Mustafa Alismail
Rania gave it to me a few months ago. “I’ll take you there one day,” she
said, “we’ll go all the way to the tip and take a picture with all of Paris
behind us.”
“I don’t think the elevator goes to the very top.”
She grinned in defiance, “We’ll climb the steel beams if we have to.
I’m getting that picture!”
I gaze back to the heavens and listen for whispers in the breeze;
as they stand now, things are calm around my neighborhood. As far
as being in a civil war goes, we’ve been fortunate. People forget that
fighting occurs in pockets. Not everyone is actually dying everywhere.
In some areas, life can even be described as normal—considering . . .
Light began to fill the sky, and off to school I went.
During the day, I wandered between Feynman’s universe and
Scheherazade’s tales, occasionally drifting back to check if the day was
done. The blackboard kept being filled and wiped clean, the person
in front of it switched a few times, and the air remained unchanged.
I was about to drift away from our round-shaped geography teacher
who continued to bellow at us from behind his bushy mustache when
a scrunched up piece of paper landed in my lap, immediately flowering
open:
ROOF.
5.
S
he was already there when I arrived. Snuck off somehow before I
asked to go to the restroom. The wind ruffled her dark hair as she
stared intently at her wristwatch. I made sure to reposition Sibawayh’s
Kitab (a copy that the school librarian has been searching for since the
sixties) which kept the roof ’s door unlocked.
“Nine minutes.”
“Your watch is always four minutes ahead.”
“Doesn’t matter, looked at it before.” She lifted her head to meet my
eyes, a look of mock-disappointment in hers. “Nine minutes. You’re
getting worse.”
“Didn’t kill you to wait.”
“I’ll be the judge of that. Give me.”
From my backpack, I pulled out both the cigarettes as well as the
treasure Rania wanted back: a very used copy of Awlad Haretna that she
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