Emtithal Mahmoud - Sisters’ Entrance

the girl with
ribbons in her hair People Like Us Memories of my childhood live between the rings of sand around my ankles and the desert heat in my lungs. I still believe that nothing washes worry from tired skin better than the Nile and my grandmas hands. Every day I go to school with the weight of dead neighbors on my shoulders. The first time I saw bomb smoke, it didnt wind and billow like the heat from our kitchen hearth. It forced itself on the Darfur sky, smothering the sun with tears that it stole from our bodies.

The worst thing about genocide isnt the murder, the politics, the hunger, the government-paid soldiers
that chase you across borders and into camps. Its the silence. For three months, they closed the schools down because people like us are an eyesore. The first month, we took it. The second, we waited. The third month, we met underneath the date palm trees, drinking up every second our teachers gave us, turning fruit pits into fractions.

On the last day, they came with a message Put them in their place. We didnt stand a chance. Flesh was never meant to dance with silver bullets. So we prayed for the sun to come and melt daggers from our backs. Lifted our voices up to God until the clouds were spent for weeping and the sand beneath our toes echoed with the song of every soul that ever walked before us. I hid underneath the bed that day with four other people.

Twelve years later and I cant help but wonder where my cousins hid when the soldiers torched the houses, threw the bodies in the wells. If the weapons didnt get you, the poison would. Sometimes, they didnt want to use bullets because it would cost them more than we did. Ive seen sixteen ways to stop a heart. When you build nations on someones bones what sense does it make to break them? In one day, my mother choked on rifle smoke, my father washed the blood from his face, my uncles carried half the bodies to the hospital, the rest to the grave. We watched.

For every funeral we planned there were sixty we couldnt. Half the sand in the Sahara tastes a lot like powdered bone. When the soldiers came, our blood on their ankles, I remember their laces, scarlet footprints on the floor. I remember waking to the sound of hushed voices in the night etched with the kind of sorrow that turns even the loudest dreams to ash. Our parents came home with broken collarbones and the taste of fear carved into their skin. It was impossible to believe in anything.

Fear is the coldest thing in the desert, and it burns you bows you down to half your height and owns you. And no one hears you, because what could grow in the desert anyway? August

Remorse is my grandmothers pear tree, me bent over a tin pail washing dishes in the sun of our final moments. The water drawn from a drying well by a niece I did not know. The porcelain scraping sand against the pail, eroding like my family. Like the strained conversation between my mother sitting across from the woman she hadnt seen in five years Me, the daughter she hadnt seen in one. Sisters Entrance Ms.

Amal tried to teach us about love in Sunday school. She said: God is a poet. He opened up the sky, spilled His word across our skin, and called it revelation. This aging giant, with a soft spot for affection, made you and me and a soul mate for every one of us as long as we wait. We couldnt. Restless hands clasped under classroom tables.

Obsidian eyes locked across prayer aisles as we slowly opened our minds to the gravity of one another. Passion is a paradox in the house of God; a weightless anchoring that draws you closer to your Creator and makes you fear the heart he gave you. You confuse enchantment with doubt, desire with insubordination, stranger to the weight of it all. Thats when they started separating us: girls side, boys side and then by age, they introduced us to the Sisters Entrance. Sesame Candy

Remember the summer we planted arugula in the sidewalk garden the same year the boys covered their heads in ash the same year we didnt know anyone new the same year grandpa called all of us wicked? I go back there sometimes, next to the dogwood tree and see the place where our garden used to grow the magnolia, the figs I take the seeds home with me I keep them in a desk drawer waiting for a drier year, or a rainy one, or a reason I keep hoping that Ill turn away and look back and see those girls playing again, the ones we used to be before the war. Afternoon Naps in the House of God I lay my head on cushions so clean they smell like piety, back propped against a wall so firm it sticks out like doubt.

Loose Threads

Our teachers cousin planned her wedding for the week after Ramadan. We filled the hall with decorations, sequins spilling from the closet in the corner. Our veils unfurled. Hooded sisters opening their pages to one another. A quick break to pray Maghreb a whole room full of laughs. Our belly dance shoes at the door lest the rugs start to bruise from our footsteps.

Shoulder to shoulder, wrist to wrist, we bore all. Thats the secret to the sisters side: no drama, no apologies no worries, no reservations, no sleeves.