A Place for Us

by Fatima Farheen Mirza

Her voice is so sad it makes him want to touch her, it seems wholly unbelievable that they are not allowed to touch one another, that he cannot even offer an embrace to comfort her. How could something so simple, for the sake of solace in a time like this, be a sin?

She touches her dry bottom lip and thinks of how odd it is to experience a secret loss. A loss without a name. The loss of a potential version of her life. Of what she never had, and now never will.

Where did they come from, her children? And how did they arrive already themselves, and unlike anyone else?

What use was a life lived out of fear of hellfire and nothing else?

It is not that we thought our way was better. It was that we did not know another way.