Free The Blue Taxi by N. S. Köenings

cotton-flowered gloom. The brothers’ silence was complete, and Agatha forgot them. In
     each room of the house, it seemed—down the hallway in the parlor, and here in their own bedroom—female shapes were ushering
     new times. Agatha, more brazen in some ways even than her mother, having seen what she had come for, pulled her head out from
     the tunnel Tahir Majid had devised, and tugged a pillow from behind him. “I need this,” she said. She sat beside him firmly.
     Tahir, wincing but hospitable, gave his guest more room.
    She’d surprised him, too. Propped up on one elbow, she asked him if it hurt. His brothers didn’t like to ask, even soft Habib;
     they already knew the answer, didn’t like to hear it. With Agatha so close to him and stark, Tahir almost said that yes, it
     did, it did, and not a little, either. That he felt the absent calf and foot as keenly as if they were still there. He might
     have added that having lost a leg had brought him new embarrassments, that the clever brothers had to bear him to the toilet
     if he needed to expel a poop (though thisthey did with a solemnity and tenderness that they had never shown him in his fully four-limbed days). He might have told
     her that when the distant aunts came (bringing their own juice, and nuts, and sweet, dry, yellow cake), he knew they came
     because they had to, because what had befallen Majid’s little boy was too-too-terrible, they said. That he could tell from
     how they passed the cashews, chomping, busy lips asmack, that they did not hold out much hope. “Two cripples in the house!
     Mad Majid whose mind should have a walking stick, and this! Now
this!
What else should we now fear?”
    They spoke their thoughts out loud when they believed he was asleep, more softly when they thought he was awake. Suddenly
     the crafty brothers—clever, yes, but unreliable, indeed—appeared more viable to the big aunts than he did. Even his Aunt Sugra,
     who people said was good, whispering to Tahir (was it just a month ago?) that he was the only hope, the only boy whose head
     for numbers might not put him in jail—Sugra had turned to leggy Ismail and Ali, and even stout Habib, the slowest of them
     all, and, holding out her hands, told them they were all their poor baba had left. That it was up to them now. Sugra! The
     only one who gave them money, came to visit; who could manage Tahir’s father when nobody else would. Sugra, who still loved
     them! A sore betrayal, it had been. But Tahir didn’t say these things to Mrs. Turner’s daughter. He waited for her lead.
    Pushing at her bottom lip with a sharp but creamy tooth, Agatha considered him. She asked again: “Really, does it hurt?” Tahir
     felt exposed. The skin around his eyes went tight; he sniffed, and looked away. But he remembered what the aunts had said
     (they had gotten it from Iqbal, at Hisham’s Food and Drink).
This
was the girl who had unlaced and laced his shoe, done something to his limb while the firmer parts of him lay well across
     the road.Aunt Yasmina had told Sugra that this girl had not flinched. That she had sat there on the sidewalk (panties showing, nevermind!)
     and watched over Tahir’s fallen leg as though it were a baby goat or doll. Had spoken to it, even. Agatha was perhaps not,
     thought Tahir, a guest into whose shoulder he could cry.
    With a valiant shove of lashes, he swept his tears back. “It doesn’t hurt. It itches.” He pushed his thin chest out and pressed
     his lips together. “It doesn’t hurt at all.” If Agatha could push, insist, then he could do it, too. She closed one eye; he
     could see the wet pink point of the girl’s tongue. He exhaled, and said, again, “It itches. Didn’t you hear right?” He pulled
     the sheet above their heads and motioned down beyond the bandaged absence to make sure she could see. If Tahir’s leg could
     be put back, thought Agatha, the foot would reach just there, to a swirl of printed leaves. Tahir loosed