Fiction

And yet, if this was a side effect, I didn’t want to get rid of it.

When the mind runs out of space, it must purge things like bad purses and key chains to make room for new memories, like the smell of menthol cigarettes on the breath of the police officer who informed me my husband had been killed.

But I was only a girl, toes curled tight in my shoes trying to march comfortably on a trail determined by other people.

I trust you, I replied, which was the same mistake I’d made all thirteen years we were together.

The boy traced his fingers over his skin in the way he saw the ladies in the commercials do. Sensuously, carefully, like any pressure would till his skin and give way to pores that would erode the glow he’d struggled so hard to cultivate.

A carrot, a turnip, my tumor: objects that can reach fifteen centimeters without being too much. I grew the tumor slowly, the way a woman cradles a pregnancy inside her, long and slow until the baby is ripe.

D blurts out the truth: they’re here to rob her. Cash jabs D in the stomach with his elbow, as if D has divulged information that isn’t already obvious. Marie rises from her recliner. She offers the boys coffee, tea, at least a glass of water.

With Hamza, Sakina had been fabulous—funny, unpredictable, utterly nonconforming to expectations—but only to the extent allowed by his disapproving gaze and after their big fights, when they weren’t on speaking terms and she was temporarily released from his influence.
Without him, there would be no limit to what she could be.