“Yes?” “I'd just as soon we get it done.” Rasheed's mouth opened, then spread in a yellow, toothy grin.
“Eager,” he said. Before Abdul Sharif's visit, Laila had decided to leave for Pakistan.
Even after Abdul Sharif came bearing his news, Laila thought now, she might have left. Gone somewhere far from here.
Detached herself from this city where every street corner was a trap, where every alley hid a ghost that sprang at her like a jack in the box.
She might have taken the risk. But, suddenly, leaving was no longer an option. Not with this daily retching.
This new fullness in her breasts. And the awareness, somehow, amid all of this turmoil, that she had missed a cycle.
Laila pictured herself in a refugee camp, a stark field with thousands of sheets of plastic strung to makeshift poles flapping in the cold, stinging wind.
Beneath one of these makeshift tents, she saw her baby, Tariq's baby,
its temples wasted, its jaws slack, its skin mottled, bluish gray.
She pictured its tiny body washed by strangers, wrapped in a tawny shroud,
lowered into a hole dug in a patch of windswept land under the disappointed gaze of vultures.
How could she run now? Laila took grim inventory of the people in her life.
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