But a day like today is also gray like old sadness that’s been buried awhile, and gray like happy memories snatched by death returning to tempt you, to show you what is no longer yours, like my father.

Everything sharp like nails in your bicycle tire and beyond repair and no money to buy a new one. Loud and crisp, every breath a statement, every thought a rumble.

The land is everywhere, too much in places, too lovely, too much yours and not yours at the same time. So you see why people like my father have heart attacks and drop dead on the street at the age of forty? Unavoidable. Stories are stitched under the skin at birth. Sometimes during a lifetime, or even half a lifetime, they can grow out of control and cause so much pain that you have to die to spare yourself the misery.

Days when sleep is your only goal, when a dreamless night would be a gift from God, when sadness is quiet happiness. Gloom when rain comes down like heavy mist and then like bullets and still you don’t run to avoid it. Instead you walk more slowly.

Sometimes there are no stories, only feelings and still no words for those feelings, only pictures—that gray sky is my heart: vast and sick and empty. My own branches are breaking. Why every time when I open my eyes am I still here? That bird is my future, far away and uncertain.

Accept that which is God’s will. Accept that which is God’s will. Accept that which ... I will accept.

35 KHADIJA Fire

35KHADIJAFire

Scary is the day before Ma comes home and Baba drinks the whole bottle—I know because I saw it empty outside by his car—and he goes inside and Hamouda is figuring out how talking works and he looks at Baba and says “wild dog with a tick ass” plain as day like he’s been saying those words since time began.

Baba sets on fire and I’m in the kitchen trying to be invisible and slap slap slap and the baby cries, so I go to see and Hamouda’s arm is in my father’s teeth and blood and then Siddi comes up to hold my father or to take the baby from him, and my father hits him hard, his own father, and knocks him to the floor and then goes back to the baby, who’s just crying and crying and crying.

I do what I have never done. I run to the phone and dial 911 like they say to do in school.

“You are at 755 Marengo Street?” the voice asks.

“Yes.”

“What’s your emergency?”

“My grandfather is on the ground. My baby brother too.”

“Did they fall?”

“My father is hitting everybody!”