in blues and browns. Aaseya folds her arms and pinches the flesh where her forearms crease at the elbows, a slight twinge across her skin. She pinches again and thinks of the apricot. How promising its texture. Hardly a spot of mold. She pinches again, recalling Shanaz’s admonitions, the possessive timbre of her voice. Heat blooms across her forearms, and she pinches again, so tender. She imagines sinking her teeth into the apricot, holding the pit in her mouth. How she would clean the sweet flesh away with her tongue and find the pit in the center. She can see it clearly—that apricot pit like a missile careening from her mouth through the screen of her burqa with piercing speed as she yells every curse imaginable in the face of those Taliban. Those imposters. Those loathesome creatures riddled with more lice than the roadside carcass of a dog. She’s lucky she survived. That’s what Rahim always tells her. That’s what Shanaz wants her to believe. Just as surely as Aaseya imagines that apricot pit zeroing in on its target, Aaseya feels the skin across her forearms break beneath her fingertips, bleeding into clarity.
There’s no denying it: Shanaz is the one who tipped off the Taliban. And the Taliban must have believed her, mistaking Aaseya’s family compound for an American hideout. The Taliban reduced her fate to one moment of dust and vibration that stole everything from her but her own heartbeat. They hurt Ms. Darrow, hurt everybody, and although the Americans may be coming soon with their own measure of fate, it’s too late. It’s not enough. Aaseya has her own explosions to carry out, and now she envisions Shanaz with black kohl around her eyes. She wants the Taliban to rape Shanaz, to kill her, but then Aaseya’s vision shifts, and her enemies turn to face her. Warmth moves across her fingertips—blood is the only proof she’s still alive—and as her accusers point their fingers at her mockingly, the apricot pit explodes on target. Body parts pepper the open desert like so many seeds of war.
As Aaseya approaches her apartment, she hears the sound of bare feet not far behind. How bad will it be if the fighters followed her? She sees herself tossed onto the ground, legs spread. Sees them spit on her, burn her hair and her eyes. Maybe it’s her due—catching up. She never should have survived the blast. Rahim and Shanaz might even be grateful if she died now, released from association with her disobediences.
“What is it?” she says and turns to face her follower.
The boy must have stayed close, after all. Feeling floods her limbs, and she looks at her burqa, noticing a few small dots of blood where the fabric sticks to her arms. She almost rushes to him in relief.
He points to the tap stand near Aaseya’s apartment steps.
“There’s not any water,” she shrugs.
The boy crosses the street, and Aaseya marvels at his little brown calves, as flat as kebabs, his twiggy arms hanging from shoulders that jut outward like wings. There’s some measure of peacefulness about him or, at least, possibility. Maybe it’s his innocence she finds charming—his age alone permitting unawareness of what’s headed their way. He moves the pump slowly, tiny frame working hard against the pressure, but nothing comes. He looks at her again, untrimmed hair flopping around his eyes and ears.
“What’s your name?” she asks, and when he points with excessive gestures toward his chest, she understands that he must be mute.
“Oh. Zra?” she asks, pointing at her heart.
He shakes his head, then points back and forth between his heart and his mouth.
“Shpeelak,” she says, meaning whistle.
Wrong again. The boy moves his hands from his lips to the air in front of him, as if pulling something from his mouth.
“Ghazél!” she says at last, quieted by the irony—a mute boy named “song.”
He nods enthusiastically, then does a little dance in the street, his face opening into a charming grin.
“Wait here.”
She heads toward her apartment and up the stairs. And so it begins—Aaseya tossing down a stuffed date and Ghazél catching it skillfully, the two connected mid-air by an invisible thread.
2
Blister in the Sun
The call center on base is nothing more than a dented double-wide lined with makeshift cubicles and a few wobbly folding chairs, a fine coating of sand over everything. Second Lieutenant Nathan Miller walks to the back corner and sits down. A boxy, push-button phone and dusty desktop fill the narrow space. He dials the unending stream of numbers for home and waits. On the computer screen, a cursor flashes in the blank Google search field, keeping time. A framed photo of President Obama hangs on the wall above, but it might as well be Ares, these Middle East wars so unending that entire generations have already come of age.
Tenley’s voice crackles across the static of 7,000 miles, delayed. “…and then the school counselor called after that, and I just, Nathan, I just. I don’t know what to say. Cissy’s angry.”
He waits, absorbing. Their daughter is only six years old. Tenley is a good mother, but lately her phone calls have turned into emotional rants, and Nathan resents it. He resents the resenting. Then he feels like a dirt-bag husband and absent father, and, before he knows it, all he wants to do is hang up because it feels like the most loving thing he can do.
But Cissy? Angry? He sits up in his seat, trying to think clearly.
“What did the counselor say?”
“The counselor said if Cissy hits another child, the school will be forced to expel her. It’s district-wide policy. Nathan, where else is she going to go? We’d have to move. We’d have to sell the house. We’d have to…”
“Hits another child next year?”
And then he remembers the emails he hadn’t read all week. The ones he thought were school newsletters and automated messages about attendance. The ones that should have caught his attention, but it’s a joke these days, trying to complete a single thought without interruption. His mind hops, jack-rabbit style. Add in his other life, his other self, the other side of the globe? Forget it.
“…and then there was this thing about Host Nation Trucking, and they had this talking head on there who said the Americans are straight-up giving cash to the Taliban in Afghanistan.”
“Who? Who said that?” Nathan reaches for the keyboard, typing a few search terms into Google.
“They’re setting you up to fail. Just get yourself home. Come home. I love you too much for this.”
“It’s going to be OK, Tenley. Ten? Try not to worry.”
A page of links appears on the screen the same time static cuts him off. The phone line goes dead. He scrolls through the pages. The Guardian. NBC. The Nation. CNN. The headlines send a spike to his gut.
How the US Army Protects Its Trucks—
by Paying the Taliban
US Trucking Contracts Fund Taliban,
Source Says
It’s all over the news. Isn’t it just peachy when the military screws itself, then tops it off by stealing the ten minutes Miller has to talk with his wife about his homecoming? They were going to discuss their dream vacation in the Keys, Cissy’s favorite bedtime story, the latest episode of Breaking Bad. Anything. Anything but this.
The
