Scary is the rumor started by my brother, Muhammad, whose two dollars I took to buy a barrette, that he saw me at school kissing Michael behind the gym at lunch and having Baba not believe me because he doesn’t have any reason to.

Scary is when the yelling doesn’t stop and when everyone has bruises “from the Devil,” as my mother says. I know better. I know they come because the sand sends him inside that small bottle of liquor he keeps locked in his toolbox and turns his insides into fire.

27 SORAYA Love Story/Remembering Story

27SORAYALove Story/Remembering Story

Like I said, I can make any man talk. That includes my crazy uncle Haydar. I know his truth. He fed it to me once. So long ago and it is still my secret.

Once upon a time, a sad young man ran across the sea, away from talks that drowned him drunk, like a dead bird in a shit-filled fountain.

“Questions need not be asked in my arms. Eyes and feet are all that change the world, besides the obvious,” he’d tell his girlfriends, whose laughter painted him clever as well as slick, shiny-shoed, and charming: quite exotic by their standards, even as he aged and aged and filled his shoes with lifts and insoles.

In Arizona his sad eyes swallowed clouds and shut, so he could keep them always there. Memories floated fat and still above his head, no matter how fast he ran or how full his arms were with sweet delight and youth.

“Running can’t go on forever,” he read in a fortune cookie to the same little girl who asked him why he was so alone and had no one in his life, and why he hardly ever visited; and wherever did he get those heavy eyes and flying feet?

Walking home, he kicked stones under a southwest sky, brighter than skies he remembers.

“But you are my uncle and I don’t even know you well,” the girl replied after he asked her to come to him. “Except that you always ask me how I am, like you want to know the answer, but I can’t break a rule like that, not tonight at least.”

Some days, weeks, months later during another visit, she risked it all and went to the running man. “In your arms I am beautiful and I can fly,” she whispered on his sweaty neck, her words sliding down his chest.

A lifetime later, lying in bed, his eyes facing the moon, he felt fear come visit.

“Why are you scared? Did you hear a noise?” she had asked, but his eyes were silent. He held her so tight in his arms her breath was hard to find.