the bird in her chest. Its gentle tugging and sweet song. My shining smart one. With the bird, she can draw herself out. She can press her heels into the warm skin of the Earth, open her lips to the sun, and keep walking—ba haya be damned. She can make purchases or trade. She can even wander home the long way just to remind herself that another way is possible. One step at a time. Block by block. Like verbs forming at the tip of her pencil, lead pressed hard into the pages: ran, run, ran, run, run.
She placed her hand over a particularly ripe apricot when she saw them. Both stand nearly six feet tall, lean and limber as the cougars rumored to patrol the nearby slopes. How many years has it been since she has seen Taliban fighters in public? They’re even laughing as though one fighter has just told the other a joke. It’s not so much their ammo and weapons as their iron stares and meticulously draped turbans that give them away, black kohl ringing their eyes. Both men have bundled their turbans at the top, swooped them below their chins, then swaddled them across their faces, leaving only a slit for the eyes. She doesn’t dare look directly, but that tiny opening of fabric, that suggestion of identity makes her feel fused to its possibility. If given the chance to show only one thing about herself, what might she reveal?
The fruit vendor tisk-tisks, and Aaseya feels a slap across the top of her hand. So few vendors will sell to her—this un-right, supposedly Pashtun woman wandering the streets—and certainly not this vendor, not now that she’s lingered too long, coveting the apricot immodestly. She turns from the booth and crosses to the other side of the path. Here is Massoud. Maybe he will sell to her today. The naan smells so fresh she can almost taste it, and she’s drawn to its doughy, charcoaled musk. She reaches out to select one of the toasted loaves. Of all the people she suspects could have started the false rumor about her family, she has never considered Massoud. His daughters also went to Ms. Darrow’s language lessons. He even speaks to Aaseya sometimes if there’s no one in line, and he can busy himself with tasks as they whisper. But Massoud has spotted the fighters too, and as quickly as Aaseya approaches, he turns his back. She angles her body closer to his table display as if the loaves of bread might stand in for her family, but Massoud offers no indication that he’s going to help her.
From the corner of her eye, she sees the fighters make purchases several booths away. The apparent leader moves deftly, his hands bloodied at the knuckles. He selects cucumbers, dates, and a satchel of almonds. Only a portion of the exchange is visible through the screen of Aaseya’s burqa, and she shifts on her feet to bring a different view into focus. Money flashes—crisp, green US dollar bills—passed like poison seeds from the fighter to the vendor. Two-days walk from a US base, a handful of years since any occupation, and here—an Afghan vendor taking American dollars without pause? She hasn’t seen that currency since Ms. Darrow showed the schoolgirls her purse one day, all the womanly items it contained. Such a treasure then. Now, the image sends shrapnel through Aaseya’s chest. The money can mean only one thing: the Americans are coming, and if the Americans are coming, these Taliban will be waiting. Imar will become a mere backdrop to their battle with one inevitable outcome.
Aaseya wouldn’t believe she has even seen the bills if it weren’t for what happened next, the vendor casually making change and the little boy from outside her window rounding the corner at top speed, running into the fighters, and knocking the currency to the ground.
“Pest!” the leader kicks at the boy tangled in the fabric of his dishdasha. Several more bills drift through the air, and coins tumble from his pocket.
“You dog!” shouts the other fighter. Both grab for the money.
The boy stands and dusts himself off. In the scuffle, a fresh date has fallen from his pocket and rolled into the dirt. He reaches for it but not quickly enough.
“What’s this?” the Taliban fighter says mockingly. He swoops down and takes the date. “Looks like we have a thief here.”
The boy’s eyes widen.
Aaseya leans toward Massoud’s booth. “Do you see this? Friend, you have to do something.”
“Get,” Massoud says, barely a whisper. He won’t look at her.
“I’ll leave,” she says. “Just forget I was here. Go help that boy.”
“You get!” Massoud says again. “Get back and away. I refuse to let you endanger me, you dishonorable whore.”
The fighters look up, curious, and Aaseya’s breath escapes in a wave. She rushes toward the boy.
“There you are!” she says, grabbing his bony shoulders. She looks at the ground, addressing the fighter humbly. “I’m sorry. My son was only doing errands for me.”
“Muuh-uuuh,” the boy blathers. He empties his pockets—shell casings, old springs, a broken pair of sunglasses, a plastic button. The stash tumbles from his hands as he tries offering it to the fighters.
“Over here,” Massoud calls. “One free loaf for any servants of Allah, the most merciful, the most powerful.”
The fighters look up, and with that, Aaseya and the boy are gone, slipped behind the nearest booth, between the side flaps of tents, past the hookah stand and the butcher’s table, through a small huddle of goats, ducking under a display of headscarves, pushing through the line for the kebab vendor. And then it’s just Aaseya—the anonymity of her burqa, the stifling air, the bird in her chest beating its wings.
Where did the boy go? Disappeared again, as elusive as water. She knows he made it through the butcher’s station where they both slowed down to dodge hanging carcasses above the slippery ground. Maybe he hid amidst the scarves and keffiyehs.
Aaseya looks for him briefly, then hurries out the far end of the bazaar toward the dead end of town where the old schoolhouse looms like a bad memory. It hurts to think how many days she spent believing Ms. Darrow would come back, certain studying was not only her privilege but her right. Beyond the schoolhouse, an overflow block for vendors’ booths and tents opens up. It’s quiet now, more like a park or garden space for nomads. At the end of the park, the tight walls of mountains forming either side of the Imar valley meet in a U-shaped trap. Aaseya has heard that another village lies not too far beyond that ridgeline, though nobody she knows ever traverses the upper slopes. Imar has always been described as cut off, physical isolation a part of her daily existence for as long as she can remember. But before the upslope begins its steep climb, the loop road arcs along the base of the valley and back around the bazaar, paralleling the edge of town and wrapping round to the entrance of the village. She meets the road and walks steadily, occasionally checking over her shoulder to see if she is being followed.
Before long, the loop road ends and opens toward the wider road leading out of the valley. It’s a junction Aaseya knows well, occasionally allowing herself to walk this far from the apartment. From here, the view widens down the length of the valley and outward to the uninterrupted desert, and she can imagine how it will be when they first arrive—tails of dust, the reek of gasoline, the strangeness of some of them with pink skin and a different language. Do the Americans know what’s waiting for them? How little it takes to disrupt a life? There’s no stopping whatever those dollars have set in motion.
She studies the view one last time, considering. She’s never stepped past this point, but she imagines it would be the beginning of something better. Somewhere in the near distance, Rahim must be digging in the creek beds, his makeshift job of forming bricks only possible in the wake of war’s destruction as families slowly rebuild. Somewhere else nearby, there must be Taliban too. She recoils at the thought, as if something is being pulled from her grasp and sucked into a vacuum of cold. She turns her head from one side to the other, letting the panorama of horizon in through the screened view of her burqa. Some mornings, the sky here
