Above Us the Milky Way

by Fowzia Karimi

  the characters

  A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

  Exit

  My dear reader, it is late. Please switch off the light. Turn over the page. Sleep.

  dream

  And when you look up at the stars, do you not feel a sensation as of falling forward, turning in? Are you not like the dry seedpod dispersing seed, the wave crashing onto the beach, the wrist turning to present the watch face? Is not all of life a turning in? Do you not see your own shadow cast across the dome of the cosmos as the warm sphere beneath you spins? Can you not sift the stars with your fingers? And the sky is beautiful. It gleams. And your eyes are closed, not open. Dream.

  the sisters, outside

  The sisters are called on from both directions. They are pulled at from below and from above. Tonight, they step outside after Mother and Father have gone to bed to sleep the unenchanted sleep of the toiling wage earner in the new country, tucked beneath their new-life comforters, which make Father’s feet tingle and swell with false heat, and Mother’s bladder fill too early in the night with the same false heat, and cause husband and wife to toss and turn under a barrage of false dreams, dreams like many supermarket apples. And the girls, unable to sleep, small and wafery, step outside and onto the lawn, wet with dew. They gather beneath the grandfather tree, now wakeful and watchful in the night, as he is not by day when he is more tree than memory. The sky is clear. And the sisters are pulled on from below and they sense the earthworm, warm and moist and not-forgotten beneath the skin of the earth under their feet. And the worm, which writhes and works tirelessly, turns the earth in all places and with equal force, minuscule, in all places minute, but proportionate in all places, so that the earth is tilled and the earth turns and is made to rotate on its tilted pin. And while the earthworm wiggles and turns the earth, the earth draws and draws its offspring to itself and pins them to her surfaces, holds there their many feet, many and multiplying, feet crooked and clawed, hoofed and horned, feet spread and flat. And the sisters, with their soft, arched feet bound to the earth and kissed by filaments of dewy grass, walk out onto the lawn to stand bound, drawn by earth and earthworm. But their eyes are called to the sky. Above them, the Milky Way writhes and pulses.

  The sisters are not asleep. They are tugged at from below and from above and it is neither the earth nor the sky that makes them girls, flesh and living. It is the draw, calling them up and pulling them down, that makes their blood circuit through their small bodies and makes their breath leave and return, exit and return, and makes them stand upright. But how is it possible we should be standing upright, like reeds, we are animal and yet we stand upright and the blood circulates, is drawn down and then fights this pull to rise up only to fall again and rush upward again and plummet again. And standing upright, the girls are not gods, and they are not of the gods, and the gods were conceited to think so. It is not god who speaks through the child, the child born of two opposing forces, forever bringing these two colossal forces into equilibrium, at every second breathing them into balance, at every moment knowing that she has little choice if she is to stand upright, if she is to feel the star’s light upon her cheek and the earth’s moisture between her toes. It is a strength the gods cannot fathom and can therefore not claim as their own. It was an illusion. Theirs. From the beginning. When the gods passed over the earth and saw the upright children, they could not help but smile and could not help but weep and this weeping, new to them, kept them gazing down with parental pride. And with the pride of parents new, they took to dancing, putting on their best theater to entertain the earthbound child, all the while their own gazes set and bound upon the child. But the child has parents elsewhere and, like all orphans, senses these parents but does not know them, senses them and yearns for them, comes out nightly in search of them. The mysteries of the world lie deep. The child, bound, upright, yearns but does not know that the writhing worm, the spinning earth, and the spiraling arms of the galaxy are the forces that move her blood, and fill, then relieve, her lungs.

  Z

  Zenith. The point on the celestial sphere directly above the observer. The point that drew and drew the sisters’ eyes.

  Zenith. The highest point reached in the sky by a celestial body. The point where nightly the sisters’ forms, drawn crudely with the light of passing stars, linger momentarily.

  Christian Fagerlund

  Fowzia Karimi was born in Kabul, Afghanistan and grew up in Southern California. She immigrated to United States in 1980 after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Karimi has a background in Studio Art and Biology, and received her MFA in Creative Writing from Mills College in Oakland, California. Her work explores the correspondence on the page between the written and the visual arts. She is a recipient of the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, and has illustrated The Brick House by Micheline Aharonian Marcom (Awst Press) and Vagrants and Uncommon Visitors by A. Kendra Greene (Anomalous Press).

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  From Rona Jaffe Award-winner Fowzia Karimi, a highly anticipated, lushly illustrated debut novel about a young family forced to flee their war-ravaged homeland of Afghanistan, leaving behind everything and everyone beloved and familiar. The novel’s structure is built around the alphabet, twenty-six pieces written in the first person that sk
etch a through-line of memory for the lives of the five daughters, mother, and father. Ghost stories and fairytales are woven with old family photographs and medieval-style watercolor illuminations to create an origin story of loss and remembrance.

  Above Us the Milky Way is a story about war, immigration, and the remarkable human capacity to create beauty out of horror. As a young family attempts to reconstruct their lives in a new and peaceful country, they are daily drawn back to the first land through remembrance and longing, by news of the continued suffering and loss of loved ones, and by the war dead, who have immigrated and reside with them, haunting their days and illuminating the small joys and wonders offered them by the new land.

  Praise for Above Us the Milky Way

  “A sharply etched treatise on the objects of memory … powerful in both its beauty and its uncompromising horror whose themes are as sadly timely as they are eternal.”

  —Starred Review, Kirkus Reviews

  “A skilled technician whose prose flows like intuition, Karimi parses the beats of her paragraphs with the attention of a poet. Rich with images and imagery, the book is beautiful, both illuminated and illuminating.”

  —Starred review, Foreword Reviews

  “Karimi’s inventive, allegorical debut renders a family’s wartime emigration through a polyphonic mix of voices and genres along with evocative color illustrations and photographs … Fans of Lost Children Archive will love this.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “An ambitious abecedary of family, trauma, and life, and a love letter to the universe with many moments of power and resplendence.”

  —Jennifer Croft, Homesick, translator of Man Booker International Prize-winner Flights

  “Reading this book—its use of the alphabet, its art, its running commentary on story, on what is deeply human and what is vaster and greater than the human, the realization and reckoning of which helps make for what is the human, our fleeting place among the places—is like coming upon a forgotten dream suddenly remembered and recognized, a dream feeling more familiar and real than whatever reality supposedly was, to the point that maybe what was in the dream—or this book—was real. This is storytelling of a high, profound, most beautiful order.”

  —Rick Simonson, Elliott Bay Book Company (Seattle, WA)

  “A stunning, visionary debut: it hums and glows with blinding brilliance and profound humanity. It’s a book about war, love, family, displacement, dreams, grief, beauty, and the secret alchemies that form our inner worlds. At once boldly cosmic and keenly relevant to our times, this book is a peerless treasure.”