Dust of Kaduna 3
352 Words
She did not go to the market. She could not remember why she had been going. She turned down an alley she had never taken, then another, moving through the maze of the ghetto until her lungs burned and she was certain no one followed. She stopped behind a mosque, pressing her forehead against the cool concrete of its wall, trying to slow her heartbeat.
Foolish. She had been foolish. If anyone had seen. If her mother heard. If the Hisbah, the moral police who patrolled these streets with their eyes hungry for transgression, had noticed her hesitation, her recognition, her flight.
She stayed there until the call to maghrib prayer echoed across the ghetto. Then she straightened her hijab, smoothed her wrapper, and walked home through the gathering dark. She had no pepper for her father's meal. She would be punished. She did not care.
That night, lying on her mat between her sleeping sisters, she tried to pray. But the words would not come in their proper order. Instead, she saw amber eyes in the darkness. She heard laughter that had nothing to do with her. She felt, for the first time, the dangerous, intoxicating sensation of wanting something she was not supposed to want.
She did not know his name. She told herself she did not want to know. She told herself she would forget his face by morning. She told herself this was a test from Allah, and she would pass it by never taking that route again, by keeping her eyes down forever, by being the good daughter, the obedient girl, the invisible woman that her world demanded.
But even as she made these promises, she knew she was lying.
The dust of Kaduna had settled into her lungs, into her skin, into the very fabric of who she was. And now, mixed with that dust, there was something else. Something that felt like possibility. Like danger. Like the beginning of a story that could only end in fire.
She closed her eyes and, for the first time in her careful, controlled life, dreamed of the forbidden
- Writer
