her arms and legs shaking as if something were throttling her from the inside,
the froth at the corners of her mouth, white, sometimes pink with blood.
Then the drowsiness, the frightening disorientation, the incoherent mumbling.
When the news reached Shindand, the parakeet seller's family called off the wedding. “They got spooked” was how Nana put it.
The wedding dress was stashed away. After that, there were no more suitors.
In the clearing, Jalil and two of his sons, Farhad and Muhsin, built the small kolba where Mariam would live the first fifteen years of her life.
They raised it with sun-dried bricks and plastered it with mud and handfuls of straw.
It had two sleeping cots, a wooden table, two straight-backed chairs, a window,
and shelves nailed to the walls where Nana placed clay pots and her beloved Chinese tea set.
Jalil put in a new cast iron stove for the winter and stacked logs of chopped wood behind the kolba.
He added a tandoor outside for making bread and a chicken coop with a fence around it.
He brought a few sheep, built them a feeding trough.
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