A Place for Us

by Fatima Farheen Mirza

He seemed to slouch and she realized that his confidence had left him, as though confidence were a physical feature as much a part of him as his winning half-smile.

It moves through the branches of the bougainvillea and all the leaves quiver like clapping hands, their rustle a round of applause.

Do you wake up in the middle of the night after a bad dream and find that you cannot remember it, but you can taste having had it?

IT IS COOL inside the kitchen, and the light too is cool, the sun having moved its way over the house.

Amar was their son. Even the word son felt like something shiny and golden to her, like the actual sun that reigned over their days.

It did not matter that she was his mother. What she could ever hope to know of him was just a glimpse—like the beam of a lighthouse skipping out, only one stretch of waves visible at a time, the rest left in the unknowable dark.

This is a moment that lifts and becomes a memory even as it is happening, and she knows this will be the meadow she will try to return to, her son’s voice the sound she will try to recall.

Hadia had power in that moment and she had done nothing with it for her brother, had made no attempt to steer Amira back to him. Don’t tell, he’d ask her, and what did she do but tell, and tell, and the only thing she kept from telling was her part.