Strings - Capstone Amal Al Shamsi (1)

Hamza leaned his head back exaggeratedly as if to take a deep breath away from his
daughter’s fumbling while his daughter cackled and kept a firm grip on his collar.
“Hamza.”
“Haya, haya. Your mother will not do her best tomorrow if you choke me to death. My
neck is too fat for that,” he said, scooping her up and managing to twist her around so she was
sitting on his lap properly, facing her mother.
Lamya looked at them for a while and set her papers down beside them.
Hamza dropped his shoulders. “Huh? We were just getting ready,” he began to say, but
she began to walk to the kitchen. “Come on, don’t lead us on like this. We want to hear it,” he
called after her.
He turned to his daughter. “ Yeah, Haya?” His daughter was leaning her full weight
against his chest. Her colorful clips scratched at the underside of his chin.
“What is it about?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” Hamza admitted, “We were just getting to it.”
Lamya came back with a glass of water and she stood at the doorway, sipping at it.
“I’ll start reading it myself, Lamya. Do you want me to butcher your master work?”
She smiled and shook her head. “I was just thinking. I remembered Faisal is going to be
there. So I need to add something.”
“The person who always asks the stupid questions?”
“They’re not stupid, just make me look stupid.”
“Is he a magician? That’s not possible,” Hamza told her. He picked up her papers but she
walked over and asked for them back. “Are we not getting our show?”
She left a kiss on Haya’s cheek and took a seat on the chair next to them. “Mhm.”
“Is that better?” she asked. She was holding the papers with both hands, for a moment
she seemed torn between setting them down and holding them higher.
Hamza was sitting on their bed. He needed a while to unzip his lips, to revert to his
natural state.
“I just thought he’d ask about the policy in between, you know, restricting movements of
non-degradable materials between states,” she said, dropping her hair. He watched it fall, clump
around her shoulders before snaking down. “What do you think?”
“It’s clever,” he said. “Now, he can’t tell you anything.”
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