Blood Feast by Malika Moustadraf

Author:Malika Moustadraf
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Feminist Press at CUNY
Published: 2021-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

Note: don’t try this prescription with all women.

But that’s enough off-limits talk for one day.

HEAD LICE

To my counterpart in privation: The Awaited Mahdi, Mohammed al-Mahdi Saqal

If he’d obeyed me I wouldn’t be here now, and he wouldn’t be there either … but he’s what we call “head-cracking stubborn.”

Lice and stench and cockroaches. I thought head lice died out ages ago, but in this dump they’re still going strong. The flabby woman sitting across from me is picking through her friend’s hair. From time to time she yells out, “There’s one. I’ve got it!” She squashes each little nit between her two thumbnails.

My mother used to put my head on her lap, too, and search for those tiny little bugs. She’d arm herself with a bottle of paraffin and one of those old-fashioned combs made from sheep or gazelle horn, and then she’d launch her attack on the parasites feeding on my blood. I’d try to wriggle away, she’d grab my arms, I’d keep struggling. Eventually she’d lure me in with I’ll tell you the tale of Hayna, who was abducted by a ghoul—and at that I’d surrender instantly.

The other woman sitting opposite me—her face is as yellow as sulphur, that’s why they nicknamed her Eggy—sticks her hand down between her breasts, pulls out a little packet, and opens it. Lots of cigarette butts. She considers carefully which one to choose, picks it out, and then asks for a match from a brightly colored woman (and I’m not calling her “colored,” I’m not racist, she is just wearing very colorful clothes) who passes her one without interrupting the song she’s singing: “No well was ever richer, but how dry is our own pitcher!”

The young woman tries to slip out of the flabby woman’s grasp, who yells, “You’re covered in lice, girl, let me zap them for you!”

“Zap your own lice already!”

I’m trying to escape my mother’s grip. She adjusts her hold on me and opens the bottle of paraffin she bought from al-Saidi, the coal merchant.

I close my eyes so that the paraffin doesn’t get in them; my mother goes on with the story: Hayna was beautiful, she had hair as long and thick as a horse’s mane, and as soft as silk … Droplets of paraffin are trickling down my neck. The fumes are so pungent. I hold my nose.

Mommy, I don’t like paraffin and I don’t like lice and I don’t like al-Saidi! I’m crying. “Don’t cry,” says the flabby woman. “They won’t put you away for more than six months.”

The yellowish woman comes over, offers me a cigarette stub. “Here, you have this, I can spare it.”

“I don’t smoke,” I tell her, my head on my knees.

Last time I messaged him I said, Why don’t you try to understand my point of view?

—Because what you say isn’t rational.

I’d seized the keyboard and typed, He who can’t afford to marry, let him fast from the carnal feast.

—I’ve tried fasting, but then someone always asks me, “Why are you fasting?

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