Above Us the Milky Way

by Fowzia Karimi

  She inhales and pats down her head covering and her dress and walks downstairs to answer the knocking on her kitchen door. She greets them with her eyes cast down at her hands. “Where’s the husband,” asks the man standing nearest the door. “He has gone to pray, he will be here shortly, any minute,” she answers, now looking at his worn shoes. The other men of god beyond him, standing and milling about the garden, picking at her okra plants, or leaning against the pomegranate tree, or poking into the soil with the tips of their rifles, chuckle and spit. One of them pushes past the leaning man at the door, past the woman, and enters the kitchen. “You can offer your guests a cup of tea, can’t you,” he says. Her eyes are cast down, but she senses his eyes scanning her, head to toe, and front to back as he passes. The one at the door comes in next, before she is able to step out of his way, and brushes against her with his rifle and his hand. “Come in,” she says, “he will be here soon. Seat yourselves in the living room. I will put on the tea.” A third man has now entered the house, and the three walk around the living room, peer out the front window, pace the hall, step into the family room, walk to the base of the stairs, picking up photographs, opening and shutting cabinet doors, kicking up the corners of rugs. Two leave and return to the garden, passing her in the kitchen on their way out. “And me, I’m second,” says one of them over his shoulder.

  The woman sets out teacups and saucers on a tray. She fills a small dish with candy and, hands shaking, removes the towel off of another piled with savory biscuits. She steps into her pantry and steps out again with a rifle held at chest level and already aimed. She walks down the hall, turns into the living room, and shoots at the couch where the man sits, his arm stretched over the back of the couch, ankle on knee, cigarette midway to his mouth. She does not stay to see him slump over into the cushions, then keel over onto the floor. She walks back down the hall, into the kitchen, and shoots one of the men as he reaches the open doorway. The woman steps over him and over toppled shattered teaware into the garden, where she releases another eighteen or twenty rounds into the other four or five men, stopping each of them mid-run to or away from her. She walks out into midst of the crumpled tented bodies, lets the rifle fall onto the earth and looks up to her bedroom window, where she thinks she sees the faces of her two youngest. The other armed men of god, who’ve been making their routine tours, visiting other houses in the neighborhood, having heard the gunfire, rush into the garden and empty their rounds into her back. Her shoulders and arms jerk and lift, her head tips back, her veil slips off to reveal her dark curls. She rises in the air. For a moment, she is suspended, arms lifted, feet pendulous, dress billowing, eyes rolled back and sky-bound. She is whole. When the firing concludes, she falls to the ground in a thousand pieces.

  laundry

  In the first land, the line grows, the children wait, the laundress grows weary beneath the burden of her trade.

  system

  The automaton, the little fleshy machine, composed of dust, wired by biology, animated by chemistry, she looks up to the sky and looks to the horizon, looks up again, repeating the gesture her small system is programmed to make across time and the solar system. The little automaton’s eyes look on, agape. Behind the lens, an intricate, subtle, methodical machine clicks, turns, and whirs unceasingly by day and in sleep to find a resolution to that perennial quandary: the inconsonance between what the lens observes on the horizon and what it beholds in the sky.

  the visitation

  The sister dreams that she has returned to the first country. Though the distance is great—two continents and an ocean lie between her bunk bed and her first life—and little time has elapsed since she laid down and drew her blanket to her chin, she finds herself in front of her old house in the first land and wonders at the method of conveyance that has deposited her here. This is how it works in a dream, she remembers. Mother told me so. Mother said: though your body lies soundly in bed, your spirit travels where it wishes or is drawn to when you dream. The girl stands in front of her old house, looks down the hill toward the city below, which hums under a misty veil, then looks up at her house, which stands dark and shuttered against a red glowing sky. She wonders if her family are at her grandmother’s. It is Friday night, after all, and the family may have gathered there for dinner. She remembers the way to her grandmother’s house: it is only up the hill, past the bread maker’s, past the butcher’s, around the next corner, and just opposite the dry fruit vendor’s stall. She takes a step in that direction and is instantly at the door of her grandmother’s house. She opens the door, or the door opens of its own accord, and now she sees it is not family alone who have gathered. Here are her aunts and uncles, her cousins and the neighbors, her first schoolteacher, the equally shy friend who shared the first school desk, the baker, the military men, the nurses and doctors—all in uniform—the television newscaster, the men who delivered Mother’s china cabinet and carried it up the narrow staircase to place it in the dining room, Father’s coworkers, grandmother’s hens, uncle’s sheep from the farm, the cheating grocer from across the street, and many others she does not recognize.

  The sister steps into the house and through the crowd, thinking, I came here because my dream spirit was bored lying in bed on a night that is not a school night. I came because I was invited. She enters the shifting, billowing crowd. Here is the balloon peddler handing out his colorful orbs, there the cousin showing the small children how to draw a tiger, here the ice cream maker cranking his machine, there the musicians sitting cross-legged before their instruments, awaiting word from their host to begin playing. She looks for Mother and Father, for her sisters, but cannot locate them. They lie asleep in the new land, too tired or too lazy to make the trip to come to this wondrous gathering. Searching and pushing through the ever-thickening crowd, she comes to the end of the great room. There lies her grandmother on her narrow wicker bed, covered in white from head to foot, eyes closed and jaw bound up with a strip of white cloth. One by one, on bent knee and with heads bowed, her guests pay their respects to the old woman.

  The dreaming girl makes it to her grandmother’s bedside and stands behind two holy men and a bookseller to await her turn. And the girl sees that it is not the old woman alone who draws the guests to this end of the room; against the wall there is a long table covered with a bountiful array of dishes, from which the guests eagerly fill their plates. She has come to kneel at the old woman’s bedside but her attention is arrested by the food on the platters and in the bowls. Here is one filled not with rice and raisins, but with fingernails, whole and pulled clean out. The layers of translucent nails, some yellowing, make a dizzying hatch pattern; peaking out or showing through in places, the bright colors of polish break the pattern. In the center of the table are two large china bowls filled with teeth of many sizes and shapes, smooth or chipped, roots intact, in shades of white, yellow, or gray. And next to them, an oblong dish with eyes of many colors, looking in many directions; round, plump forms that glisten in the half-lit room. Three silver platters at the farther end of the long table are covered with women’s breasts of various circumferences and heights, neatly placed next to one another, like many puddings. Nearer the sister, two round trays hold hundreds of fingers arranged as diminishing spirals, some still wearing rings. And she sees it all at once, the entire table, each dish, every wrinkle on each finger, every vein in each eye as her own eyes flit to and fro, as her mind reels and wonders, do the others not see, not heave? Is this what they now eat in the first land?

  A soft rhythmic thud and jingle draws the girl’s attention away from the table. To her right sits her grandmother on her low bed, playing a tambourine, surrounded by the throng of guests. The old woman slaps her shaking hand against the taut goat skin, and all the while looks directly at the sister, singing words the girl strains to understand in the dream. Her grandmother nods at her; the girl draws nearer through the crowd to stand by her bedside. The old woman plays faster, more forcefully; she closes her eyes, tilt
s back her head, and opens her mouth to repeat the inaudible lyrics. And the girl sees that in place of a tongue, her grandmother has many rows of neatly arranged teeth, loosely bound to the fleshy bottom of her mouth; she realizes that the rhythmic jingling is not made by the tambourine in her grandmother’s hands but by her row upon row of teeth, which strike against each other as she nods and sways. Looking about her at the other guests, the girl sees that now all have their faces bound round with white cloth, their eyes shut, and are moving their torsos in rhythm to the old woman’s music.

  wake

  And is not childhood but a dream? Open your eyes, said the laundress.

  childhood

  How immense the epoch of their childhood! How timeless those core years when all five sisters were children. When a walk, measured in steps from one end of the yard to the other, equaled an entire afternoon! Then, time whispered its ticks, hummed its tocks, and skipped some altogether. While the greater universe, that magnificent gravity-devouring-death-begetting-light machine, lurched and tugged, the smaller world of the sisters opened still smaller worlds, breathed them into being: bees appeared out of thin air to join the thick summer atmosphere; laughter, while thrilling the eardrum of a jesting sister, halted long enough to admit a second joke before resuming; and water revealed its sticky properties to insect and girl alike.

  and water

  It is not earth alone that opens up to take and comfort the many bodies, those dead and those bound for death. And they who push them, who have been schooled in or come on their own to learn the subtleties and the physics of the act, they push with equal force into earthy pits as into rivers, lakes, dams, and wells. A bound body, a single rope tying it at ankles and wrists, defines the one arc through the air if the hand pushing hits precisely in the space between the shoulder blades. Watch the chest lead, the neck snap back, the jaws snap together the single time, the eyes gaze into the skull. And they who push, those drivers of small forces, are surprised at the similarities and come to appreciate the differences between a fall into the aquatic versus one into the terrestrial grave: air escapes the lungs with a puff upon hitting hard earth, but as a series of gurgles and sprays in the liquid medium; there is equal chance of the neck breaking upon impact with either substrate—it is the angle at which the chin meets the surface that yields such rare deliverance for the body; in the men of this land, who can no more swim as fish than fly as birds, it is a push into water that elicits the coveted scream. And while the great pits are an easier time, a tidier solution, collecting the many bodies at once, neatly concealing them, it is water that holds the attention of the driver of small forces long after that initial arc. The thrashing, bound body fights to stay afloat, turns and turns again in the lake, bends at the neck, hips, knees, and ankles—mimicking the inchworm and not the fish—only to bind itself further, to draw in more water. In the river, the body, like timber, moves with the powerful flow, hits first one boulder, then the next, at the head, the shoulders, the elbows, or the feet, and releases neat, warm streams of blood, streams that eddy, bead, and sink. Streams that, being of a denser, stickier nature, momentarily oppose the river current’s force and freeze the spectator’s gaze. And there is also the well, omnipresent in this arid land, which, upon receiving a body, releases the single great exhale. It too is neat, swallows neatly, but it is only for the immediate and small job.

  Water takes the many bodies. It enters the bodies, shifts that ratio of liquid to solid further in its own favor, ballooning the dead, coloring their skin a cool hue, and distorting their features, so that the living who go in are not the drowned who come out, should they be pulled out. And water dissolves those who do not find the idle or the brave passer-by in time to be dragged back out onto the dusty earth. The great solvent absorbs and distributes the molecules evenly through itself and around the globe, in time. Water returns to water. It receives the dead and comforts the dead. And what does water learn from the dead about terrestrial life? What secrets leave the drowned man’s flaccid mouth, what stories are read in his clouded, unblinking eyes? It is the magic element, water. Watch how the hydrogen bonds snap into place in winter, collapse in summer. Observe how water changes the landscape, across the seasons, across the globe, across the ages. See how water changes form and, in its shifting, rises from the depths to the heights to fall again, to soar again, then run again, rinsing the mountaintops, the valleys, and the depths on its circuitous route. What knowledge does it carry and distribute? To whom does it deliver its news? Who listens? Is water burdened? Is it joyful? Is it oblivious? Has it not always carried and constituted life? Known life more intimately and fundamentally than any other? Does it not know death equally well? Was it not the first to do so?

  In the beginning: water.

  W

  I say I am an astronaut. I say I am here to do naught but gaze upon the stars. And even as I fathom the luminous lights above, I sense the wholesome water within. It rises and falls, it fills and buoys me. If my eyes were not firm and not coated with the liquid, what use would they be to the sky? And I think it is they, the ancient glimmering stars, who call water up and bind to it their own salt, so that they might see themselves amplified in my eyes. If I say their beauty makes me cry, will you think me weak? Will you laugh if I add that I know water came to be born in the bowels of rocky bodies, which, blindly hurtling through the empty spaces, grew agitated with an unknown desire, and in their hurtling and spinning and agitation conceived the liquid jewel that would rise and pool on their dusty surfaces so that something might reflect the starry night?

  dust

  In the beginning: dust: H, C, N, O.

  stones

  And the dreaming sister observes, as if from a window and across a courtyard, a group of men standing, none too close to another, and staggered over a patch of dry and dusty earth. She does not see the fists that hold the stones or the arms that pitch them—the persecutors are out of view—but the stones come fast from the direction the men face. They hit the standing men on the shoulder, the chest, or across the chin, which makes the head pivot and the body totter momentarily. The men absorb the assault. They falter, bend, sway, and come to stand upright, stand still again, to face forward again. And the sister dreaming watches a stone rush through the air, sees and hears it lodge in the forehead of one of the men, and senses all this closely: the man’s face contorted, his eyes crossed and upturned, the lines on his brow deepening, his neat hairline, the moisture collected there, the stone embedded, the blood surfacing. And Mother who is and is not there beside her in the dream describes to her daughter what she is observing. She says, this is such-and-such, a phrase in the first tongue, which the girl tries to hear, to decipher in the dream, but cannot. Mother repeats herself, this is such-and-such. It is when a stone is thrown with a precise aim and with purpose and power enough to lodge itself in the skull, but not so deeply that it causes the man to topple. The stone must lodge and the man must remain upright. This is the object of their diversion. And the girl listening, seeing, hears and sees other stones fly, hit, lodge, and men totter, sway, find their equilibrium again. Beads, not streams, of blood drip onto their shirts and shirtsleeves, their pant legs and bare feet, the dusty dry earth. And she cannot turn her gaze. And Mother who is not there reassures her, this did not happen in the before. When I was a child, this did not.

  arc

  Against a backdrop of disappearances, drownings, live burials, hangings, shootings, stonings, electrocutions, beheadings, disembowelments, and dismemberments, the automaton’s head makes the singular arc. And her eyes search the sky for deliverance.

  how lonely, how earnest

  How lonely we were. We were girls, children. When the gods ventured down from the cosmos, did we not halt our play and climb down from the tree to sit upon the ground from which we had sprung? Did we not bring together the soles of our feet and splay them like the many pages of that ancient book so that the gods might easily read the account of our natural history? Was it not writ
ten clearly enough in the lines that perhaps did not score deeply enough into the bottoms of our weary feet? We were born landlocked, surrounded by mountains. Our journey was by land, by air, and over the great swirling sea. All this, and more, was plainly written there. We were wanderers of valleys and hills by day and castaways, adrift upon the bottomless starry sea, by night. Ours was a circuitous route; the gods had traveled directly. Should we have first washed our feet with the garden hose? Should we have bowed, genuflected? We wore our hair long, loose or plaited. They stood about us and looked down at our wide eyes, our moist pink lips and soft full cheeks, our graying hair and wrinkled spotted hands. We were unnatural. Was it this that frightened the silent gods away? Perhaps it was the rustling of leaves in the rosebush at their heels. Did they overhear the garden oracle whisper their fate? Or perhaps the gods noticed the rectangular lawn become more faded at its edges and more vivid, more saturated where we sat in a semicircle before them. Did they, in that moment, learn of our pact with the pigments of the earth? Oh, and how we tried to keep them near with our daily offerings: the sunbaked earthen vessels filled with berries and ladybugs, the bleeding scabs-picked-early, the flowers, the bird feathers, the countless drawings of billowy clouds and snow-peaked mountains. How earnest we were.