 Image by Benyamin Bohlouli on Unsplash in that small waiting room, each occupant half-enrobed in a somehow sinister mauve. We’ve entered curtained-off sectors and removed our tops and bras and covered ourselves in one-size-fits-alls, with their gaping necklines and tiny ties that cannot shield us. We’ve inserted our displaced clothing into our chosen lockers. Will we remember our locker numbers? We may not remember our numbers unless they’re helpfully written on the worn pieces of wood attached to our locker keys. We grip that wood more tightly than we might realize as we take our chairs, three here, four there, edging the room. We don’t think to check whether our locker numbers are written on the wood or not. Our eyes gravitate to a television in the corner, where a cooking show offers light-hearted chatter. We need that lightness because waiting in this room does not simply feed impatience. It feeds terror and prayer and a pitching of the mind, from attempted optimism to malignant imagery and all that might ensue: a biopsy proving what they’ve caught; months and months upended; slashing, burning, poisoning, weakness, visible illness; then the slow crawl back to normalcy, or as close as we can get, if we’re able to crawl at all. As they arrive or return after their names have been called, some women say hello to the others in the room. A newcomer sits with brittle poise; another, with heavy resignation. Some who’ve been here longer may know who’s yet to get any pictures and who’s waiting to hear about the results of their pictures and who’s been called back for more pictures—“the doctor just wants a few more pictures”—and who has returned from a nearby room in which ultrasounds are performed and discussions held, the one doctor on duty periodically approaching and leaving in her clicking heels. They’re the only clicking heels in the place, at least on the morning I’m talking about, so those heels in the hallway sound like doom being visited upon one of the women who had needed extra pictures. We could free our tops and bras. Try our keys in every lock. But we’d still be at risk, however we’re shaped, in whatever position we wait. So, we cede ourselves to this life-saving/-shattering process. The clicking of heels. The meting out of doom. Perhaps I shouldn’t say doom because I’ve faced and survived a breast cancer diagnosis. So far? Entering with two double As and emerging with one and three-quarters or so, without chemo. Yes, I was luckier than most. But it didn’t feel like luck at the time. And it doesn’t feel like luck now when I’m called back for more pictures—technically, “better pictures.” A very experienced mammographer has taken up my case because the minimal tissue that can be pressed between those planes of hard plastic requires an expert hand, guiding my position at the machine and positioning me within it. I spare my husband the turning knob, the ratcheting pressure on flesh, the suffocation of held breath…. He’s already wincing, and I haven’t even gotten to the worst of it yet. The worst of it, I explain, is the waiting after the second set of pictures. The heels on the floor tiles. The woman who returns after a stint in the nearby room and hopes things go well for us, all of us in the waiting room right then. Things have not gone well for her, she confesses—she cannot help but tell us—but somehow, she manages to wish the best for us. He’d asked me how things went. Could any of us have simply said, “okay”? I’m still not sure what exactly happened in that room after the woman spoke. Did someone muster a word of comfort? Did time go silent for everyone, or only me? I have a blurry image of our wounded comrade disappearing with her coat and purse. Then nothing: until I’m released with a paper bearing an “x” in the “benign appearing” box. Perhaps my desperate relief could be seen in the shiver of my key, the clutching of my things, the haste with which I abandoned our uniform. I had no words for anyone else just then. I wanted every second left for myself.
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 Image by Stefan Cosma on Unsplash They told me not to go alone. The locals at the diner leaned in when I asked about the trail. Old woods, they said. Best left quiet. But I am not a believer in ghost stories, and my grief needed silence. My sister had loved hiking—she died in a hospital bed, sterile and still. I wanted to give her something better. I brought her ashes in a tin and took the path marked by stone and moss. The forest greeted me with stillness, and for a while, that was enough. My boots softened into the dirt, birds muttered in the canopy, and I whispered my sister's name as I scattered ashes beneath a red pine that looked a thousand years old. Then I turned to leave. And the path was gone. Not overgrown. Gone. The stones I would step over—vanished. The way I came curled behind me like a fern folding into itself. The sun was dipping fast, and the trees had shifted. Taller now. Closer. I did not panic. I had a compass. I had done this before. But the compass spun. The needle twitched like it was afraid to choose. My phone flickered dead in my hand. When I started walking, the forest seemed to inhale. Every step deeper felt like sinking. The birds no longer muttered, and the pines stopped rustling. There was a sound behind me, soft as fur, quick as breath, but when I turned, nothing moved. That night, I made camp without fire. I dreamed of my sister. Only her skin was bark, and her eyes were hollow knots, and said, I am still here, you know. I never left. When I woke, pine needles were on my pillow that had not been there before. On the second day, I tried to mark my trail. I carved notches into trunks, broke small branches, and laid out stones. But the forest closed them behind me. Trees stood whole again when I looked back. My trail was being swallowed. The sound returned that night—closer. I stayed awake, listening to my breath and the sound of something else breathing. By the third day, my mind was cracking. I could not tell if the whispers were wind or voices. I saw faces in the bark. I heard my name in the crunch of leaves. Leila, they said: my sister's voice. Leila, stay. When I ran, the forest ran with me. Trees blurred. The light filtered strangely, like through stained glass. I tripped. Cut my knee. When I stood, I was back at the red pine. The ashes were gone. In their place was a hollow in the earth, pulsing gently—like a heartbeat. I understood then. The forest remembered her. It had taken her. It was offering me the same mercy. I knelt. The earth was warm. I do not remember lying down, only the softness of moss and the weight of pine needles falling like snow. I felt bark bloom along my skin, roots threading through my veins. I felt her beside me in soil, in sap, in song. We are quiet now, but we are not gone. We listen when you enter. We bend the trees. We hide your path. And if your grief hums like ours once did, we might call you closer. We are what the pines remember. Zainab Khamis is a Bahraini writer whose work has appeared in the Inlandia Institute, Vermilion, and The Progenitor Art & Literary Journal. She won first place in Bahrain’s Young Authors Contest (2024) and was recognized by The New York Times “My List” contest. Her writing explores identity, memory, and belonging.
 Sons, the grandfather who didn't live long enough to meet you asks me in Winston 100 smoke-rings whisper what you're like. He's sitting in his powder blue recliner - the one where he watches the News at 10 & then The Benny Hill Show before the orange smolder of his cigarette butt fades to a flicker in the black plastic ashtray that rests on a folding table by his left arm. His smoke circles like an oasis & disappears & he falls asleep doing this routine each night of the week. I struggle for adjectives & adverbs to describe you guys as I blink through tears & IVs hearing my dad, gone 30-plus years, question me in a fog of words & discordant machines emitting metronome noises over the air conditioner's hum. My old man's only son describing his sons to a ghost in a blue post office button down short sleeve work shirt, thick bifocals in tortoise shell frames & all I want to tell him is how I've been & what I've done & that I'm ok. But we'll catch up soon, Dad. Knowing we'll grab a bagel & instant coffee somewhere soothes me as the nurses recycle in symphonic movements, adjusting my drips, checking off charts at the foot of my bed. I may be crying. This room may be raining. What's left of my eyes dances between you three, my sons now guardians, as you look to the nurses & then back to me & the monitors & back at me & my eyes flutter like shutters in summer storms, my lips like a vacant orbit, a vapor whisper. Dad.
 My mother spat me out when realized she couldn’t digest me. Pushed until all traces of fermented beauty and soured anger had been expelled. I think a part of her was relieved when I stubbornly screwed my mouth and refused to suckle on the very body that I came from. It started small, as all things do. She would feed me jaundiced milk formula in pink bottles. Pulpy pea and pureed black beans. Sips of stories of birds with human faces that brought death to crying babies. Soggy bread and milk-soaked crackers. Cloying nightly prayers to the people in the paintings on our altar. Raspberries mashed to look like emboluses and slimy banana disks. Warnings of disembodied hands, hungry for fat infant ankles. This was before my baby teeth had burst like rice grains from the banks of my gums. She later began feeding me pasta, soft like animal entrails smothered in red sauce and small helpings of self-doubt about my scabby legs. Fish with spines like lice-combs and eyes that popped like gummy candies. Legends about moon-faced ladies with animal feet who called men like my father into the forests. Bowls of bone broth frothing with wilting greens, cooked with languishing love and gossip about the kind of women we shouldn’t be. Whatever she fed me, she measured. I survived like this until I gorged on what I wanted. By the time I turned fifteen, my pallet had expanded to soft, tongue-like seafood boiled in blighting spice leaves and nibbles of straight romance novels stolen from my mother’s shelves. I sucked dribbling white chocolate from my fingers and chicken bones after ripping the pink meat off. Slurped drinkable yogurts, picked at pomegranate seeds, gnawed on toughened jerky. Sometimes my mother still served me berations candied in sweeter, back-handed compliments about the acne scars that peppered my cheeks and dough that molded over my frame. After I left home, I acquired the taste of waxy lipstick from the lips of one-night stands and the briny wetness from between their legs. The salt of sweat mixed with perfume that I lapped from collarbones and the metallicness of ringed fingers. I could now have my fill. When I visit my mother now, I feed her a daughter she can stomach. One she won’t regurgitate into my lap and tell me to clean up. Spoonfuls of a daughter that doesn’t fuck girls, that won’t get stuck between the gaps of her twisted teeth. I add salt when she tells me that I am not enough, that I could have been more. I add sugar when she says I need a man in my life to fix me, to satiate the hunger all women have. I bite my tongue until it bleeds and my mouth begins to rust. I think perhaps I could leave her here, to waste away and let the ulcer in her stomach eat her from the inside out.
 Image Via Pixabay AlkeMade Flooded twenty years ago, abandoned, now the castle slumps like a collapsed birthday cake, the jungle boat run aground, Peter Pumpkin Eater’s cracked concrete shell filled with dry vines, leaves rattling, too much like snakes. We trespass. She points her phone, snapping while I throw empty beer bottles of my 12 pack behind me, hear them bounce on gravel. “Dad’s here,” she says. “Somewhere.” A waste of a Saturday to hunt his belligerent ghost. And why here? Sure, we visited twice the year we lived with him. Surprise afternoons of freedom from Wilson Elementary, we headed through the mountains with a canteen of coffee, ham sandwiches coated in mustard, wrapped in aluminum foil. My sister hated mustard but forgets this to glorify our adventures. “Remember, the stagecoach picture? In a frame on his desk forever?” It was the 70’s, people couldn’t scroll memories or pass them back and forth like insults as they can now. It took effort to have a photo developed, printed, framed. I was not smiling in this picture, having just been stung by a bee as I climbed into the velvety cabin of the stagecoach. My arm throbbing and tears near the surface, I thrust myself out the window because missing the picture, crying over a bee sting might ruin the whole day, might get me walked to the car, Dad’s fingers tight around my arm, my feet barely touching the ground, his rage over my betrayal strong, like the smell of dirty laundry, strong like his hand reaching for his belt to signal some rule we were breaking. With four beers left, I find a bench under an oak tree, and lean my head back. The bark a maze of deep rivulets and shadows, uneven as I drink and rest, drink and close my eyes, drink and let the memories fade as much as they will. She talks to herself, searching and snapping, hoping, although I suspect she might not really believe herself. Point the camera here, I could tell her. Find your ghost here in my blood, my throat, my birthright to be who he was, the set of my lips, too often the slump of my shoulders when I look in the mirror at all the broken promises. “Come on,” my sister insists, kicking my foot to get me up. I open one eye, roll my latest empty down the length of the bench and watch it skitter across the grass. There is almost a buzz going, the quiet tingle I can trace up and down my body until it lets me rest, like I’m a shirt slowly ironed free of wrinkles. “You’re so much like him,” she says, no longer pleading. “I know.” This moldy truth is not comfortable. I pat the space beside me, feel the bench take her weight, only a slight shift but then she’s leaning against me, solid, real, our bodies almost the same size now. I reach in the box, hand her a beer, and wait.
 Image via Pixabay by fernandozhiminaicela She flattened her back against the wall, arms planted and slightly askew, fingers splayed, head pressed in profile like a cartoon character, or maybe more like an FBI agent about to leap around the corner, gun cocked. The remains of a potted plant lay recklessly across the floor and up the wall where earth and leaf lingered. Just moments before the upheaval, the pot had sat steady on the corner of a counter and the plant reached its limbs towards artificial light. She was mad, my mother. She said she was going to strangle herself with her purse, drown herself in the pool, throw herself under a bus.After hurling the potted plant, she went for Agnes and grabbed her around the neck until frantic caregivers pried her away. It’s the disease, Connie said, when she called. Don’t worry, she said, it’s the disease, she said. We all love your mother, and I loved her for saying that, but my hands flew to my face, and my insides tumbled and spilled across the floor. ~ Connie, the assisted living director, told me I was their poster girl. I brought sunshine in the door and laughter to the fourth floor. She told me I didn’t fuss around playing nursemaid. I visited. I danced. I sang. I read books. I dressed up and hula-hooped. I wasn’t afraid to come and have fun. But I was afraid. I was afraid every time I visited my mother. I was afraid of my mother’s dementia, afraid of her pain, afraid of not knowing what to do, of not doing enough, of not being able to delight her the way I had always been able to do. I was afraid of saying goodbye. She hated goodbye. “I won’t be here when you get back,” my mother said to me. And she shouted my name down the elevator shaft and I could hear her from the ground floor. On the fourth floor, the dementia floor, the knives, the scissors, and the hammer were locked behind glass in green felt pockets. But you can’t lock up someone’s hands, or stop them from kicking, or throwing a glass, or heaving a potted plant. ~ She was sad, my mother. A caregiver had encouraged me to leave while my mother read, Paddle to the Sea, with Ester, another kind caregiver. “Your mother is distracted,” she said. This might be a good time for you to slip away.” “But I didn’t say goodbye. And she might come looking for me.” “It might be easier this way. She won’t remember you were here.” But she did. I slipped out while Ester read, “The Canadian wilderness was white with snow.” I backed out of the room and ran to the exit and pressed the secret code and snuck down the back stairs like a thief and left my mother paddling to the sea with Ester. But, I didn’t say goodbye. I didn’t say, I love you, Mummy, and she didn’t say, I love you, back. Just before Christmas, my mother woke in the middle of the night, and in bare feet and a yellow smocked nightgown, she traipsed after Helen, a new fourth floor resident. My mother followed Helen down a dimly lit hall and tapped her on the back. “Where are you going?” my mother said. Tap Tap Tap. But Helen, her long grey hair pulled back in a ponytail, didn’t turn or speak. My mother tapped Helen again and again and Helen swung around and shoved my mother with both hands and my mother tumbled to the floor, her right leg crumpled beneath her. Fractured. At three in the morning, I found my broken mother in a hospital cubicle, shivering without a sheet. She waved her left arm in the air, clutched her right leg with her right hand and cried, “Hello. Hello. Somebody!” “Oh, Mum, I’m here. I’m right here.” ~ I woke up beside my mother on St Patrick’s Day, her favourite day, and I finger painted her chapped lips with a drop of white wine and fastened a shamrock pendant around her neck. She died at noon. When the coroner arrived, she insisted on an autopsy. “Oh, please don’t do that,” I said. “Please. She’s been through enough.” But the coroner said they needed to know the cause of death. They needed to know if it was Helen’s fault. “It’s no one’s fault,” I said. “It’s the disease.”
 Image via Unsplash, Claude Gabriel When my grandmother’s hands hurt too much to play the piano, she lost her will to live. She began to forget. In the middle of duets, her hands dropped off the keyboard. Notes transformed themselves to dots, melodies to monotone. We kept turning the pages to try something else. We never made it to the end. She forgot the way downstairs to the pool, and whether she’d washed the strawberries. She forgot where the cabinets were, and the refrigerator, the names of the cards when we tried to play gin rummy. The air in her apartment grew dank. She wouldn’t open the door to the balcony. The ocean humidity might hurt the Steinway. My daughter now sits at the piano, yelling at fingers that will not hit the right notes—her eyes, my eyes, daggers as we struggle through duets. She will not wait for the right time to come in, and sometimes, neither will I. She yells at the piano, at me, at her hands, strawberry red and raw from winter. My daughter complains that the keys on our piano buzz, stick, reverberate. I tell her to tune it out, the way I tuned out my grandmother’s hands, her pained fingers falling into the wrong places. When my daughter was little, she used to sit on my grandmother’s lap, her chubby hands slapping at the Steinway. My grandmother would follow her as she toddled around the edge of the pool in a dark green dress that barely covered the edge of her diaper, the two of them sporting the same opened-mouth smile. “I always wanted a girl,” she said. It took my grandmother over a year to die, several months to forget her words—one note, one phrase at a time until all was silent. No notes. No words. Only once after weeks of empty measures did she utter a lilt of syllables, my daughter’s name. Clear and in tune, I could see them again, the day they disappeared into the bedroom like sisters and came back in silver party hats. My grandmother yelled, “March,” and somewhere on the Steinway, I found some chords, a march rhythm, 1-2-3-4 all the way to the balcony, where beyond the pool, the ocean was so perfectly blue, she even agreed to open the door. Just a crack. Just for a moment.
 image by Ryan Chan via Unsplash after the illustration by Sybille Von Olders (Germany) before 1916 I. This rabbit has too many children. Even if this may be the common case with rabbits, the picture is far too rosy. The ten rabbit children look like they’re on the brink of prancing. They're on two feet, not four, and holding each other’s hands. Again, a rosy choice. Did this mother rabbit have the choice to bear all these children? II. In Germany, where this picture originated, abortion is technically illegal, but unpunished during the first twelve weeks–as long as you’re not too explicit. The picture is dated before 1916, but what happened in the 1930s—or in the 1940s, especially to children who didn’t have pure Aryan blood? Was there an urge to abort? A surge to abort? How many women pranced happily pregnant in ghettos until the soldiers came to take them away? III. What does a baby think when it draws its first cry in a refugee camp in Rwanda? In a war zone in Ukraine? Or Gaza? When does that moment of pure innocence and infinite possibility first start to cloud over, like the feeling of the real world pricking hard at your edges after you’ve just come back from vacation? So much better to be in a painting like these happy rabbits prancing in paradise, which, on vacation, you try to capture with the snap of a camera as you tell yourself, this matters: this moment, where you can be as happy as the rabbit children. IV. Before they get to the water, the rabbits must pass through a grove of trees whose trunks are so close together they look like prison bars. Beyond the trees is an open field, where the ground changes to a brighter green with yellow hues, brightened at the top by sky. Though the air takes up more than half the canvas, our eyes are drawn groundward to the happy rabbits, whose mother never had a choice whether or not to have them. Two of the rabbits have human faces. In the story, these are children the rabbit mother rescued and made rabbit suits to keep them warm. The children are in the lead, as if the artist is saying that humans, like Aryans, will always be superior. But nevertheless, let’s give the artist the benefit of the doubt. She wants things to be pretty. She wants the rabbits to be happy. She is letting the rabbits pass through the pressed together trees out toward the water, its wide expanse of promise.
 Photo by Eric Prouzet on Unsplash I have oil stains on my frayed hem. On Fridays I smell sour, metallic. On Saturdays I smell like Tide detergent. On Sundays my fabric grows stiff. On good days, after vegetable picking and an early lunch, I smell like sunshine and air when I am hung outside. The family is at Clam King, and the little girl eats grilled cheese. I hate it because I am not there, I am not being worn, I am the workday armor. I am not needed at Clam King. I am outside a house, hanging in the sun, dancing in the wind as if I were not strong at all, as if I were beautiful. I am not made for sunshine; I am not made for dancing. I am armor, and I feel forgotten. I see the man when he comes home. Beige pants. Pleated and embarrassing. He pretends he does not need armor; he pretends that he can wear loafers and laugh over lunch. He will wear me again soon, but I don’t recognize him without me. I see questioning postures and a laugh that doesn’t meet his eyes. Those days of beige pant performances were like a school play where everyone forgets their lines. The little girl cries. The mommy gets drunk on bloody marys and the man is not wearing the right costume. During summer they take day trips. I go to the beach, I am navy blue, and hot in the sun, unable to soak in the saltwater. I am a bog, I am a shield, I am armor. The little girl looks at me funny, so dark against his pale skin. He takes off his shirt but slouches his shoulders. Tucks himself in and under an umbrella. I did not get removed. Not here. The little girl hates me, she doesn’t understand why I am not a pair of Bermuda shorts, with bright florals that scream and laugh in the waves. Sea mist and boardwalks. She does not know why I am not a swimsuit. Saltwater and chafed thighs. The little girl crawls on the sand, puts her head under the green nylon chair, she stares at my navy blue the way it punches out of the spaces in the fabric. Both a blindfold and a bullet. She hates me. She hates me because she has never seen her father’s knees. She hates me because she has heard the words shrapnel, she has heard the words scars, but she doesn’t know what that means, she doesn’t know what I protect. She doesn’t know I am armor with oil-stained hems, I fight an invisible battle, an invisible war. I cover legs that didn’t walk for months, I cover legs with wounds that never quite heal, wounds that are wrapped tight, wounds that smell like almonds, and swamp water. She is a little girl; I am armor.
 Photo by Mahdi Mahmoodi on Unsplash “You can’t go through there,” Jason shouts across the rooftop pool. The girl, who’d been blissfully unaware of the rule she was breaking, quickly removes her hands from the door, revealing the words “Emergency Exit. Alarm Will Sound.” The door snaps shut with a metallic click. “Oh, I am so sorry! I thought this was the way back inside.” Jason nods his head, flashing her his charming grin. “Other set of doors, sweetie. That one’s the emergency staircase.” She blushes and nods back shyly before maneuvering around the pool. I lift my glass to my lips. “There wasn’t an alarm.” Jason turns his head towards me but doesn’t take his eyes off the girl. “What?” “The alarm. It didn’t go off.” He finally blinks out of his flirtatious stupor and glares at me. “Anika, what the hell are you talking about?” I take another sip, this one burning down my throat. “Nothing.” “Yeah, you’re always doing that. Talking about nothing.” I look away from him. My vision blurs, and the dozen or so people in the pool become nothing more than colorful blobs. Girls’ giggles sound shrill in my ears, men’s voices too deep and grating. I notice another couple, like us, is standing by the railing. The man leans in close to the woman. She smiles like she means it. “You want a beer?” Jason asks. “No.” “What, so you’re only gonna have water?” I swirl the liquid in my glass. “I don’t like beer.” He knows this. “Well, you could at least try something else.” “I told you I didn’t want to come here.” I start to walk away. “Oh right, Anika, because everything’s about you, huh? You can’t do a single—” Jason grips my arm tight and pulls me back to him as one of his friends approaches us. He leans in close, lips grazing my ear. “Act right for once. Can you do that?” he says through gritted teeth. I do not hear anything Jason or the friend say. I do not look at Jason’s blindingly white smile, pay no mind to the fingers tightening around my bicep. Whenever a fingernail digs into my skin, I know to smile, know to laugh, know to nod. I am here but I am not. I am looking past the friend’s head, at how beautiful the sky looks at this time of day. The sun is low and dyes the clouds pink, purple, orange. Orange is my favorite color. I am wearing green, Jason’s favorite. “Anika,” Jason snaps, and I come back. The friend smiles apologetically. “I was just asking if you’re enjoying the party.” I smile. I will have a bruise on my arm when I get home tonight. “Of course.” “‘Of course?’” Jason hisses when the friend has walked away. “Not even an idiot would’ve believed that.” I lean back against the railing. The metal is cool against the skin of my back. I look over my shoulder at a bird perched on the railing further down from us. “Are you even listening to me?” The bird dives for the street below. “Do you ever wish—” “Wish what? Wish my girlfriend wasn’t such a buzzkill?” He laughs, loud, but he makes it sound so genuine. He throws his head back, smiling so wide, anyone would think I’d just told him the funniest joke. “Yeah, all the time, Anika. All the damn time.” I close my eyes. The sun is warm on my face. “Jason, I want to leave.” “Of course you do. You always want to leave. And what if you did? If you just got up and left my best friend’s party? How would that look?” I hardly notice the rest of what he says. All I can hear is What if you did? What if you did? A gong clanging in my head. Jason leans against the railing beside me. He jerks his chin out at a girl in the water, the same one who’d opened the wrong door. She smiles and waves to him. He grins back, and he says to me, “I give you everything, Anika. I do everything for you. What more could you want?” The metal no longer feels cold against my back. I lean into it, looking up into the sky. The clouds are all orange, all orange, all mine. There are no sirens, no alarms going off in my head, when I make the decision: I am going to leave him. “Anika!” he screams when I am already falling.
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