The Arsonists' City

by Hala Alyan

That well says it all, the decades of a marriage moored to umbrage and disagreements but also a shared history, hard and glinting, embroidering the years like a snake’s backbone.

“People don’t need much of a reason to hate each other. We’re programmed to blame others for our unhappiness.

Beirut was where her life had cracked like a thin ankle, neatly splitting into before and after. But the past remains the past, Beirut the thumbtack that holds it together.

And yet she believed her mother; she always did. Every embellishment, every lie about the world or their family, her mother worked on them like prayers, turned over and over like polished river stones in her mouth, the tasting rendering them a truth.

The news is simply too much, an evening saturated to the point of collapse with its kissing and Freckles and music and death, and she can feel her hands begin to shake. It’s a strangely familiar feeling, and she finally locates it: childbirth. The digging in, the body splitting in two, the terrible work to do and no other body to do it.

But it is a small mercy, how time distills what we know, how it fictionalizes it.