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Back The Wild Ones Save as PDF
Chapters (61)
  1. Cover
  2. PRAISE FOR The Wild Ones
  3. Title Page
  4. Dedication
  5. Epigraph
  6. The Beginning, or How Paheli Became the First Wild One; With a Cameo by Taraana, the Boy Made of Stars.
  7. An Introduction; Hold On to Your Hats.
  8. The Sweetness in the Sugarcane, or The Impractical Nature of Immortality
  9. Paheli: The Vagrant Experiences of a Mango Addict
  10. Cotton Candy Sugar Screams
  11. From the Book of MEMORIES
  12. “Will You Walk into My Parlor?” Said the Spider to the Fly.
  13. The Best Ice Cream in the World, Teddy Bears, and a Tree Creature.
  14. From the Book of MEMORIES
  15. I.
  16. The Reappearance of the Boy Made of Stars and the Plight of the Girl by the Oleander Lane.
  17. Paheli: An Interlude in Blue
  18. Besieged in the Between
  19. Tea, the City of Stairs, and the Story of a Boy
  20. From the Book of MEMORIES
  21. Heartbreak, Stone Buildings, and Tandoori
  22. Observations, Conversations, and Hot Parantha
  23. Paheli: The Spies Who Came In from the Between
  24. From the Book of MEMORIES
  25. The French Quarter, the Spanish Half, and Eulalie
  26. Paheli: The Eggplant Overture
  27. Sunny Jelly Beans, Po’Boys, and “Alouette”
  28. From the Book of MEMORIES
  29. The Keeper of the Green and the Mysteries of Magic
  30. Blood and the Between
  31. The Library of the Lost and the Stories of the Silenced
  32. Walking in Wicked Ways or The Importance of Balık Ekmek
  33. From the Book of MEMORIES
  34. Looking for the Needle in the Haystack
  35. Paheli: The Peculiar Crackle in the Electricity
  36. Ten Degrees Past Despair
  37. The Fault in the Stars
  38. The Blue City in the Mountains
  39. Paheli: Disharmony in the Attics
  40. From the Book of MEMORIES
  41. Paheli: Continued
  42. The Politics of a Body, the Politics of Pleasure
  43. The Medina, the Riad, and the Red City
  44. Paheli: The Atlas Mountains, the Cozy Rooftop, and the Confession, Possibly of Love
  45. From the Book of MEMORIES
  46. Souks, Spices, and Survival: A Guide into Chaos
  47. Jemaa el-Fna: The Mosque at the End of the World
  48. Paheli: A Moment in Chartreuse
  49. From the Book of MEMORIES
  50. Paheli: On the Frailties of the Heart
  51. Sonagi, or A Sudden Rain
  52. Paheli: The Cheese in the Trap
  53. Paheli: The Maze and the Minotaur
  54. A New Era, a New Dar; the River Sings
  55. The Burning Door, the Fallen City, and Taraana 2.0
  56. Paheli: The Beginning of Forever
  57. From the Book of MEMORIES
  58. Moving One Rock at a Time Will Eventually Move a Mountain, aka Goodbye
  59. Acknowledgments
  60. More from the Author
  61. About the Author

We are the Wild Ones. We are made of whimsy and lemon.

We have the temerity to be not just women, but women of color. Women with melanin in our skin and voices in our throats. Voices that will not be vanquished. Not now, not ever. We will not be silenced.

Just in case it needs to be said, all you need to be a girl, to be a woman, is to decide you are one. Your gender is your decision.

There have been many of us over time and between time. We write glimpses of our stories, of the lives we led before we became wild, in a Book of Memories. We share some of our stories, some of its pages, interspersed within Paheli’s story.

Our lingua franca? Why, darlings, we speak all dialects of pain.

Paheli’s story is our story. We will give it shape, allow it reason, fashion it wings, and watch it fly.

Now. Are you ready? Take a deep breath. Let’s be wild.

The Sweetness in the Sugarcane, or The Impractical Nature of Immortality

The air inside the Between smells very much like the air inside very posh hotels: expensive with hints of nature. Ligaya, with hair as dark as an evil witch’s heart, walks to a patch of wall and carefully pulls out a plump diamond embedded in it. She places it gently in a small sack that contains other Between diamonds, each one as exquisite as the other.

We don’t take many diamonds out of the Between. Just enough to keep us sparkly and satiated. The stars embedded in the palms of our right hands qualify us as the Wild Ones, and, as the Wild Ones, our needs are numerous.

At this moment, we are traipsing silently down the Between. It would be easiest if you thought of the Between as a corridor snaking throughout the world, invisible to human sensibilities and precious to magical ones. The walls of the Between are made of stone, like a medieval castle corridor flanked on either side by closed doors. If you turn the knob on a particular door, it will open to a city. Each door in the Between leads to a different city in the world. This corridor is always illuminated by a golden light, which, if you believe Paheli, is magic. We can feel this light soaking through our skin and filling us up.

It is never silent in the Between. You can always hear voices talking, laughing, screaming, or crying. There are murmured conversations between lovers, confrontations between enemies, mundane exchanges, and illicit whispers that tease your ears. The worst moment is when you hear a voice you think you recognize. The best is when you hear one you wish you did. So, we are silent in the Between because all of us have some voices we wish to hear and others we never want to hear again.