Strings - Capstone Amal Al Shamsi (1)

Hamza had somehow perfected the teacher squat, he could hold it for a whole rambling
story of what a kid did over the weekend while two other kids were pulling at his wrist and a
fourth bumped into him while sprinting to the swings.
“Why did you do that?” he asked the kid who had been artfully narrating how he had
thrown away his mother’s cheesecake.
“Wait, it wasn’t me. Now I remember. It was my bigger brother,” the kid was saying, then
turned to the girl next to him, “All my cousins come over when my mom makes it.”
Hamza opened his mouth to give his condolences to the cake when another girl cried out
that she had just remembered her new cat. She badgered Hamza to call her father to remember
to feed it.
It was a long matter but once it was settled, Hamza gingerly stood up, making a show of
stretching his legs to the delight of the amused children who ducked away. He knew the children
liked him because he let them be. Did that make him a good teacher or a bad one? He wasn’t
there to really teach in any case.
Sometimes, the students would just play tug-of-war with his ears. Yet, Hamza enjoyed it.
He enjoyed how for a moment, everything goes.
“She was doing ​eeee​, so I was going ​eee​,” as Talia adequately put it.
On the courtyard, Hamza was picking sunflower seeds with his teeth on a bench while he
kept watch over the children. Any snack that took a while to unravel and consume, that was the
best for Hamza. He thought, it’s just like music, it’s all worth it when it builds up to that
crescendo of the chorus. Admittedly, he knew nothing about music and was by all measures
tone-deaf.
The kids were not giving him any reason to be concerned. He wandered around the gate,
working on the seeds and thinking of a movie he had seen the previous day. It was not often that
everything was as it should be. He got bored. Leaving the bag of sunflower seeds on his
designated bench, he approached some of the children. There had to be something.
“Where’s Eisa?” he asked, offering the children some of the sunflower seeds from his
open palm.
They shook their heads, one of them pulled out a rubbery sweet from their mouth.
“Maybe he skipped ahead and has a job now,” she offered before pushing the sweet back into her
mouth.
Hamza looked at them. “You’re hiding him?” They were good, but Hamza was a little
better.
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