Excerpt
Touch
by Adania Shibli
Everyone manages to find black outfits to wear, except the little girl. The search for a black outfit for her, followed by an attempt to improvise one, nearly causes the family to forget their grief, so eventually the responsibility for the task falls on her.The closet door is always half open, because no one fixes it or shows any interest in fixing it.
The girl removes all the clothes from the closet and places them in the small space between the closet and the beds. The pile of clothes remains multicolored, despite what the constantly angry art teacher said—that all colors mixed together make white.
A pair of navy blue velvet pants and a wool sweater that is mostly navy blue with little bits of other colors win the black outfit contest. After she puts them on, she discovers a hole in the left knee.
On the way to the mosque, she buys a bottle of soda with a red ribbon on it, but the liquid inside is black, or closer to black than to any other color around her. She walks the rest of the way to the mosque, holding the bottle in her right hand and hiding the hole in her pants with her left.
She is the last to arrive at the mosque. When she gets there, she finds out that mother fainted and has been taken to an ambulance parked out back, so she heads in that direction.
The back door of the ambulance is open, but she cannot get to it, because a throng of women in black creates an immense barrier between her and the door. She can’t even get a glimpse of mother’s shoes. As the crowd of women in black gets bigger and bigger, she is shoved in her navy blue clothes further and further back, completely unable to resist them with her right hand holding the bottle and her left covering up the hole. She can’t let go of her pant leg, or everyone will see the hole.
The shoving gets harder and harsher, and each time her hand is almost forced from covering the hole. She presses on it harder and harder, using all her strength. Her right hand weakens its hold on the bottle, and a little black liquid leaks out with each step she takes backward.
At the end of the mosque’s grounds, the wall rises behind the girl, keeping her from being pushed back any further. She stands there looking toward the ambulance, which has no white left on it at all now because of the black drape of women. But above, on top of the ambulance, the red light keeps spinning inside itself, not veiled by anything, switching regularly from dark red to light red. She waits expectantly for its regular return to dark red, because it looks just like the red label on the empty bottle in her hand.