The Girl from Everywhere

"You're blocking the view."
"I am the view, amira," he said, framing himself with his hands.

"I never knew you had such a fine eye for fabrics," I said as we continued up the street. "You should have been a tailor instead of a thief."
"I have a fine eye for all things, amira, which is why I'm a thief and not a tailor."

A table was laid on the deck, and on the table, all the culinary delights New York had to offer: pungent halal chicken and rise doused in hot sauce, pork dumplings in Styrofoam clamshells, a cardboard box marked difara's pizza, pastrami sandwiches thick as dictionaries, creamy cheesecake covered with glistening scarlet strawberries.
Kashmire flung his arms wide. "Happy theft day!"

"The last thing we need is for you to go to jail."
"For treason?" he said, running a comb through his touseled hair. "We wouldn't go to jail."
"Really?"
"We'd be shot."
"You always know just what to say."

Everything must come to an end. In every myth, paradise is meant to be lost.

Everything must come to an end. In every myth, paradise is meant to be lost.

Why did the stories I knew best never end well?
But why too did I feel at home among them?
I could never give up the myths, the maps, the ship that had shaped me. Blake’s home might be paradise, but my home was the Temptation.

"Who said it was thieves who know the price of everything and the value of nothing?”
"Oscar Wilde,” I said. “And it’s cynics, not thieves.”
"Ah! That explains it, then.”
I stuck out my tongue at him.

“And Mister . . . ?”
"Firas,” Kashmir said, folding his handkerchief neatly and making a crisp bow.
Blake’s brow furrowed as he took in the fine clothes. "A sailor?”
"Her tutor,” Kashmir said smoothly.
Blake cocked his head. “You’re much younger than any of my tutors.”
"Baleh, I am wise beyond my years,” Kashmir said. “And of course I have a natural inclination to it. My people did, after all, invent algebra. Including the zero.”

I bit my lip to keep it from trembling; he’d let me go a long time ago. After all, you can only hold one person tight if you’re holding on with both hands.

The beauty of the ephemeral was in its impermanence; I couldn’t have let myself feel for Blake had I not known there would be an end. And I could admit it now: I did feel for him. There was safety here, at the end of our short story, and it made me bold.

Had I been too selfish? I had never known my mother, but I knew my life as it had been without her: the ship, the sea, the myths, the maps . . . and, yes, Kashmir. The pain I felt at the thought of losing him—the same pain that kept me at arm’s length—gave me a hint of my father’s own struggle.