God forgive me for having been so careless with such a dangerous weapon.

God forgive their stupidity. They are foolish children. Nothing happened, thank God and thank you for your concern.

Please forgive my carelessness.

I can feel the neighbors’ eyes and words following us. What are you looking at, you foolish weasel? I ask my friends to please stay and watch Salwan and then we drive to the gray-yellow hospital on Sharia Filisteen.

Salwan told me later they played cards with him and told him stories, which would have made me furious had I not already reached my limits of rage and given him the beating of his life, so bad that he almost had to go to the hospital on Sharia Filisteen too.

What made me remember this story today is the oddest thing of all. Your mother came back for a visit a few months later. Saara was showing her the scar on her shoulder. Huda was turning her head this way, and then that way, for a couple of minutes, and then she laughed.

“Why are you laughing?” we all asked her.

“Abu Salwan, this scar is in the shape of a lizard. It is nothing if it is not a lizard.”

So you see, Hala and Fawziyya, that lizard you saw in Petra was a reminder that your mothers are always with you.

25 HALA Backgammon

25HALABackgammon

This is my last night. A week and a half has passed in the blink of an eye.

The sun has been gone awhile and the night’s cool winds cover us as we sit beneath the grapevines on the balcony. Remnants of the day’s laundry dangle amid a circle of cans filled with flowers of exotic smells in an alley that usually reeks of sewage.

A wrinkled hand pushes a black chip across the felt.

The crickets are in symphony.

Um Salwan comes and sits next to me, a hand on each knee and a smile for her husband.

“Come on,” I say. “Let’s walk.”

“Tomorrow, girl. Tomorrow we will walk to the university and back.”

This has become our joke: I wanted to walk to the university that is more than a mile away and Um Salwan coughs after two alleys, but she swears she will walk with me tomorrow, God willing.

Crack, crack, crack, say pumpkin seeds between teeth as cracked as the shells they are biting and nowhere near as white. Ping, onto the dish that piles itself higher and higher.

“I will go to sleep now,” I say.

Concentration is broken momentarily as protests heavier than the chips on felt are piled on my head.

“It is too early,” Fawziyya shouts next to me and clutches my shoulder.

I am convinced and silence returns with occasional pings and cracks and growls of passing cars. Sleep can wait, though Abu Salwan will let me go if I insist more than twice.

“Abu Salwan, tell me about the gold. ...”