She had set the table with unfathomable resentment. White table linen, sharp at the corners, napkin rings strangling, cutlery already its own kind of deadly. All living things smothered, even the picked-wildflower centerpiece. The dim candle lighting cast a brass shadow, making everything, even Maggie, appear appropriately solemn.
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Nothing was neutral, there was always something attached to it, clinging to it, triggering, pulling, insisting, asking her to look, telling her not to forget. Sheâd tried explaining this one to Adam, but he had shaken his head and insisted that she was going to exhaust herself, that it sounded like she was living several lives at once, all stacked up on her, weighing her down, bottoming her out. Waleed had understood, a little. He had told her it was the same for him, to walk through the city was to walk with ghosts.
He sat in that dark shack for hours. He saw the darkness turn in upon itself, churn, and spasm. He watched it reach out for him, felt it first caress, then clutch and fondle him. When Essie finally returnedâeyes bruised, hair awry, limbs weary, bleeding, and missing somethingâhe wanted to handle her like he would a newborn. Instead he whispered to her viciously against his better judgment. He couldnât help it. She had become a looking glass for his incompetence and he had no courage to place the blame where it actually belonged.
Whether men had seen battle or not, each of them, to one degree or another, came home from wherever it is men go to be with themselves or to do the things they would never admit to out loud, with the same intent to inflict whatever harms they endured from the world onto the women and children closest to them. Relation didnât matter. Mother, wife, sister, and daughter were all equally targeted for the same rage. Father, husband, brother, and son all had the same blank disregard in their eyesâthere, behind the glistening fury, was the thing that shook them so thoroughly that they felt the need to destroy anything and anyone who they believed could see it: nothing.
See? That was where Isaiah had faltered. To survive in this place, you had to want to die. That was the way of the world as remade by toubab, and Samuelâs list of grievances was long: They pushed people into the mud and then called them filthy. They forbade people from accessing any knowledge of the world and then called them simple. They worked people until their empty hands were twisted, bleeding, and could do no more, then called them lazy. They forced people to eat innards from troughs and then called them uncivilized. They kidnapped babies and shattered families and then called them incapable of love. They raped and lynched and cut up people into parts, and then called the pieces savage. They stepped on peopleâs throats with all their might and asked why the people couldnât breathe. And then, when people made an attempt to break the foot, or cut it off one, they screamed âCHAOS!â and claimed that mass murder was the only way to restore order.
7. The Come-Apart
âZehrunisa returned to her hut and sobbed, still clutching the rag with which sheâd
cleaned her neighbor. She didnât cry for the fate of her husband, son, and daughter, or for the great web of corruption she was now forced to navigate, or for a system in which the most wretched tried to punish the slightly less wretched by turning to a justice system so malign it sank them all. She cried for the manageable thing â the loss of that beautiful quilt, a parting gift to a woman who had used her own body as a weapon against her neighbors.