touched hair, her skin grazed cold bones, her ears caught the sounds of the creatures made of smoke. They did not want her presence. She sensed them fretting. There was a silliness about them despite the ability to move seamlessly between air, water and earth. The djinn knew no barriers. An enviable position, but still their lack of weight counted against them. Iman felt the pain subside into rawness, all the sensitivity of new skin. There was no rush. She could sleep and dream of the Hoopoe. In a dream, he would tell her another story.

There was a story that he had not completed. It was about two tribes in a forest. One tribe was made up of small gentle people, highly skilled and peaceful. The other tribe were monsters, greedy and violent. The small people lived in fear of the monsters. All their efforts and intelligence went into protecting themselves from attack. They devised methods of predicting the movement of the monsters, they laid traps for them and studied their weaknesses. The monsters were foolish. They survived on their brute strength. In the style of the Hoopoe’s storytelling, there were epic wars and myriad adventures, heroes and heroines, tales of escape and subterfuge. Yet what had moved Iman the most in that story, what made her blood run cold, was the origin of the monsters. They were not another species. They were not foreign or alien. In fact, they were the children of the small people – some, not all of their children. At the toddler age, if they were destined to become future monsters, they would start to eat more and more. They would guzzle and become aggressive. Not finding enough food in the village, they would move to the woods and forage as much as they wanted. A small mother could come across her daughter or son, call them by name, beg them to come home, but they would ignore her. The next time, as their monster form developed, the mother would barely recognise her own flesh and blood. And they, well into becoming fully fledged monsters, would no longer have any memory that she was their mother.

Iman, though, was not losing her memory. When the earth finally gave her up and she stretched up as tall as a small tree, when she shook off her torn clothes, she remembered the human she had been. In the cartoons she often watched with Salma’s children, transformed characters could see their new reflection in water. They gazed down into a pool of blue and their face swayed up at them. Iman searched for water, her movements ungainly, her sight blurred. She found a running stream, gurgling and frothing. But it did not reflect her face.