Laila wished she could see her face, but Mariam was in burqa—they both were—and all she could see was the glitter of her eyes through the grid.
This was Laila's first time out of the house in weeks, discounting the short trip to the pawnshop the day before
where she had pushed her wedding ring across a glass counter, where she'd walked out thrilled by the finality of it, knowing there was no going back.
All around her now, Laila saw the consequences of the recent fighting whose sounds she'd heard from the house.
Homes that lay in roofless ruins of brick and jagged stone, gouged buildings with fallen beams poking through the holes,
the charred, mangled husks of cars, upended, sometimes stacked on top of each other, shattered glass everywhere.
She saw a funeral procession marching toward a mosque, a black clad old woman at the rear tearing at her hair.
They passed a cemetery littered with rock piled graves and ragged shaheed flags fluttering in the breeze.
Laila reached across the suitcase, wrapped her fingers around the softness of her daughter's arm.
At the Lahore Gate bus station, near Pol Mahmood Khan in East Kabul, a row of buses sat idling along the curbside.
Men in turbans were busy heaving bundles and crates onto bus tops, securing suitcases down with ropes.
Inside the station, men stood in a long line at the ticket booth. Burqa clad women stood in groups and chatted, their belongings piled at their feet.
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