Free The Burgess Boys by Elizabeth Strout

to be more vigilant now that the pig’s head had been rolled into the mosque. “Everyone promises,” Abdikarim said, as he stood. “Sleep with peace,” he added. “And get that lightbulb fixed.”
    “Tomorrow I’ll buy a new one. I’m driving to Walmart.” She smiled at him playfully. “Hoping Wiil Waal has not returned to work there.” Her earrings moved as she walked away.
    Abdikarim rubbed his forehead. At Ifo Noor’s tonight, Rabbi Goldman sat with the elders and asked them to practice the true peacefulness of Islam. This was insulting. Of course they would do that. Rabbi Goldman said that many townspeople supported their right to be here, and after Ramadan the town would show this with a demonstration. The elders did not want a demonstration. To gather people in a crowd was not good. But Rabbi Goldman of the wide heart said it would be healthy for the town. Healthy for the town! Each word was like a hit with a stick saying this was not their village, their town, their country.
    Abdikarim, standing by his bed, squeezed his eyes in anger, because where were the Rabbi Goldmans of America when Abdikarim’s eldest daughter had first stepped off a plane in Nashville with her four children and no one to meet them, and the moving stairs called an escalator were so frightening they could only stare at them and get pushed aside by others who pointed and laughed? Where were the Rabbi Goldmans of America when a neighbor brought Aamuun a vacuum cleaner and Aamuun did not know what it was and never used it and the neighbor told people in town the Somalis were ungrateful? Where were the Rabbi Goldmans and the Minister Estavers when little Kalila thought the ketchup dispenser at Burger King was where she could wash her hands? And when Kalila’s mother saw the mess her daughter had made she slapped her, and a woman came up to them and said, In America we don’t beat our children. Where was the rabbi then? The rabbi could not know what it was like.
    And of course the rabbi could not know, back in his own safe house now with his worried wife, that as Abdikarim sat down heavily on the bed, it was not fear that rose in him with most prominence but the uncurling of remembered shame from this evening, when he had put a piece of mufa in his mouth and experienced the feral, furtive pleasure of its taste. In the camps he had been hungry constantly, it was like a wife, the companionship of this ceaseless exhausting need. And now that he was here it was exquisitely painful to notice the animal craving he still felt for food; it debased him. The need to eat, excrete, sleep—these were the needs of nature. The luxury of their naturalness had long ago been taken away.
    Fingering the tapestry of his bedcover, he murmured, “Astaghfirullah,” I seek forgiveness , because the violence in his homeland felt to him to be the fault of his people for not living the true life of Islam. As he closed his eyes, he recited his final Alhamdulilah of the day. Thank you, Allah . All good came from Allah. The bad from humans who allowed the sprig of evil in their hearts to blossom. But why this was so, the evil unchecked like malignancy—this was the question Abdikarim always walked into. And always the answer: He did not know.

    That first night, Bob slept on the couch with all his clothes on, even his coat, it was that cold. It was not until the light began to come through the window blinds that he finally dozed, and he woke to hear Susan yelling, “Yes, you’re going to work. You’re the one who did this stupid, stupid thing! You damn well go earn that two hundred dollars I spent so you could be free. Go .” Bob heard Zach murmur briefly, heard the back door close, and in a few minutes a car drove away.
    Susan appeared, hurled a newspaper across the room at him. It landed on the floor by the couch. “Nice job,” she said.
    Bob looked down. On the front page was a large photo of Zach leaving the jail, grinning. The headline read NO