If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English

by Noor Naga

I watched his automatic fingers and saw with my bedroom eye the cigarette sizzling out, headfirst, against a nipple.

In the months I knew him, I never saw evidence of his photography and believed him solely because he didn’t try to shoot me, as they all do, didn’t say the line they all say, preying on the conceit of women: Your bones were made for a lens.

If a man’s anger is lovelier than his loveliness, what kind of ending do you expect?

Is romance just a father who never carried you to bed carrying you, at last, to bed?

More than anything, what binds people here to one another here is the pointless struggle for quality of life. I’m learning slowly that having money and the option to leave frays any claim I have to this place. It turns out that to be clean in Egypt is just to be free of Egypt, to exercise the choice to stay or go elsewhere, which most of the population cannot do.