Free Promethea by M.M. Abougabal

prepared for slaughter, an ironic and fitting relationship between lambs and their shepherd I presume. Yet my cynicism did not affect the extent to which I was overwhelmed by the spectacle. I felt emotionally crippled, admittedly weak as the events of my sister’s murder rushed back in overflowing abundance to my head, flooding the memory gates I once thought were sealed shut.
                  She was doing this for you. I couldn’t stop thinking.
                  She had considered herself on a personal crusade when she crossed the massive Atlantic Ocean barrier and settled in Africa, hushing the surrounding cowardly gossips of the sceptics and the doubtful. I recall it clearly now: her avalanching enthusiasm for the prospect of being a more devout Christian, a volunteering Catholic, and how it was an object of pure untainted fascination. It was in the oddest possible way that her college theology studies have awakened the divine in her. It was simply something she was powerless to resist.
                  When she had finally reached that spiritual point, she felt no other urges and no basic needs, she was exclusively consumed by an unachievable idea: playing a part in making up for the xenophobic atrocities committed within the boundaries of our typical Southern American city. She was deeply disturbed by the fact that even up to this very day some parts of the city were still segregated. Shiny suburbs as opposed to festered neighbourhoods splintered the white and rich from the black and poor; everyone knew that New Orleans was no paradise. It was labelled one of America’s ‘Dirtiest Cities’ and the ‘Murder Capital of the United States, by the time I had lived there. Yet with all the doom and gloom surrounding the Mississippi-pumped Jazz-echoing metropolis, I had known no other home. It was one of those charming distinctive cities erected by the French almost exactly three centuries ago and proud residence to my family for as long as it set foot in the vast plains of the new world.
                  On recurring thanksgivings, our relatives would gather around a lavish dinner table, with mouths full of turkey and tongues wet with wine. Their exaggerated family tales may have certainly usually stretched the boundaries of logic wearingly thin, yet they have always managed to hint to an exceptional ancestor whom we actually descended from and inherited his name, Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne.
                  The Frenchman had founded the city on a piece of land that once belonged to a Native American tribe named the Chitimacha. As Emily and I grew more informed, we started noticing how they always deliberately skipped the part about the natives’ current struggle with imminent extinction. Their numbers have actually withered and dwindled to a meagre 700 tribesmen currently drawing their last cultural breaths in the State of Louisiana, so much for American and family glory . Yet I was not the only cynic in our gatherings, Emily too started spending an increasingly amount of time in our house’s massive library, drunk on the nectar of knowledge with each book she left vanquished in her tracks. Suddenly, no amount of reading was ever enough. Our library’s two-story atrium became her impenetrable fortress, where she developed an emphatic, nimble skill and versatility for hopping on-and-off the dark wooden shelves’ wheeled steel ladder.
                  I have seen Emily in the last thanksgiving we had together, sitting across our generations’ old chestnut wooden table and sinking her teeth deep into her trademark full lips in obvious dismay. She was struggling to contain her fiery resentments and longing for a venting foray. The truth is, we had all accepted those shameful realities in our own way. I resorted to denial and indifference, but her preference of compassion had led her, a couple of full moons later across the globe, a whole continent