Free The Girl Who Fell to Earth by Sophia Al-Maria Page B

peeked out the flap at the other areas of the tent cluster. The stars and moon were bright like a black light and made the white sand glow ultraviolet. I steered clear of the shadows and snuck around the back of the camp facing up against a dune and fashioned a little dugout for myself. All around was silence, and the stars were even brighter than they had been the night in the desert with the tribesman. The only light came from one of the open tent flaps, and the silence was suddenly broken by the wail of a baby.
    I hopped away from my puddle in the sand and walked toward the light. A flap of black wool flickered in the breeze, and a baby bawled from inside. I remembered Ma and wondered if she and our baby brother were feeling better yet. I thought maybe I should go back to Dima, and then I realized I didn’t know which of the identical black wool tents I’d left her in. The baby cried again, and now I could make out a gas lantern hanging on the main post in the middle; underneath this I saw the figure of an old woman. She drew me in like a tractor beam, and I startled when I got close enough to see that she was watching me. Her body was wide, and she sat flat with legs akimbo. Her jalabiya was dark calico, her gray braids were red with henna, a black berga covered her face, and her underwear was long, with a ringlet of embroidered starbursts circling her ankles.
    I hung shyly at the door. “Do you know who I am?” she asked.
    Although I never knew the answer when anyone else asked me this question, somehow I did know this was my grandmother, Umi Safya, my Arabic namesake. But I was too terrified to answer her for fear I’d be wrong. She lifted the corner of her berga and offered her smooth cheek for me to kiss, then held me by the shoulders and sat me down roughly beside her. She grasped a loom between her toes, a stick knotted with the ends of rough camel-hair yarn she was weaving into some kind of rope.
    â€œHow’s your mama?” she asked and offered me a piece of sour, salty cheese. It was about the size, shape, and consistency of a sand dollar, and had the indents of her fingers in it like a fork across our other grandmother’s peanut-butter cookies. “Did you come to see your brother?”
    I didn’t understand what she meant. Ma and my little brother were in Doha. How could they be here? And if they were here , why hadn’t anyone told us?
    â€œEy! The little stranger came to see her brother,” Umi said to someone I hadn’t noticed in the corner of the tent. She directed me with a rough push toward the shadows and went back to braiding her sling of yarn into rope.
    The woman’s body in the corner was a sea of black but for the white island of a boob, spilling over the neckline of her jalabiya and into the mouth of a little baby. “Come here.” She beckoned to me. Her voice came harsh through her veil. “His name is Badr,” she told me. I looked down at the tiny brown baby suckling at her black areola.
    â€œBadr,” I repeated dumbly, still puzzling over why Umi had called him my brother.
    â€œIt means full moon.”
    She then propped him against her knee, his legs akimbo on a pile of blankets like a helpless specimen, so I could get a good look at him. I studied this little human she was presenting to me. His tiny fingers balled up and pawed at the air like a turtle on its back, and his tears were stained black by the kohl powder around his eyes. He had a thick black tuft of hair waving straight up from his head like Astro Boy. His snot glistened, mixed with tears in the dim light, and when I touched him his face clenched in displeasure and he began howling again.
    â€œCan’t you see he needs winding?” Umi Safya commented from the sidelines.
    â€œTake him to your grandmother,” the woman ordered.
    He blinked up at me with his wet eyes. I didn’t understand who this little person was to me. How he could be my