A face like the moon by Mina Athanassious

Author:Mina Athanassious
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781771613408
Publisher: Mosaic Press
Published: 2018-07-11T16:00:00+00:00

MOSES THE BLACK

I saw the colour of heat on Cairo’s city streets the day the doctor told me I was going blind. The jagged lines that rode between bricks across buildings and the shades of everything bright hot and alive struck me for the first time.

I stared through the thin patches of grass that grew between the broken pieces of cement and brown stalks of palm trees rising from and covering the ground with their massive fronds like owners of the land and the colour of the people that hovered below in all different shapes. Everyone walked like they had somewhere to be. I wondered if they ever recognized each other.

Mama held my hand and walked me through the streets. “Everything’ll be alright” she smiled and tried to mean it. She told me to unbutton my collar because I was sweating. I was too busy watching time move to listen. She stopped, knelt down and pulled me toward her as she reached for my collar. I saw myself in the brown of her eye. My head looked round and glossy, like a balloon on a string held down by a brick.

“Soon you’ll have beautiful blue eyes,” she spoke quietly like a secret. There were words stuck in her throat. If she said what she needed to, we could move. I needed to move. Her eyes were too wide and heavy for me to stare too long.

I looked down at her neck. Her crystal cross beamed purple from where I stood. I tilted my head slightly and watched it turn blue to red to orange to green.

“Maybe the doctor was wrong,” I said for her sake, smiling like a good boy. She pursed her lips and smiled with a hope and a lie. She patted my shoulders and stood up, took my hand, and we walked away. I watched the colours fly through the streets.

At the street corner sat an old man in a moustache and galabeya, his face worn and etched. Dark brown skin like a Southerner. He sat cross-legged on a thin white blanket in front of a basket made of palm leaves full of fish and stabbed at one with scales that shined like steel in the sun. He carved out something pink from its gut and threw it in a plastic bag in front of him, wrapped the fish in a sheet of old newspaper and handed it to a woman that stood to his side.

Mama dragged me to the fish man at the street corner by my sleeve. He aged with each step. Lines dug deep into his skin under his tired eyes. Light patches of stubble grew around his moustache and into his sunken cheeks. His graven face, weak and powerless and angry and alive.

The man watched us approach with his eyes on me. I looked into his basket when we got there. It was full of black fish with long whiskers. Beside him was a tin bucket with the same kind of fish, but these ones were alive and swimming.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.