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1
"I FEEL NOTHING," Aisha thought, letting go of the
ropes
as her swing approached its maximum height. “I touch nothing.”
But she didn’t launch into flight. She didn’t even fall
to the ground. Instead, she remained firmly attached to the wooden board as it
swung backwards between the two pine trees and over the patch of wildflowers,
dandelions and forget-me-nots. Holding her arms straight into the air outside of
the ropes, her legs tightly tucked underneath the board and bare feet touching
the rough wood, Aisha closed her eyes until she swung upwards again.
“I touch nothing. I feel nothing,” she whispered,
relaxing her legs into free flight and releasing her eyes to the blue of the
sky. She let her mouth open wide and breathed in as deeply as possible, into
the pain in her stomach, into the tingling in her fingertips. She flew higher
and higher, then down again, back towards the patch of dandelions in front of her
grandmother’s house. Aisha closed her eyes to not see the flowers’ approach,
working her legs to get more speed. At the top of the reverse trajectory, she
shuddered from a vivid premonition of her grandmother’s shrill voice recalling
her back to the world of afternoon chores.
“Hands off! No more touching!” Aisha swallowed the words
as she dissected the warm, fragrant air, accelerating full speed ahead into the
ground and then back up into the light blue, cloudless sky that could not hold
her.
2
In the middle of the night, Aisha woke with
uncomfortable sensations. Her mouth was completely dry, her lips cracked and
peeling. She lay in bed for a few minutes, biting her lips and tongue to induce
salivation, hoping the frightening, unfamiliar sensation would go away on its
own. But the thirst lived in her tearless, itching eyes, her throat spasmed
from dehydration, and her stomach ached for water. Moving gingerly, like a
snail coming out of her shell, aware that even the slightest noise would alert
her grandmother, wheezing uncomfortably in her high and narrow bed by the door,
Aisha pushed the heavy pressed cotton wool blanket to the foot of the bed and
moved her feet to the floor. When she stood up, the old wooden floorboards
creaked slightly underneath their linoleum covering, and her grandmother’s
obstructed breathing turned into a light cough. Aisha froze in mid-movement,
her body waiting for a thundering command from that corner, but none came, and
the cough resolved into a deep snore.
Holding her breath, so as not to disturb the stillness
of the air, Aisha crept by her grandmother’s bed and paused for a moment in
front of the heavy wooden door, her hand getting used to the shape of the metal
handle. When her hand grew sufficiently steady, she silently pushed the door
open a few inches, and slipped through the narrow slit onto the terrace. Only
after closing the door tightly behind her, she breathed again, experiencing
with sharp pleasure the coolness of the air, the floor, and every surface she
tried not to touch.
The large water bucket she replenished every evening
stood on a wooden base by the front door. Aisha grabbed the metal dipper
hanging on the wall above the bucket and filled it to the rim with the ice-cold
spring water. She paused for a moment before drinking it, as if getting ready
to do something dangerous, explosive. Then she drank it all in one long gulp,
leaning over the bucket and letting half of the burning liquid stream down her
chin and back where it came from, wetting her nightgown and the floor around
her. The water seemed to set her body on fire, the blaze spreading from her
tongue to throat and the stomach. It reached inside every cell, from her hair
down to her toenails, without satisfying the underlying thirst, leaving Aisha
only with desire for more, much more.
Aisha whispered into the water, filling the dipper the
second time and emptying it past her mouth, past her arms and breasts, past her
belly, past her legs, back into the bucket. She reached for the water with her
tongue, stretching out her lips as wide as she could, but the dipper was empty
again. She filled it twice more, emptying it slower and slower each time, but
to no avail. The water would not reach inside, would not touch her. The sight
and sound of its flow only increased her thirst.
“What are you doing out there?” croaked her grandmother
from behind the tightly shut door, her voice hoarse from sleep, her words
accented by the missing dentures. “Go back to bed!”
3
He moved on top of her in the ashen dusk of their
candlelit bedroom. He moved without pause, his penis reaching deep inside her
small, muscular body, his lips patiently teasing the sensitive skin around the
nipple of her left breast. Aisha trembled from the effort not to flex a single
muscle, not to shift, stir, or change anything, to remain completely in tune
with his movement. She was going to come … she was going to come … and then it
was gone. She could never tell exactly what happened, an irregular flicker of
the candle, a barking of one of the neighbor’s dogs, a car alarm going off
somewhere down the street, an imperceptible tremor somewhere deep in the folds
of the bedrock beneath them, a fierce meteor shower on the surface of a distant
moon. What was it that suddenly turned desire into revulsion, intimacy into
invasion, the gentleness of her husband’s arms into an unbearable, suffocating
grip?
“Stop,” she said, suddenly struggling against him. “Stop
it. Don’t touch me.”
Having been married for ten-something years, Aisha knew
that she had to exercise patience as her husband, who had been steered by the
inertia of the rhythmical and titillating movement, did not, could not
instantaneously react to the change in her attitude.
“Patience,” she thought the word painfully, feeling
angry before the end of the second syllable.
“I can’t! I can’t do it!” yelled Aisha, now struggling,
pushing his heavy, perspiring body with her hands and knees. Moving erratically
and violently, she somehow scrambled out of the bed, turning over the
nightstand with the alarm clock, a glass of water, and the candle with it, ran
out into the hall, down the stairs, out of the front door, into the blind
little alley that stared at her naked body with its hundred double-pane
windows. She saw immediately — it was a trap, a cage, a grave, a coffin, with
no air to breathe and no space to be in. She spread her arms out, trying to
feel the air reach her lungs, and ran, nude as she was, down the street into
the blackness.
4
The orchestra collapsed to the sound of a single flute,
and the woman on stage sang. Sitting in row K on the far left side of the
balcony, Aisha couldn’t see the woman’s face or make out a single word of the
foreign language, yet the sound and shape of the singer captured Aisha’s full
attention. The woman, dressed in a solemn black dress, stood in the center of
the stage moving slightly toward the orchestra, her slow and rhythmical
progress disconnected from the emotional restlessness of the sound produced by
her body. The harder Aisha tried to decipher the movements of the woman on stage,
the more music seemed to exist without source, everywhere in the great faceless
hall at the same time. Having no beginning and no end, it dissipated in the air
— it was air, and it encompassed Aisha within its own waves and particles.
Aisha breathed in and, for a moment, parted with the awareness of self.
5
On her way home from work, Aisha drove by her favorite
French bakery only to find the place closed, a handwritten note posted on the
door: “We’re closed from July 17 until August 21. We appreciate your business
and wish you a pleasant summer.” Aisha stood for a moment in front of the shut
door, staring at the white piece of paper with its blue curves of ink.
“I will bake bread myself!” The decision came suddenly.
Aisha drove home, parked in the driveway, and went up
the stairs enjoying the tapping sound her heels made against the concrete. She
unlocked the front door, picked up the mail that had been pushed through the
slot on the door, walked down the hall into the kitchen, slipping out of her
shoes on the way and dropped the envelopes and the keys on the little ledge
that demarcated the kitchen. Only then did she notice that the house was
unusually quiet and empty. No fruit bowl sat on the kitchen table. The spice
rack and microwave were gone from the counter by the stove, glassware and all
the dishes from behind the glass doors of the cabinets around the sink. The
wine rack, toaster oven, and the breadbox were also missing.
Feeling disoriented in the strangely spacious kitchen,
Aisha pulled out a chair and sat down in front of the breakfast table. Moving
mechanically, she pulled out each of the drawers underneath the counter, one by
one. In one of them, she found the glaring absence of her silverware and
spatulas, while in the other lay an old, greasy cookbook she had inherited from
her grandmother. She flipped the pages until her eyes stopped on a simple
French bread recipe. It called for flour and yeast. Sugar, salt, and an egg.
Cornmeal and butter to grease the baking sheet. Aisha looked around the kitchen
again. It was still empty.
6
At 32, Aisha started to lose weight uncontrollably. She
lost 20 pounds in three months, without changing her diet or exercise routine.
“I think I have worms,” she told her friend.
7
Aisha had passed these bushes every day on her morning
run down the ocean shore. The blackberry bushes that separated the path from
the highway traffic and also provided natural nourishment for the native birds.
Like the blackberry bushes that had grown in her grandmother’s garden. The berries
were ripe today. Most of them had already fallen to the ground or were eaten by
pigeons; the ones that remained were soft and sugary. Aisha stopped to taste
one and continued to pick every one she could reach.
“Those might not be the cleanest,” noticed an older
gentleman, without breaking his pace as he ran past her.
They were not. But Aisha couldn’t stop. She climbed
deeper and deeper into the bushes, thorns piercing her skin. It was good to
feel the familiar pain; it was good to taste the velvety skins of the berries,
to crunch the seeds between her teeth, to absorb the tangy, flowery juice.
Aisha could almost feel the weight of the large wicker basket on her arm,
almost hear the loud, coarse voice of her grandmother. “What are you doing
there? Fill the basket, not your stomach!”
Aisha discerned that almost-but-never-ever-again quality
in every berry and ate more and more until the moment when she could not. She
was full. Moving slowly and carefully, she disentangled herself from the
branches. She was surprised by the sight of her fingers, painted blue by the
juice, and her arms and legs badly scratched and bleeding in several places. It
was strange to think that she could hurt herself to the point of bleeding
without noticing it.
“Do you need help?” a middle-aged runner asked, stopping
in her tracks at the sight of Aisha standing perplexed and disoriented in the
middle of the busy path.
“I’ll be alright,” said Aisha, “I’ve just swallowed my
childhood.”
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