“What’s wrong, little cucumber? Are you sick?”

“Sick, sick,” said Hamouda.

My mother hugged me and felt my forehead.

“I think I’m getting sick,” I told her. “Lots of the kids at school are sick,” I lied.

“You stay home with us and we’ll make you better, won’t we, Hamouda.”

Hamouda looked at me and shouted, “Yes!”

Two days later, my safe mother flew a million miles away to see her dying mother. My uncle Hamdi paid for her ticket.

“I promise you, habibti, only for one week.” But I knew she was lying because I heard Baba say two weeks and no more.

“Let me come, Ma, please,” I begged.

“No, habibti. You have to stay to keep an eye on the boys. Go to Maysoun if it gets bad.” But I knew Baba wouldn’t let me. He would expect me to take care of everything.

I cried and cried, because without her our house is empty. Even Baba feels it.

29 MAWAL Maziuna

29MAWALMaziuna

Months have passed in a blink. Days take forever. My world has flipped upside down. My father is dead and my grandmother, with whom we now live, has gotten old so quickly. Something in her has walked away, and now my auntie Shahira is visiting, to help my mother and also to help with my grandmother. And I am still watching, like my mother taught me to do.

The seventy-four-year-old woman named Maziuna sits at the edge of her bed, her face decorated with angry wrinkles and spots like bruises. She wears a scarf that’s red and streaked with gold and she does not recognize her daughter, who has come to visit after so many years away, only the second time since she remarried and she and her two daughters, Mina and Monia, left for America.

There are many heavy women who punctuate the room. They are all somehow related. The daughter who is visiting vies hardest for her mother’s attention, whispering, singing, and talking to her, and when she gets no response, shouting. Still, Maziuna is oblivious as Omar Diyab serenades them from a boombox.

The visiting daughter, Shahira, does not give up. She props her mother’s face between her palms and shouts, “Where is that mule Shahira? Have you seen her?” Her mother looks just over her daughter’s left shoulder and stares at nothing, or maybe at a memory she just peeled off the windowsill and let drop and break.

“Ma, Ma, where is that mule Shahira?” She forces her mother’s face toward her own, but the eyes are still looking over there, under the window, at the floor.