Nightmare sky, p.6
Nightmare Sky, page 6
Gentle as always, Jadda mused, “It’s true that the women of the stars have tragic fates. But see how they keep their honour in spite of misfortune. There’s a lesson in that. And by contrast, the shame of the fugitive Suhayl.”
The Suhayl of star-lore is the killer of both Na’esh and Jawzaa, hunted across the sky by the vengeful families of both victims. Of the four stars that bear his name, three mark his path and the fourth one is where he’s hiding, far to the south.
“Imagine having to hide like that, all alone. He cannot even greet his sister, who crossed the river after him. And his cowardice and shame will be on display as long as the stars can be seen.”
And Sorayya wonders if she’s shameful and a coward for hiding like this up here.
The call to the night prayer rings out, jostling Sorayya awake. When did she fall asleep? She scrambles to get her abaya on, abandoning the plastic bag with the evidence of the excursion. Then she rushes to find her way back down the mountainside, a circuitous path so she can feign she’d come directly from the Sanctuary.
Her heartbeat does not calm until she sees the faces of other children Suhayl looks after, going in the same direction.
They arrive at the door more or less at the same time, as normal. After removing their shoes outside, they gather in the central room of the house. A large salon surrounded by seating cushions at each of the walls. The children stand at one end of the room, and Suhayl, fresh from the barber, stands at the other. With his crisp, ironed clothes and well-groomed face, he couldn’t seem more out of place.
On the floor between them, on a thin plastic sheet, are two communal plates heaped with rice and straggly shreds of meat. The other children haven’t eaten yet. Sorayya looks away from them out of guilt; her own stomach would be gurgling too were it not for the shawarma. She keeps her eyes on the ceiling fan, buzzing as it slices the air.
“Come,” Suhayl says, smiling, after a head count. “Show me what you’ve brought for me.”
The children line up and present their cash, one by one. He calls out the amounts, and his mood suggests that everyone has made their minimums.
Sorayya is near the back of the group, unable to look directly at Suhayl either. The room doesn’t offer much else to look at. The cracks on the walls are the closest thing to adornment, and an incongruous blue bucket catches drips from the air-conditioning.
When it’s her turn, she reaches into her abaya pocket for her money.
Her money?
The pocket is empty. She shakes out her abaya, hoping the roll of banknotes will fall out of her sleeve or a fold somewhere. But it doesn’t. So where is it? When was the last time she saw it? On the ledge, when she was counting out—
Oh God, did she really forget to put the rest of it back? Is it still on the ledge? Did it fall out while she was running, trying to get here?
Suhayl says, syrup-sweetly, “Is there a problem?”
All she has is the 150 riyals she’d stashed away. Small mercy she even has that. She contorts herself to retrieve it and hands it over, keeping her head down.
“Only 150?” he says, dripping with disappointment. “Why?”
Should she admit she’d had more? Would it go down worse if he knew she’d lost money, or if he thought she hadn’t earned enough? How is either choice better? How is she supposed to choose? She bursts into tears.
“Shh.” He pats her head. “It’s fine, I understand. You’re getting older now. Not so cute, not so able to pull the heartstrings.”
A few of the kids laugh. Sorayya wants to disappear.
“Because everyone feels sorry for the little ones, right?” Suhayl looks over fondly at the younger kids. Specifically, a wide-eyed kitten of a boy named Badr, who has brought in 1300 riyals today.
Sorayya bows her head in defeat. “I’m sorry. I promise, I’ll try to do better, I promise I promise I—”
“Sorayya.” He wipes her tears with his thumbs. It takes everything in her not to shudder. “Ya habibty. Go wash your face and come back to eat. We’ll solve this later.”
She nods and runs to the bathroom to wash her face. Not from her tears, but from his touch. Why does it turn her stomach? He’s being nice. She’s lucky. But the last thing she wants to do is eat. It would have been better if he’d actually denied her dinner, as he’s done before with kids who didn’t make their minimum.
But she dries her hands and face and goes back to the room. And even though her stomach is in knots, and it’s hard to swallow the fatty rice cooked in meat drippings, she manages to force down several mouthfuls.
When the meal is done, Suhayl dismisses the children. But as they’re leaving, he calls out, “Ya Sorayya! Have tea with me.”
There are two cups in front of him, already filled.
“Only her?” says Badr, pouting.
“She’s a grown girl now,” says Suhayl, “and this tea is not for little children.”
What does that mean? Her instinct says to refuse him, but how can she dare? And Badr leaves without asking any other questions, leaving her with nothing else she can do.
She drinks.
The only tea she knows is the Rabea brand with the triangle logo. This does not taste like that.
“You look so tired,” Suhayl says when she finishes. He isn’t wrong; she’s more tired than she can remember. “You can just go to sleep.”
So she shambles over to the girls’ sleeping room. Mats are scattered over the floor, with a pillow each and blankets to share. She drags herself to a mat at the far end of the room and curls into a tight ball around her pillow. Hugging it the way Jadda used to hold her.
“Those three stars in a row?” Jadda would test her.
“Jawzaa.”
“And the red star they’re pointing to?”
“The Follower.”
“And who is he following?”
“Sorayya!” She grinned. Or Thurayya as they say it in classical pronunciation. The Little Abundant One, the star cluster she was named after.
Thurayya was in the sky earlier when Sorayya was on the ledge. The whole constellation, not just the star cluster in the middle, her outstretched arms embracing half the sky. There are stars for her shoulders and elbows and upper arms and forearms, for her tattooed wrist and henna-stained hand on one side, and her amputated hand on the other.
“How come she lost a hand?” Sorayya had asked once.
“She had leprosy,” said Jadda simply, melancholy. “The disease had no cure in the old days.”
Thurayya doesn’t have legs or a torso either. Did the same disease take away that much of her body, leaving just her head and her arms?
Sorayya drifts off to a floating ghost Thurayya filling half the sky, wailing a tragic mawwal, like a funeral singer, mourning that she’s wasted away and there’s so little left of her. Indistinct faces swarm all around, and Sorayya can’t feel her body beneath her neck either, but sympathetic pain shoots up her forearm and throbs, as if she too had a rotting hand that had to be taken off. But then she’s plunged back into the dark, leaning against something soft in the back of her father’s Landcruiser, the desert stars in all their splendour overhead as they made the journey to the Sanctuary. Jawzaa with her braid and her bow and her footstool, and the two Shi’ra sisters on either side of the heavenly river, and ignominious Suhayl so close to the southern horizon, flashing in and out of visibility between the dunes and rocks.
She wakes up the following afternoon, in an unfamiliar room. There’s enough light from the window to see the rust-orange henna capping the fingers of her right hand.
Her left arm ends in a bandaged stump where her hand used to be.
After she’s screamed and retched until her throat hurts, Suhayl comes into the room.
“Sorayya, habibty,” he says softly. “How are you?”
One look at him and she knows it’s him. That he’s the one who had this done to her.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “I know this must be a shock.”
He was supposed to protect her! He said he cared for her like one of his own! That was why she stayed here in the first place. That was why she came back night after night.
“I mean, but I anticipated your problem before last night. And I thought about what to do, and the answer came to me from the stars. Because everyone feels sorry for a child amputee! Who wouldn’t give money to help her?”
Money? Was this really just about money?
“You’ll see how it’s better for you, for all of us. How much you’ll earn after this. You’ll bring in so much I can even buy you something nice.”
Money can’t buy what she wants. It can’t bring back her hand—or her family. They kept to their desert life and didn’t go after money beyond what they needed, even when the government gave them the chance. And why does he need 500 riyals to let her eat two meals and sleep at his house, when she can have a filling meal for less than ten riyals and sleep at the Sanctuary? Why didn’t she have questions when she saw how much food actually costs? How was she such a fool to think he cared about any of them? All of the children—they’re just money to him.
“But you don’t have to go back to work yet. Get your rest. I want you fully recovered.”
How does he keep talking as if she’s fallen sick—as if this isn’t something he did to her?
After he leaves the room, she weeps for everything she’s lost. Sobs it all out, like Thurayya in her dream. But then she wipes her face with the edge of her dress.
She will not be like the Shi’ra sister who cries until it ruins her eyes.
She is careful over the recovery days not to show anger or defiance. She can’t stomach even pretending to agree with what he did, but she can pretend she’s come to accept it. That it’s not worth fighting, and she’s ready to go along with it.
He sends her back to the Sanctuary in a week.
Patience is hard, especially now that it’s harder to make her way up and down the mountain with one hand. But she knows better than to run for it on the first day. No doubt Suhayl has the other children watching her. He’s clever enough not to completely trust her.
She smiles to think that he’s afraid. He should be.
She scouts the Sanctuary slowly over a week. Following the paths of the visitors, blending in with them, keeping herself in the middle of crowds where the other children are unlikely to see her. Draping her abaya over her head like an old woman, so even if she’s in their sightlines they won’t know her.
In particular, she scans the guards.
She seeks the guard who spoke to her before. He seemed to have something to say, and at least she knows he has a respectful manner. But even when she locates him, she can’t talk to him too soon. A few more days to throw off suspicion, and to be sure of when and where he’s stationed.
Finally, on the twelfth day she approaches him.
“I remember you,” he says. “You fit the description of a missing girl some people were looking for.”
Does she dare hope that was her family?
“But…what happened to your hand?”
She does not hold back. She tells him everything.
The women of the stars may never find justice, but down on Earth, she will make Suhayl face his crimes. And she will not lose any more of herself; she is not Sorayya of the stars.
MOTH TO A FLAME
MOTH TO A FLAME
JEREMY MEGARGEE
Moth gapes at the night sky, her black curls framing a face bordering on cherubic, and she counts the stars on her fingertips. Those bright distant pinpricks soothe her, and she is not herself when detached from starshine. In daylight hours she slinks through the world like an eel provided with only an inch of water, unsettled and incongruent, but under night clouds, moonbeams, and twinkling starlight, a sense of self manages to bloom.
She is always alone. People frighten her, and their big booming talking heads make her feel unsafe. Moth cannot follow their conversations, she cannot match pace with their body language, and she is lost in the rhythm of their honeybee lives. She wishes in the deepest part of herself that she could be among them and of them, but it is not to be. She wasn’t born for it, and it hurts to pretend. That lack has created a chasm inside of her, but she knows how to fill it. She finds answers in the constellations, and methods of comfort are passed down to her from the stratosphere.
She licks her lips, fingers brushing across the freckles on her nose and cheeks, constellations that dominate the galaxy of her face, and she thinks of her mouth as a wormhole, those little words that come out traveling from terrible starved distances. She is a taker and a maker, and she whispers sweetly to what she unearths.
Moth knows where to find companions and quiet friends who no longer have the capacity to judge. They’re down in the soil, multitudes of forgotten ones, and the stars tell her where to plant her spade. She digs during nocturnal hours, a dirty little mole of a girl, and she pulls at rotten casket lids until her palms are lanced with splinters. There is always the musk of them, that eldritch spice of closed graves, and it excites her to inhale it, because it means a new friend will soon be introduced.
Sometimes her friends are juicy, peeling, plump forms like fruit left too long on the table. They’re bloated and gassy, and they belch out pressure from decomposed innards. She is splattered in the black and brown wetness of them, but Moth doesn’t mind. Other times they’re dry like cordwood, adorable little collections of bone and fabric scraps, and these ones make her feel special. They’re wizened, shrunken, leering skull faces with broken teeth, and she cradles them to her chest and calls them fairies of the dirt. She pulls worms out of the dark holes where their eyes and noses used to be. She brushes grit from their brittle brows, and she dances with them, making them rattle for her. There are tea parties and stargazing picnics, and Moth sits in comfortable silence with the dead ones, knowing there is never a need to converse too much, because souls talk too.
She loves all the stars, but one constellation stands out above all others, because it is the one that is the kindest to her. It is the great Fly in the Sky, the Musca constellation, and she always finds it waiting in the southern firmament. It’s small, only a few stars, small like her, but it matters. Sometimes she closes her eyes, feeling the wind knifing against her cheeks, and Musca speaks through the crickets and the creek and the hidden living things that exist all around her in this abandoned boneyard.
It buzzes in her head, pleasant warmth, and it tells her the corpses are lonely and lost just like her. No one visits them, no one loves them, and isn’t that a shame? Moth knows what it feels like to be unloved. Most of her life has been a delirium, and people don’t notice or care.
If a person isn’t involved, a person isn’t interested. It’s easy to slip through the cracks, and she slipped through a long time ago. She never climbed out, she just taught herself to build a nest in the depths of that crack, and Moth acclimated to the never-ending dark.
She has a place, as close to a home as she’ll ever have. It’s a disused subway tunnel that is accessible through a part of the city that harbors gutted rowhouses and human wraiths that crave nothing but the needle. She takes her favorites there, and they become permanent guests. She wraps them up in bundles and carries them like babes, and if anyone sees her walking in the night, they’d mistake her for a young mother. No one has ever asked to see what she cradles, but if they did, she’d show them. She’d smile and pull back the mildewed blanket with the half-moons, and she’d let the sickly yellow streetlamp glow fall on empty sockets and mossy teeth, and she’d rattle her bundle for the whole world to hear.
But people see what is important to them, and Moth has never been important to anyone, so she is never seen. She moves through her pockets of shadow, and what she carries are her burdens alone. The sole caretaker for lonely stick-thin limbs and gaunt cheeks, and when she comes home through her tunnels and rooms, she relishes her orphanage of bone.
Under crumbled concrete arches that drip water, through twisted webbing of unrepaired rail, and in a place that is deep and forgotten in the world, Moth arrives home. She navigates her rabbit hole, nurturing lit candles that spill over with wax, feeling safe beneath the shadow of an undiscovered ossuary, and twirling like a girl-child that only has the capacity to thrive in a tomb that her own nimble hands erected.
She closes her eyes and inhales, taking in the aroma of her rabbit hole, and to Moth, death smells like cinnamon. Exhumed friends line the walls, affixed there with wires and twine, posed like mannequins in various states, empty yearning sockets watching her make her way deeper into sanctuary. The rats share the domicile, and they nibble on the organic bits that still have value, a ceaseless din of chattering crooked teeth, but Moth does not begrudge them. They are misunderstood familiars, and death is not ashamed to feed their bellies, just as it has never failed to give her a sense of purpose.
She is comparable to a rat in some ways, because she is the happiest in her nest. Moth goes there now, her circular bed under the heat vent that blasts out cloying air from an active part of the subway system, and she uncovers her newest acquisition from the boneyard, nestling his wasted form down there in folds of curtain, rug, blanket, and big whorls of discarded wool from the dumpster behind the farmer’s market.
She unfurls the layers of cloth that cover her, a butterfly shedding the cocoon she must wear up above, the shapeless husk that lets her be invisible, and when she is all goose-pimpled milky skin and undergarments, she climbs into bed with the cadaver. Moth cuddles in close, and she plants her head against that hollow drooping chest, just sharp ribs and flesh like leather. She likes to imagine that there is warmth still there, and on the nights when her thoughts are wild, she hopes for the beating of a heart that once was.
If she were to be asked what she gets out of it, her answers would seem almost heartbreaking. She is sweet with the corpses, tender and hopeful, and there is even an element of the maternal. She thinks of what it must feel like for a person that has been dead for hundreds and hundreds of years. The kudzu encircling your tombstone, the erosion of time stripping away your name and your birth date, and every single person that ever knew you or could be bothered to tend to your grave died a long time ago too.
