Behind You Is the Sea

by Susan Muaddi Darraj

You don’t even need anyone to tell you that all you have left are just a few minutes to be together, intact, as a family.

Destiny put everyone on a stage, to play a role, and sometimes the spotlight slipped off you to give you a break. At other times, it burned into you directly, relentlessly, as you stumbled through a soliloquy of exhaustion.

The only math I liked was measuring in teaspoons and cups; my science was mixing flour and oil and eggs.

“Behind you is the sea. Before you, the enemy.” I glance at him then continue. “You have left now only the hope of your courage and your constancy.”

She imagined that, surrounded by the white of the tent, she was sitting in a cloud, that everything around her was constructed of light and emotion. There was nothing hostile, nothing angry, in this beautiful place he’d created.

People married for lots of reasons, and love wasn’t usually one. Sometimes marriage was nothing more than the cool shade of a tree in a scorching desert you couldn’t otherwise survive.

The Arabs were a people that knew life could be horrifically unjust and unfair—and yet they cherished it.