When We Were Sisters: A Novel

by Fatimah Asghar

The sky, who sees everything, looks down at him. And the moon, who is full, shines her milky dress on his dead body, bedded by the cement street.

What no one will ever understand is that the world belongs to orphans, everything becomes our mother.

We want softness, we say and turn away from the field of sunflowers that lush their yellow. Power, we say and a volcano explodes. Strength, and the trees root in their trunks. Touch, and the sand clings to our feet. Allah has forgotten me, I whisper in my bunk, alone, and I don’t notice the moon shining her light on my pillow, reaching.

Our city is full of Used-to-Bes, of people who came from somewhere else, whose degrees don’t matter here, who check out groceries and pump gas and return to their single room in a rented apartment, to a framed photo of them in their cap and gown holding a degree above their bed. Tiffany doesn’t talk to us, she just shuffles along quietly, and when we’re in the kitchen together she’s so still that my breath feels rude.

I turn, and there she is: Aisha, the slight dimple by her lip dancing, the streetlight flickering in her eyes. Suddenly, everything is laughing at me. The sidewalk, the trees in their cement cages, the leaves, the mailboxes along the doors. Everything is laughing. A thousand laughs that wrap around me, that start to suffocate all of them. And there’s Aisha, standing in the middle of it all, her laugh the conductor at the symphony of laughs, her laugh making a magnifying glass of my emptiness, her laugh that, when held to the light, bursts my body to flame.