Strings - Capstone Amal Al Shamsi (1)

Hamza balanced himself, resting a hand against the car.
The girl looked up. He felt he had been compromised. She broke into a grin. “Oh, baba
came.” On her feet, she pushed back her hair, leaving a dusty brown streak above her eyes.
“Kick, kick, kick.” Her leg swung up and down, jolting out and spraying grass.
Jasem got up as well, a little unsteady on his feet. He repeated the same motion, grinning
wildly. It seemed violent when he did it, Hamza told him to stop.
Haya spotted the cup he was holding, hopping over while her leg continued to swing
forwards. “Can we use that?”
He told her they could, then gave it to her. He turned back into the house, feeling dizzy.
Some afternoons after that, they were eating lunch when Jasem knocked over juice into
his rice. Hamza held his mouth closed as the liquid spread across the wooden tabletop, feeling it
drip through the artisanal cracks onto his socked feet.
Perhaps in anticipation of him boiling over, Lamya shared a conspiratorial glance with
the boy. Annoyed at his wife’s misjudgement of him, Hamza licked his fork clean from the
chicken-y residue. Then, he began to stir the boy’s bowl, smiling at the way his son watched with
rapture as the rice turned pink. Haya seemed to want to laugh but covered her mouth, glancing
at her mother.
“It needs more juice,” Jasem whispered. His mother folded her arms underneath the
table.
Hamza moved his chin up towards his daughter. “Give him some of your Vimto,” he said.
Lamya’s hand lifted up his cup and poured a little more red into the boy’s bowl. They continued
this play for the rest of lunch, some of Haya’s hair even got involved.
By the end of lunch, their chairs were nestled side by side on the long, rectangle table.
Lamya got up across from them. It was Hamza that had wanted a circle table so that they could
be closer together, but Lamya found that it made no sense. She would sigh and tell him that they
would never know where to put the chairs. Certainly, it didn’t matter. She was a clever woman
that mustn’t have cared too much, but at that point, they just wanted to disagree.
Hamza remembers that feeling of getting under her nerves. He couldn’t explain it, he felt
he was being pushed away and this was his retaliation. He used to be the one that everyone
wanted to be around, then suddenly after the kids, he was this man.
“Where did you go?” Hamza called out to her. The kids laughed as they played.
“Getting a towel,” Lamya called back from the other room.
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