Home Fire

by Kamila Shamsie

For girls, becoming women was inevitability; for boys, becoming men was ambition.

Grief manifested itself in ways that felt like anything but grief; grief obliterated all feelings but grief; grief made a twin wear the same shirt for days on end to preserve the morning on which the dead were still living; grief made a twin peel stars off the ceiling and lie in bed with glowing points adhered to fingertips; grief was bad-tempered, grief was kind; grief saw nothing but itself, grief saw every speck of pain in the world; grief spread its wings large like an eagle, grief huddled small like a porcupine; grief needed company, grief craved solitude; grief wanted to remember, wanted to forget; grief raged, grief whimpered; grief made time compress and contract; grief tasted like hunger, felt like numbness, sounded like silence; grief tasted like bile, felt like blades, sounded like all the noise of the world. Grief was a shapeshifter, and invisible too; grief could be captured as a reflection in a twin’s eye. Grief heard its death sentence the morning you both woke up and one was singing and the other caught the song.

Grief was what you owed the dead for the necessary crime of living on without them.

‘Do you believe in heaven and hell?’ ‘Only as parables. A god of mercy wouldn’t condemn any of his creation to eternal suffering.’

There was never anything to be gained from pettiness.