Strings - Capstone Amal Al Shamsi (1)

with reverence. But that was another layer of lies. Why was he even wearing shoes to bed? He
thought. He tried to distance himself further from the decidedly offensive act.
Still, Hamza watched dream Hamza make a pained face before he reached out a hand to
the son. His legs are too long, and his feet too far away, and he never reaches. The man was
putting on the stolen shoes that seemed so comically large on his feet. Next, he dusted off his
own pair of ugly sneakers which hissed in his hold. He managed to roll them up neatly and slide
them into his father’s breast pocket where they continued to squirm.
Hamza recalled waiting for the man to speak. Standing there, above him, it was his son
He could speak again, somehow, taking time in between words to swallow the warm liquid
pooling on his tongue. “Are you finished?” he asked. There were tiny phantom teeth in his gums
that sharply pinched his tongue as he spoke.
The boy was pressing both palms down on his father’s chest. Hamza felt this action was
redundant, as he was already incapacitated and undermined. The man was just reaching for
excess. Jasem’s face split into a scowl that rendered him unrecognizable, no longer the spitting
image of his father. Hamza tried to reach his hands up to hold the man’s face in place, to keep it
that way. Jasem swatted his hands away.
“I keep forgetting how foolish you are, it’s a little insulting, isn’t it, baba?” he asked.
Hamza was thinking of shoes in animal encasings, of a clever woman in a crisp blouse
offering a tour of the Metropolitan Museum. Maybe this thinking was in retrospect. They
identified people in mass graves by their shoes, the woman was saying. He had made a joke that
caused her to smile and pull him aside at the end. He wished that he could remember what he
had said.
The boy looked at Hamza as if he had spoken. Hamza just wanted him to leave at this
point.
They were back in the cave, light was pouring in from different angles. Hamza was
digging his thumb into the dirt.
“I said, when I die, they will think it’s you.”
Hamza didn’t understand. Wasn’t it supposed to be the opposite? That was why people
became parents.
“Don’t lose my teeth,” Hamza said because he thought that would be a real pity.
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