From the Bookshelf of Around the World in 80 Books…

Don’t forget ... stories ease the pain of living, not dying. People always think dying is going to hurt, but it doesn’t. It’s living that hurts us.

”Mama?!”

The booming is thunder in my bones. The room gets real still, only the beetles twitching at

Don’t forget ... stories ease the pain of living, not dying. People always think dying is going to hurt, but it doesn’t. It’s living that hurts us.

”Mama?!”

The booming is thunder in my bones. The room gets real still, only the beetles twitching at the cracks in the windows. My pulse pops in my wrist. On the table, my knife shakes against my napkin. The lines in Abusayid’s forehead are thick and deep as tree roots.

“It must be coming from another neighborhood,” mama says.

But she stops eating. She holds her fork in the air, a bite of cucumber salad dripping yogurt sauce. The light falls across the triangle of her nose, as straight as baba’s T-square

The tall lady’s voice is thick as water, ruby-purple as pomegranate seeds. Sweat darkens the gauzy linen of her hijab where it meets her forehead and her temples, and it glistens in the spaces between her fingers when she talks.

Zahra pushes my hands, ringing her wrist with her own fingers like a cuff.

“Do you know what would’ve happened to us if they hadn’t opened that truck??” she whispers. “Do you have any idea?”

I lock my knuckles against Zahra’s, the damp salt of her sweat oiling my hands. The humid morning strokes the red and white blisters on my legs, the cold’s fingerprints. Zahra stares me down, slipping my hands off her wrists like invisible bracelets. Her scar ripples her jaw like a bruise on the skin of an olive, the same way these blisters will leave pale opals of scar tissue on my shins. I think to myself, ‘life draws blood, and leaves its jewelry in our skin.’