Strings - Capstone Amal Al Shamsi (1)

Lamya looked at him sideways, picking up some of the empty bottles and placing them in
boxes carefully. She seemed to want to say something. Instead, when she was done, she reached
out a socked foot to wipe away the oil from the floor. They traded looks and laughed quietly.
They spent some time like this, cleaning up the house. His wife stayed close to him for
the first hour, maybe trying to gauge his level of comfort. Then, she moved upstairs, from room
to room, much quicker than he did. She moved past his mother’s bedroom, leaving the door
closed.
There were pieces of paper everywhere. In the drawers, he found the paint handprints
that he and his siblings had made in school, sealed in glossy plastic. They were such a silly thing
to keep, that could be any child’s miniature blue fingers. Hamza would toss them away if they
hadn’t had his mother’s notes around them, deciphering the smudged prints. She loved palms
and reading them, to the disdain of much of his father’s family as well as her own. It was a grave
disobedience. But they couldn’t call her a liar. She was either good, meaning that she was some
sort of heathen, or bad, meaning she was just lucky most of the time.
Hamza never doubted that she was wonderful.
He could see her writing, but didn’t have the heart to read it. He felt he would be letting
her down in some way, if he saw that she had predicted for his or his siblings’ lives to go
differently. Now she was gone, she couldn’t change her mind or modify her divinations. Why
point out the mistakes of the dead?
He put the papers on the floor like he put everything else that he didn’t know whether to
keep or throw away. There were growing piles all across the house. He trusted that Lamya would
come around and decide on his behalf.
He met her halfway up the stairs as she was climbing down, barely seen behind two large
boxes. “Give me, I’ll put them outside,” he told her.
“These are to keep.”
“Why?”
Lamya continued down the stairs, gently putting the boxes down. “When are the men
coming for the furniture?”
His brothers were keeping the furniture, using a few pieces in their house, probably, and
storing the rest. They had arranged moving men to handle big things like that. “Sunset,” he told
her. “Tell them not to touch the carpet downstairs.”
“Do you want to keep it?”
“Not especially. We need somewhere to sit when the rest come.”
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