Home Fire

by Kamila Shamsie

“I’m driving at the fact that habits of secrecy are damaging things,” Hira said in her most professorial voice. “And they underestimate other people’s willingness to accept the complicated truths of your life.”

Everything else you can live around, but not death. Death you have to live through.”

Once you know, you’ll have to think about what it means to be that man’s son. Maybe it’s easier never to think about him.”

But now he remained where he was, watching all the lives within their narrow frames slide past on the tracks in the darkness, allowing the wound to fester so that tomorrow he could tell Farooq about it and receive the antiseptic of his new friend’s indignation.

He didn’t know how to break out of these currents of history, how to shake free of the demons he had attached to his own heels.

Grief changed its shape to fit your contours—enveloping you as a second skin you eventually learned to slip into and resume your life.

struck with the angel of death, who wanted an unpassable river to separate the living from the dead; grief the bridge that would allow the dead to flit among the living, their footsteps overhead, their laughter around the corner, their posture recognizable in the bodies of strangers you would follow down the street, willing them never to turn around. Grief was what you owed the dead for the necessary crime of living on without them.

Well, you obviously don’t love anyone very much if your love is contingent on them always staying the same.”

Our dead watch over us, I know that. They’re trying to speak to me today, to tell me what I can do for you.”