Free Henna House by Nomi Eve Page B

gems for Solomon’s Temple. How could I tell him that no story would be complete without the curve of his smile, the square set of his broad shoulders? I blushed, coughed, looked down at my hands. I didn’t yet have the words for it, to explain that he was now braided into my life like a strand of wax in the candle we light to mark the transition between the Sabbath and the rest of the week. And not only into my life but also into my imagination. I would have to ask Auntie Aminah about this. She was always saying that certain embroidery stitches are charmed, and that by putting them into cloth, you give the wearer the power to change her future. She also said that the past had pockets in it, and that if you knew how, you could pick and choose the things you found in those pockets and then use them for your own purposes in the present. I never questioned her mystical pronouncements, but took them at face value. What would she say if I told her I saw Asaf in my stories? And I was there too, engaged to him in ancient days, in places neither of us had ever been, speaking a foreign tongue in which both of us were oddly fluent.
    â€œWell, if you aren’t going to finish, then it’s my turn.” He lay back, put his hands behind his neck. “Did I tell you about the time my father bought frangipani petals from the one-armed man in Madras? No? Well, that was the day we were both thrown into jail. I was just four years old, and they put us in a cell with murderers, pirates, and thieves.” He talked and talked until the sun was low in the white belly of the sky. We left the cave late that day, and when I returned home, I was almost caught by my mother.
    â€œI was looking everywhere for you,” she berated me. “Where were you? I want you to make the lahuhua bread for dinner.” I was becoming a good cook, and my mother, though never one to praise me, had been relying upon me more and more in the kitchen.
    â€œI was at Masudah’s, helping her with the baby,” I lied.
    â€œBut I was just there. She said you were at Sultana’s.” Sultana had long black hair, heavy mannish eyebrows, and thin lips that always seemed to be puckered around some invisible lemon. Sultana wasn’t ugly, but she wasn’t pretty either. What she was, was kind. She would always lie for me—usually to protect me from my brothers but also to throw my mother off my trail.
    â€œI went from Masudah’s to Sultana’s. I picked up some of her eggs for Auntie Aminah. I delivered them, and then I came home.”
    My mother stared at me. She knew I was lying, but she didn’t care enough to catch me at it. Her nostrils flared, and she shook her head slightly, communicating her boredom with my excuses, her disapproval at my need to lie, and her begrudging admiration that she had raised a daughter who seemed to slip through everyone’s fingers, like water. Her eyes glazed over in the middle of my explanation, and she muttered, “Well, go wash up, and then get to work on the dough.”
    *  *  *
    That year we had gone many months without rain. By midsummer, people all over the northern mountains were going hungry. There had not been enough wheat in the fields, bulb flies killed what crops managed to grow in the parched soil, and a conflict between two of the lesser sheiks in the west was making it almost impossible for camel caravans, laden with dried fish from the coast or with citrus fruits from the lowland orchards, to make their way inland and north to the mountains. In the surrounding villages, people began to invoke the aid of Af Bri, angel of rain, asking that he seed the clouds from above with the water of the heavens. Some began to pray that Elohim would once again send down manna from the sky, as in the days of old. Instead of manna, locusts fell from the sky, and we celebrated. Locusts were a delicacy, and we fried them in samneh or roasted them on skewers and went to