Strings - Capstone Amal Al Shamsi (1)

Thief
When the day reset, he decided he’d swing by the school. Hamza picked up the hat on his
bed and turned it around in his hands. Haya said this would look stylish on him. She also held
the belief that umbrellas were for people with empty hands.
He moved to the mirror in the living room and stopped in front of it for a moment. His
eyes fell on his figure which bumped into the frame on either side of the mirror. He was
becoming pudgy and could no longer pin the blame onto the broadness of his chest and
shoulders, the manly build onto which fists would thump and girls would sometimes linger, he
would like to think.
Hamza felt brave and mustered a look at his face, it was not bad. His beard, tended to
and spruced up with some oil, helped significantly. He practiced a small smile, just because.
Although he looked like a fresh new print of his father’s father’s original stencil, he had his
mother’s cunning ways, her wiliness.
On his head, the hat looked good. It cast a flattering shadow over his wrinkled forehead
and the crow’s feet next to his eyes. When he tilted his head upwards, he was unrecognizable. It
sat atop the dark curls, pushing them down to the sides of his head. He itched his ear. They were
large and stuck out. Receivers, one could call them. He was a good listener because words got
stuck in the spirally shape.
It was enough. Hamza didn’t want his day to turn sour so he shook his head vigorously.
Impressive, he thought, the hat stayed on for the most part.
He wore it to the school. The hat did a fair job of trapping little droplets in its folds. The
children were all in stitches as he walked into the classroom, perhaps because of the hat itself or
the way he had whipped it off so that it sprayed them with the ensnared rain.
“Mister!” they all cried. The boy in the front held his head with wide eyes.
“Oh, don’t worry, the gel is waterproof, no?” Hamza asked with a chuckle.
He particularly liked the moment that the children’s mirth was instantly erased when he
pulled out a stack of arithmetic worksheets, like a magician and a rabid rabbit. “What? Let the
rain tell you the answers, like morse code,” he grinned as he handed it to the boy with the
gelled-down curls.
When it was lunchtime, they moved out onto the courtyard.
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