The blanket was warm and damp. The ground hard. The night wind filtered through the window bringing shrieks of crickets, like cracks of fire. Saba sat up and lit the oil lamp. To look away from her body now would have meant accepting the midwife’s presence inside her for ever. It would have meant accepting the hurt, the intrusion, the growth of injustices like a thorn bush against her inner thighs. Saba decided to confront and to cleanse the ghost of the midwife. To liberate her body from the midwife and take it back. Like the flag of a free country, she planted pleasure on her assaulted body with her fingers.

A WOMAN

Saba stood outside the hut. She heard laughter as fresh as the morning as the young girls and boys hopscotched on the sandy ground. When she looked away from the children, Saba saw the businessman making his way to the office of the aid coordinator. He had yet to receive an answer to the request to allow the aid centre to provide loans to refugees and to speed up the issuing of travel permits.

Saba could picture the businessman trying to persuade the aid coordinator to do more to convince the regional authorities. She imagined him saying, After a while humans can’t just survive on food and safety, even in a camp.

But maybe sometimes words have no power, Saba thought when she saw Tedros following his father into the aid centre, holding by its legs a rooster they had bought from Hajj Ali.

Saba felt a sudden pain in her back and tummy. As she placed a hand on her stomach, she felt something warm dripping down her leg.

Yikes! Look at Saba’s legs, one of the girls behind her screamed.

The children scattered away. Saba looked down. Blood dripped down her leg to the grey earth beneath her. Saba ducked as the eagle swooped down on her blood.

The midwife took Saba inside and shut the door. Piercing ululations from her mother marked Saba’s passage into womanhood, while the midwife folded a piece of cloth into a thick absorbent pad to place in Saba’s underwear. Everything will be fine, sweetheart, now that you have become a woman, said the mother.

Saba expected womanhood, this phase of independence, to arrive once she was well on her way towards the goals she’d worked for at school, but it found her as a refugee in a camp. It was bewildering to her that a woman’s passage into adulthood wasn’t through her intellect, her character, but through her vagina. As far as she was concerned she had already been a woman for a long time now.

Saba clutched her stomach and sat on the blanket.

I will go and ask him to hurry up, said the midwife. Saba is not going to wait around forever now that she is a woman.

Saba sat up. When the midwife reached the door, she turned around. Tears welled up in her eyes. Her mother went up to the midwife. The two women hugged and wept.