Free The Hidden Light of Objects by Mai Al-Nakib

didn’t especially enjoy waking up early. Sometimes she slept late, and on those days small panting birds were left thirsty for hours, blinking at each other in confusion from across a dry dish. However, on this particular morning, Mina had managed to wake early enough to avoid guilt over parched chirps. She provided cool water then stretched her bones out on the grass.
    The sun was not yet overhead and it was breezy enough to forget that only two months earlier it would have been impossible to spend five minutes outside air-conditioned space. Mina was doing what people do when they have half an hour or so to kill before work or errands or taking care of responsibilities that once belonged to someone else. She was musing in random patches. Fidgety thoughts rested for a second or two before moving along. Her finger played casually with her bellybutton – that funny little cave which at one time linked her flesh so intimately to her mother’s. A stray petal of bougainvillea landed on her exposed belly.
    In Kuwait, bougainvillea is called mejnooneh , crazy, notably in the feminine. Crazy because the fuchsia tissues multiply with an exuberance bordering on madness despite the heat and dryness. That this unique form of insanity was marked feminine always appealed to Mina the diarist who, as a girl, imagined writing down her observations, her owlish insights, on hundreds, thousands, millions of crazy petals in gold ink and then releasing them into a sky as tragically blue as the Mediterranean. She pictured the massive cloud of pink tissue petals, gilded feathers without bird bodies to keep them together. She thought of the people who might glance up expecting to see nothing more exotic than a pigeon only to find a ball of fuchsia rustling overhead, low enough to reach up and grab. Each person would end up with a single petal. If they were lucky, it would be meaningful to them. If not, and they happened to be standing beside someone who had also grabbed at the impossible floating pinkness, an exchange could be arranged. For example, It is sometimes unreasonable to expect the world to mirror your responses could be traded for Cacti that look like artichokes are wrapped blessings . Or, To be left alone in a lonely place means only that joy is invisible, not absent might be swapped in favor of Stairs may lead to nowhere and doors may open onto a steep drop . The young Mina had filled pages and pages with her fragments, believing, with a degree of arrogance masquerading as largesse, that one day they would firework the desert skies as never before.
    Mina tried to peel the mejnooneh petal off her belly with her thumb and forefinger, attempting, unsuccessfully, to keep it intact. It was crushed, leaving in its place the electric pink dust that memories are made of. Inhaling this memory dust was pleasant enough at first. Fuchsia tissue petals and gold ink, parrot feathers and mysterious pouches, recommended books and The Wizard of Oz . But it wasn’t long before towering paper sky scrapers began to shadow the horizon and, worse still, to come tumbling down. Red triangle corners started to bleed into the white muslin of memories fluttering in her head. She felt the loss of each moment twice, first to flames, then to time. Mild discomfort turned into a gigantic concrete brick of anxiety lodged tightly in her throat. She couldn’t swallow, but she ached to regurgitate the pages burned to ashes. What had she done? What had she done? She descended into a notebook-shaped hell of her own making. She was now in her thirties with a lost-and-gone-for-ever past and a future she couldn’t put into words. She had shed her writing skin with such effervescent ease. Now she was paying a price that had not been disclosed up front. She didn’t know how to sweep the ashes back to the place where words resided.
    After the morning in the garden, the brick-in-the-throat panic would knock Mina out anywhere, any time of day or night. There were no special