A Place for Us

by Fatima Farheen Mirza

Her lit window and his own dark beside it. One summer they had pushed out their screens and connected their rooms by a string attached to Styrofoam cups at each end. Hadia assured him she knew what she was doing. She had made one in school. He wasn’t sure if he could hear her voice humming along the string and filling the cup, or carried through the air, but he didn’t tell her this.

A knock at the door. Even if she had not been waiting for him, she would have known it was Amar, always hesitant at first tap, a brief pause, and then two louder taps. Huda let him in and Hadia overheard Huda thank Amar in the reserved way she spoke to those she was unfamiliar with.

He twisted his mouth and pushed his tongue against the inside of his cheek, the way he so often did when he was lying or was nervous, completely unaware of his habit, and this instantly endeared him to Hadia. It was him. Her brother.

Never had she looked at her daughter with as much awe as when Hadia stepped from the hotel room, looking both mature and ready for this step and also like that hesitant, wide-eyed girl she had dropped off on the first day of kindergarten.

They were told not to question the way God worked, not to think too much into it. That it was a mystery. And she was happy to think of it as such. She pictured a dark sky with the fog in front of it, how her mother had once explained it to her: we don’t have to see past the fog to know there are stars.

A heavier silence ensued, both now painfully aware they still shared a language they should have long since forgotten.