The River Has Roots

by Amal El-Mohtar

From their earliest days, Esther and Ysabel never shirked their duty, singing the required hymn with great solemnity at the changing of every season. Strange to tell, it wasn’t in English; they couldn’t say what language it was, only that the shape of the words fit so differently into their mouths that they felt their voices shift in deference to it. Their mother told them that her parents had thought it was Welsh, until the day a Levantine woodworker staying with the family had said it sounded to her like Arabic, but a dialect she’d never heard. Either it was older than her, or from a place she’d never travelled (“or,” their mother said, ruefully, “my accent was too atrocious to understand and she was too polite to say so”).