Editor’s Note: This story features very challenging and profane language. _____________ Damn, Becky. Damn. “What writing chops,” as Professor Grafton would say. To be fair, I expected as much. But brah!—I never pegged you as one for sci-fi or alt reality. Wild. Really. I love that about you. Your first sentence gripped me so hard I felt your nails cutting into my skin: “Remember the names of the places but use the compass to be sure. Both.” She spoke as she always spoke to Ilhan, with quiet authority, but this time with a catch of frustration in her voice. Young people don’t know where they are going anymore, Wafa thought as she spoke. Not without their machines. “We are here, close to the river,” she pointed to a dot of her making. She slid her calloused finger slowly across the wrinkled map in a straight line. “You are making your way to the sea.” So…atmospheric and fraught, Becky. OK, let’s get this party started: I’m following the Grafton peer-review checklist. There is no real plot—and I don’t mean that critically since I am hooked because I am still working hard to piece together what’s happening here. And you’re good. You drop your hints with the pacing of a striptease act. … Well, forgive me. Got distracted there for a second. (Yes, I’ll grow up if I must.) But there you are, inches away from me, just across this pretentious mahogany seminar table locked in, holding your pencil in that lovely hand of yours as you comment on someone else’s story—could it be mine?—in the middle of this blue-blooded book-lined seminar room, in the middle of this red-brick gated ammonium-nitrate-nourished green quad…here we are, aren’t we? But Grafton wants us to do this response in his fucking boomer-OCD way, and who am I not to follow the rules?? (Ha! Don’t answer that!) Now I gotta “state the setting, main characters, plot etc.” as if I were a complete fucking retard. But—lowkey—the plot is subtle. How would I put it? The story takes place in the home of Ilhan (a woman in her thirties) who lives with her mother Wafa and her two daughters (ages 10 and 12) and close to her sister Hagar. The family is Muslim (hijab, haj, right?) and it’s not clear immediately, but they live somewhere in the Middle East (cypress trees, couscous) in an alt reality of the not-too-distant future. While her husband (we never learn his name) is on a pilgrimage to Mecca, the three women plan a journey of escape for the sake of the girls. Hagar packs the clothing for the four of them. Ilhan prepares the food. They will travel light, mostly by car. They will leave most of their belongings behind. Wafa, already elderly, refuses to slow them down, refuses to leave her land. She will look after their possessions. Or she will sell them if she needs to. Or, as Hagar worries aloud at one point, Ilhan’s husband will kill their mother. They will leave Hagar’s phone for Wafa, turned off for now, hidden. Maybe Wafa will be able to use it in a few months or sell it. What they are escaping is a mystery that slowly unravels. This grabbed me: Ilhan’s phone will be closed so he cannot track them. She cannot rely on her phone for directions. So, over the past month, Wafa has transmitted her knowledge to Ilhan. This land has always been Wafa’s most prized possession, imprinted in her memory, from the terraced olive groves to the cinderblock apartment buildings. The children think it is theirs, but they will never know it like she knows it. I like the clip of your sentences here, Becky. “You want to get to the old highway 71, then look for Shunem where there should still be a functioning petrol station and then get to Sinwar Aljibali, and then to Wadi Arafat…then go onto Hudaybiyya or the old Route 65. If you see any old signs, the ones in Hebrew—you remember your Hebrew, right—then look for Pardes Hana, and Hadera,…you were in Hadera once…it’s now called Nasrallah … but not all the signs have been uprooted yet or painted over.” Wafa looked into her daughter’s eyes as she recited, Sinwar Aljibali to Wadi Arafat onto Hudaybiyya to Nasrallah. Like a prayer, Ilhan repeated the directions under her breath. Sinwar Alibali, to Wadi Arafat, to Hudaybiyya, to Nasrallah. You are moving from the river to the sea, Wafa said to her. From the river to the sea, Ilhan responded. That’s when the reader gets it if he hadn’t already (I had!): we are in Israel or former Israel. Israel is gone. Vamos. But that’s just an aside. That’s just backdrop. No tired references to massacred Jews or destroyed synagogues or libraries. The point is, we are well past whatever upheaval created this new reality. We are in Palestine and no mention of Jews. (I admit: refreshing, dude!) …Trump, his swagger and the humiliations he afflicted on them are a distant memory by at least twenty years I would say. All this is making me wonder, do you have the authority to talk about Muslim women, Becky? I’m thinking that that is THE question that will consume our class convo next week. But, anyway, this is the plot, roughly speaking. Fallacy of the paraphrase, right? Sorry if I’m mangling your art. Do we need these structures and systems organizing our fucking thoughts for us? Can we not communicate outside all the “institutional structures,” the university’s prudish chaperoning? I’m sure you find my pontification irresistible (joke)… Actually, when I speak in class, I look for your reaction most of all. And I loved that we both had so much to say about the story about the A&P. For a flash I was Sammy, and you were one of those girls in her bathing suit, you were Queenie, moving around the grocery store your straps fallen from your shoulder…That’s just a little glimpse into my head. TMI? But I WAS listening to you, trust me.…You were thinking out loud and said something like it was easy for Sammy to rebel against the grown-ups…it’s practically a joke, and Grafton pushed back on this and said it might seem like that from our point of view but that it was a big deal for Sammy …and I saw that you didn’t buy what he was saying and God, you are Queenie, I thought then….But now that I think about it, sitting here…no you aren’t… There was a time I really wanted you. I said to myself, so what if I fucked her suite mate? I can still go for her. Megan hates your guts. (That isn’t news to you.) Maybe she even knows that you are the OG for me. First in freshman seminar, also with Grafton. Do you remember? I knew you’d take him again. In a sense, it all led to this moment. But I digress. Grafton wants to know if and how you create suspense. How you get your reader to continue reading. Dude. Every line has me gripped…like this scene: “Now,” Hagar told Ilhan, handing her the scissors. Ilhan draped a patterned tablecloth around her sister’s neck and began to cut her sister’s thick, ebony hair. But she only cut the ends before waves of emotion gushed from her and unsteadied her hand. She sobbed. Hagar turned around and took the scissors tenderly out of Ilhan’s hand. And then began grabbing pieces of her hair quite randomly—she had no mirror before her—and cut long strands off from close to her scalp. She cut with a happy abandon, and she smiled at her sister as she did it and made funny faces, trying to make her laugh as she would sometimes do when they were little girls. And Ilhan did laugh. Wafa interrupted them. She demanded the scissors be returned to Ilhan. “You must look like a man not a clown,” she said. Hagar returned the scissors to Ilhan, who proceeded to give her a masculine haircut. Women are permitted to drive, but behind the wheel they attract far more attention than men. What’s next on the Grafton checklist? Of course: Freytag’s Pyramid: exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, denouement. So, we’re here at the beginning of “rising action,” but the way I see it, you screw with the pyramid. The exposition is there, so is the “rising action”…but it’s only toward the end that we get a true climax…I love to imagine you reading that word, climax… Stream of consciousness: After that class…when was that, two weeks ago, the day we read Hemingway’s “Snows of Kilimanjaro”? I waited in the stairwell for you to come out, but you never did. I figured you must have stayed to talk to Grafton. So I waited longer. Then I gave up. What were you guys doing in there for so long? More stream of consciousness: A few weeks ago, we discussed how we identify with certain characters in a story—do you remember that?—and I don’t know if you imagine yourself as Ilhan, but I imagine myself as the dead husband that she pines for, the good man. Ahmed. We don’t know how he died. We know only a little more about her current husband who is only referred to as “he.” But me? I am Ahmed. (I share this in case it helps to know how this “lit boy” reader of yours took this in). You know how your mind wanders when you read something? So, mine mostly didn’t. But. But at some point, I thought about seeing you in the library Tuesday night. I’ll admit, you were a vision leaning on your hand, so your cheek and lips sat plumped up, the smooth skin of your face lit up by the glow of your screen. You were so locked in, which is why I didn’t say hello. Full confession here: full-on male gaze from where I sat down at that table near the elevator and—no joke—…. Do you remember seeing me? I pretended to be reading when I saw you looking up, but I hadn’t been. That is the truth that is the truth…as you are apparently so enamored with Truth. And this is absolute and total free association of the kind Grafton probably wasn’t thinking about when he told us to free-associate: that night when I was with Megan next door in your suite—when we crossed paths in the hall—I couldn’t stop thinking, Can she hear us? Is she getting off on hearing us? Am I getting off on imagining you getting off on hearing us? And one more thought. This time something even more truthful …but maybe farther afield, but maybe on point… All semester I have wanted you to join us…but the others are so intense. Megan especially. They need to feel the solidarity, the brotherhood and, at first, I didn’t get why you couldn’t join. Ahh, yes, brutal honesty. Let me rephrase: why they refused to let you join. But some of those guys, Maddie, Leo…their heads are so IN IT and you gotta admire them for it. They feel hard for what those people are going through. They are committed. I mean, I’m committed, but they are really fucking committed. But I sit with them in the quad, and then I remember how much more intensely I really feel for them…it’s like the effects of a drug even though it’s pure…emotion, because then I feel a kind of closeness—the cause coursing through my veins. Man, where else do I have that in my life?? I wanted to be there, and I wanted to be there with you for ultimate connectivity. And it shocked me when Megan said that you don’t feel it. She hated to be the one to have to tell me that your heart is stone, but it is, she said. But…this person you’re talking about has a big heart, I said about you. I loved the argument you had with Prof. G. on Calvino’s “The Watcher.” The point of the story undermines itself, you argued. Because something is imperfect you don’t just throw it out, you don’t just destroy it. I hadn’t read it properly before I read it through your baby blues. When was that? Last Wednesday? And I was smitten again. I was re-smitten. Man, I’ve been back and forth on you in my head. I’m focusing again. How can we forget Grafton’s obsession with POV? In your case, I would say omniscient but with a leaning into the mentality of the women, absorbing their language etc.…I feel it especially here toward the end, the bloody meat of the story (which we will have to discuss, dude): He had mentioned it last year, but in May, he had fallen seriously ill, and he forgot about it. Then, two months ago, he brought it up again. His voice was sugary when he first spoke to Ilhan about it. He said, the girls will have the summer to recuperate, Inshallah. They will do both of them at once as soon as school ends. He spoke the words as if he were only suggesting this. The older girl was not his biological daughter, only the younger daughter was. If they have it early enough, the girls are always back in school by the fall. Ilhan felt a wave of intense nausea that day; but in front of him, she knew to be casual about it. Once he left the room, she rushed to the bathroom and vomited. Following the War of Redemption, Ilhan’s older sisters, Mona and Hagar, had been submitted to it as teenagers, but then her father had fallen sick and died, and her mother protected Ilhan from the savagery. Mona, Ilhan’s oldest sister, left. Hagar never recovered properly, never married. When he raised it a second time, she pushed back. “This has never been our people’s practice,” she said. “Now it is our practice,” he replied with force. Ilhan sought Hagar out the next day at the market and told her what he wanted for the girls, and Hagar shook her head slowly and wore a look of someone disappointed by the unpleasant weather. “If he insists, you and the girls will have to leave.” She stated these words plainly, but with the weight of a mountain. “I will go with you.” Soon it would be April, and the end of the school year continued to approach. He began to make plans. Ilhan approached him once more, this time like a servant might, with a teacup of resistance; any more—let alone a fight—and he would begin to suspect something, grow paranoid. When he dismissed her medical concerns, she signaled to him that she accepted his decision. She began to plan their escape with Hagar and her mother. Dude. Dude, what are they doing to these girls?? What sick Islamophobic so-implied mutilation that you know fuck-all about are you ascribing to these characters? Is this what you’re going to let people in class read …and with your name on it? You are one crazy brave fuck. Or just crazy. More on that later, dude. Does the story have a Chekhovian pistol, Grafton wants to know. Maybe the scroll of hide? You mention it on page 1 as strewn amid other objects and tools on the counter. Toward the end we see the scroll again. Wafa checks her watch and announces in her soft and pious way that there is still time to reinforce the women’s shoes before they wake up the girls for the journey. She had examined their sneakers the day before and realized they were in bad shape and there was no time or money to buy new ones. She had learned how to repair shoes from her father. She insisted. It will be her last expression of maternal love to her daughters and granddaughters before they say goodbye. Wafa unscrolled the hide, scuffed and torn but still sturdy and malleable. It was neatly striped with ancient inky Hebrew letters. She put two books on either side of it to hold it in place. She placed Ilhan’s shoes on the hide and traced them with a pencil and then, with scissors, cut out the hourglass shape for one shoe and then did the same for the other. As she did this, the women continued to chat sparingly, cook, pack. She did the same with Hagar’s sneakers. Carefully, Wafa brushed a coating of glue evenly over the Hebrew letters of each piece of hide, turned each one over and then carefully fit each one into its corresponding shoe. In the same way, she reinforced the inside soles of the girls’ sneakers. Once she was done, she ran her fingers along the edge of each new inner sole so that each hide was centered and secure. Ilhan slipped hers on, laced them up, and walked a few paces. “Shukran Ommi,” she said. Thank you, mother. They hugged tightly before Wafa released her. Dude: did Chekhov’s pistol just detonate like a fucking silent ballistic missile? What Talmudic voodoo is going on here, I asked myself when I read this para. What kabbalistic machinations is this chick up to?? A few nights ago…you know the night…when shit started to go down between you and Megan, I was in the bathroom, I’m not sure if you know that. I didn’t hear anything from inside the bathroom and when I came out, I just saw her grab her stuff and just take off and everyone looked shocked and looked at me to react…and when I said, What the fuck just happened?…they said Megan needs you, man, just go, and so I just went after her. That’s what people expected me to do. And when I sat with her, and she calmed down she told me that you pressed her and the others to talk, “to have a conversation” with you, and she doesn’t want to fucking engage with you, she doesn’t owe you a conversation, and just because she is your suite mate she doesn’t owe you her friendship or Maddie’s friendship or Leo’s goddamn friendship. That it was on them if they don’t want to talk to you. And somehow things escalated from there, I guess? And you called her a bitch and she said she didn’t call you this but said “at least I’m not a Zio bitch cunt.” And I know the truth: yes, she kept repeating it. And people tried to calm her down and said don’t call her that Megan, but she was like, “I’m not calling her that, all I am saying is that ‘at least I’m not a Zio bitch cunt.’” And, according to Leo, she said it loud and like a robot, each word like a switchblade. At. Least. I’m. Not. A. Zio. Bitch. Cunt. What can I say? I won’t gaslight you. She didn’t call you that, per se, but, in a sense, she did call you that. The climax as I see it: I wanted this. I fought for this, Ilhan, Wafa said rubbing her eyes as if trying to restore her vision. Frustration and guilt clawed at her voice. I did too, Ilhan said with an eruption of anger. Not just you. We all did. But Wafa insisted. “I have to tell the truth, Ilhan. I have to say it out loud before you go. It must be in your ears before you leave me.” And then her words became impious and inelegant. Ilhan never heard her mother speak like this…with naked control. She said, “I lived for many, many years in a shitty apartment with angry, violent men and it was a hardship to visit my family because of the checkpoints. And yes, I wanted what I wanted, what they wanted. And yes, we had our rapture. But who is paying the price? Again, I am in a shitty apartment with a violent man. Again. And now, I must say goodbye to you and to my granddaughters forever.” She wasn’t emotional. She didn’t cry. She smiled because she heard the truth and because her daughters heard the truth. And then, quite suddenly, Hagar swung her fist into her mother’s smiling face and Wafa’s head slammed into the wall and she lost her footing, but Ilhan overcame her shock and caught her and cradled her in her arms. But after a moment her mother shook her off and held herself up, leaning against the wall. Hagar: “When he gets back, tell them him they took us all. You don’t know where. You don’t know who. Maybe Jews. They didn’t want an old hag.” And the old woman looked up and smiled at Hagar and nodded her head. And now I’m thinking that you don’t know how to fucking lay off, Becky. You can’t fucking let things go. Because I see what you’re doing here. But this is NOT the truth: Ilhan, and Hagar, and Wafa DON’T EXIST, DUDE. They are fiction. Figments of your fucked-up imagination. Do you get it? The opposite of truth. And now that I process all of this, I have to wonder about what Megan said. I have to wonder if you’re Islamophobic. If you’re a Racist, Zio, Bitch, Cunt. I’m not saying you are this. But I have to wonder if this is the truth. We want to hear your thoughts about this article. Click here to send a letter to the editor. 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