Samiha Sohail

The patch of tall grass just behind her father’s hut was a favorite of Viva’s. From here, she would watch the metamorphosis of the world around her with glassy eyes: blue that reflected the sky in the North Sea, a touch of green from the trees of the Amazon. A rosy pink stolen from the English roses of Great Britain, and the red from the leaves of Canada. She would watch the grass bend and sway and curl itself into positions a human never could, the trees would wilt and grow and wilt again (MashaAllah, how strong, they are!). Even at night, where she would force her eyes open and rub the fog out because every time she blinked, she would miss a few years.


Her earliest memory was a transparent river that flowed through her cranium. Sufiya was the mountain. Refusing to leave her side in her first few months growing up, even while the adhan reached them above the rice paddies, penetrating the sunlight through the loudspeakers, her mountain would lean against the tree in a certain position that soothed her volcanic pain–“My little seedling deserves some fresh air” and water her.

That beautiful voice, she would whisper into her feet. That’s the voice of our beloved Sheikh, Musa. How young is he! Yet even he knows the Qur’an by heart. It’s called a hafiz. At least, she assumes. She cannot remember much except the look of immense love in her eyes, connecting with her own eyes, forming a river of love which she assumed she could associate with Musa’s beautiful voice. A river of love. Love, and obligation, and obligation and love.


Never had she seen so many children in love with one man. The way the girls clung to him like flies to the dead birds she watched him pluck from the sky, the way the boys hopped around him like frogs. It felt alien to her.


Musa tells her that her stretch marks, silver streaks of rice grains, are disgraceful. She looks into a river and wishes that it could wash the dirt away.


She had grown accustomed to patronizing him, praying that not once would he feel the acidic heat of the bile in her throat as he kissed it.


He gives her candies he said he got from the nearest town. She laughs with her mouth full of them.


He would coax her out of her slumber with a kiss here, a touch there. Occasionally, he would mount her. Namaaz is better than sleep.

She cannot bear to do ghusl again. She reaches out to stroke Aisha’s hair.


He hoists her onto his lap, cages her body with his hands, and opens her to him. She feels something under there. What is that? He would only chuckle. In time, he would promise. Hand me that glass of milk. Tell no one else.


Musa's self-control was the envy of the village. Fellow council members would complain about stomach pains, foot pain, their hunger for women, and he would brush them off with the blink of an eye and quick Dhikr. No one questioned him, but.


Aisha ripped from her like a branch crudely splintering from a tree. Her wet wails flooded her ears, the residue staining her hands.

“Get her away from me!” Viva sobs. “I can’t bear it!” Ashane’s new wife, Layla, takes her away without question.


There was an evil that broke through Tira Redi’s membrane. She felt it the way she woke up with her salwar soaked red, and something white and slightly yellow. Next to her, Musa shakes his head disapprovingly. You’re such a bad girl. Like dirt.


The British man named James Darcy came all the way from Colombo, said Musa once. She had no idea what all the way meant to her.

Viva never felt the flutter in her chest the way she did whenever he passed their hut during an investigation. The way it did when he found her the first time she lay in the very patch behind her father’s hut, thinking of all the ways she could use her hands for herself. The way it did whenever she straddled him and claimed that she needed to feel anything. The way it did whenever she closed her eyes, her one thought being her need to climax when he was inside her.

Touch me, she’d say, eyes half-lidded. He would. Touch me here. And here. He would. Your skin is beautiful. Your Sinhala is perfect. Consent is… sexy.

Yet in the fall of 2023, his skin smelled of the dead birds she would pet after Musa plucked them from the sky, his body stiff, uninspired. His mouth stopped reciting clumsy, sweet verses, and stopped kissing her. His hands experienced contractures, his arms locked around her, and no matter how hard she tried, she could not pry the stench off her.

Rigor mortis is a terrible thing, she realized, as she eyed the tree weeks later, watching the way the body swung in the wind, like her hair whenever she imagined the weeping willows she’d slept under in the fields of her imagination.


Allah loves you, Musa would repeat into her ear after each prayer, after every meal, every minute of the day. Every time you let me into you, you are receiving a reward. He loves when you make me happy. You’re such a good girl, Viva.

Nowhere in the Qur’an does it say she has to let him into her bed. Her stomach ached and she did it anyway. She was happy when he was happy.


Viva craved sex like the world craved rice with chicken and potatoes on the side.


Ashane never told Viva that Sufiya bore the weight of another man's terrible feelings. Bore the weight of the stones on her cranium, stones that she could never push off as her arms were tangled in the tree’s roots.


Not Aisha. No. Not her.


Viva knocked it over. The milk spilled onto the floor.