Hoomins and Other - Wardah Abbas

One-thirty midnight,

I dragged myself out of bed,

swallowed pills with flat, warm soda

and hitched my bones backwards

into the fevered room where Mama lay,

hot as a stove left burning to the coil.

Baba, eyes pleading,

stood in the doorway, rehearsed helplessness

dripping from his tongue:

“Just try, and you can rest after.”

I watched her drag her feet down the passageway,

dull-eyed, skinning yam tubers with fingers that shook like an earthquake,

sinking against the kitchen floor

until her back hit the plastered wall,

heaving and gasping between strokes of the knife.

Weeks before, she had washed his sick body

in the bathroom tub,

spoon-fed him broth,

tucked the sheets tight to his chin.

But when my own temperature spiked,

Mama yanked me up by the elbow, snapping,

"A woman has no sick days."

Once, watching Baba bleed from an open wound,

AstaghfiruLlah! I pressed a cold kitchen knife to my own wrist,

waiting to see if the liquid spilling out was blue-

proof we were entirely different species,

that Baba was human and we were something… other,

blue blood, iron and pulse-less,

no bones made of calcium;

some quiet, enduring thing built to crack without a sound.

The bright red spilled across my palm.

Perhaps my eyes were simply smoked out,

rolling blind in their sockets,

and we are not hoomin after all—

just strange things dropped into a world of hoomins;

sewn with a different thread

on the wrong side of the cloth

waiting for the ground to give way.