Strings - Capstone Amal Al Shamsi (1)

“My hands are broken, just for you and your stupid begging,” he said, then he went
inside. He was sad about the dog, even though he felt he shouldn’t be.
The grave marker fell before the next morning, and Hamza made the school bus wait as
he ran to straighten it. But it was probably gone within the next few hours, swept away.
There was not enough space for another house on that land, or even an electricity box,
really. So it stayed barren. When one of the houses had a party, guests would occasionally park
their cars there, scraping against the trunks of the trees.
In the years to come, Hamza’s brother did not want to, but he got another dog and they
named it Ben, just Ben. It was a pitiful puppy and everyone could tell he didn’t love it at all, but
they kept it until Qasim married and moved out. He wed before Hamza left for college, at the age
of twenty-three, and it was ludicrous to think, but perhaps he just wanted to leave the house
with the replacement Big Ben.
Who knows how long they’ve been there, those palm trees. His mother lived in that
house longer than Hamza had been alive, she must know, but he never asked her. There are
those questions that he wondered about but didn’t care to ask. He didn’t want to waste her
breath, he respected her too much.
He imagined her walking in the hallways when the fire started, she had just gotten out of
the hospital and she was already antsy, not knowing where to start in the house that had
seemingly emptied itself while she was sick. She would be retrieving knick-knacks from boxes
and making them visible again on every surface, calling for dust to coat them. Arnaud used to
cram them all back into drawers, but now there was no one to enforce any type of minimalism.
This would go on for a few minutes before she got tired again and slowly took off her shoes to
succumb to sleep.
Hamza must have been at the gate, leaving his car. He had his wife’s flight on his mind.
Hamza leaned on the car door lazily, thinking of where to get those vacuum-sealed bags, Lamya
would be overjoyed to hear that she could take another coat with her. She said she’d call before
sunset, nothing yet. Would that small shopping center by the roundabout have the bags?
He heard a hissing that sharpened as he turned his head towards the gate. A wispy, gray
plume trickled upwards against the pale evening sky. He smelled heat, his ears tickled with a
new crinkling sound, almost delectable, delicious.
A light weighed on the corner of his eyes, ducking down and stretching back up. Hamza
pushed himself upwards and headed onto the street outside. The palms before him were alight.
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