I pretended otherwise, but that warning of hers, that something bad was going to happen, was a constant source of terror to me. The worst thing was its vagueness; unlike her other predictions it didn’t say that something was going to happen in a few minutes or a few hours, but was instead like foreboding in a dream, ill-defined but inescapable. As though her ear was tuned to fate and had picked up a voice speaking in anger but was unable to pick out the words. She couldn’t understand what was being said, and she couldn’t turn it into good news.

That same nebulous sense of dread filled my chest as Bahr and I surveyed the steeply rising road they called Simon Street. We didn’t need to check we were in the right place: the rumors turned out to be true; children had been banned from the street.

The children kept being hit by the flowers. Plenty of injuries, quite aside from the deaths. They hit so hard, the giant blooms that Raef Annabawi had first seen on a trip to Indonesia, deciding on the spot that these were the beauties with which he’d fill his hanging garden in Muqattam.

A gigantic plant, massive, more than ten feet high—nearly twice the height of Raef himself. Rare and expensive, true, but nothing was too costly for Annabawi. Ever since he had built his extraordinary villa atop one of Muqattam’s rocky outcrops and surrounded it on all sides with terraces of herbs and flowers, he had been contemplating a wall to enhance not only his garden’s security and privacy, but its beauty as well. What to do? He didn’t want a fence of steel or a screen of stone. Then he took that trip and found what he’d been looking for: the flower. The first time he encountered it in that Indonesian greenhouse, a young woman was standing on tiptoe, arm stretched above her head in a vain attempt to touch the bloom itself: a bright dish from whose center rose an erect blade. The sight touched off thoughts both sexual and mildly derisive in Annabawi’s mind, and he drew closer. A foul reek struck him. Titan arum! he thought, The corpse flower!

Raef wasn’t deterred. The look of the thing, its mythic dimensions, and the fact that it bloomed so rarely (once a decade) more than outweighed the problem of the smell. The flowers would line the outside of the wall; their stink wouldn’t reach him, wouldn’t even reach to the street far below. The pedestrians on Simon Street would see the impossible things looming over them like something out of sci-fi.