“Stand up, ‘thing,’” her father’s voice grated. He never used her name. To name a thing was to acknowledge its soul.
Zainab rose, her fingers trailing the velvet piping of the armchair. She felt a presence in the room—a smell of woodsmoke, cheap tobacco, and the ozone of a coming storm.
“The mosque has many mouths to feed,” Malik said, his voice dripping with a cruel sort of relief. “One of them has agreed to take you. You are getting married tomorrow. To a beggar. A blind burden for a broken man. A perfect symmetry, don’t you think?”
The silence that followed was visceral. Zainab felt the blood retreat from her extremities, leaving her fingers ice-cold. She did not cry. Tears were a currency she had exhausted by the age of ten. She simply felt the world tilt.
The wedding was a hollow percussion of footsteps and hushed, jagged laughter. It took place in the mud-slicked courtyard of the local magistrate, far from the eyes of the village elite. Zainab wore a dress of coarse linen—a final insult from her sisters. She felt the calloused hand of a stranger take hers. His grip was firm, surprisingly steady, but his sleeve was tattered, the fabric fraying against her wrist.
“She is your problem now,” Malik snapped, the sound of a gate slamming shut on a life.
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