Not Unlike Escargot

Gaberielle hadn’t yet arrived when I came to sit at our usual table in the far corner of the cafeteria. I set out the Tupperware containers of lunch I’d made for the both of us and then folded my hands in my lap, determined to wait for her before starting to eat, myself, even though my stomach was protesting the delay. I examined my hands, freshly washed and still fragrant, nails trimmed just this morning. I wondered if maybe I could recite bismillah while I waited, seeing as Gaberielle didn’t take part in that ritual, anyway, but decided against it. She had her own prayers to say before eating, and I wouldn’t want to start before her, anyway.

We were a bit of an anomaly, as far as the stereotypical way of things was concerned. On the one hand, you had me, a Muslim immigrant from Iraq and therefore an outcast in the tiny religious town we both lived in. Gaberielle, on the other hand, was the eldest daughter of the town’s most prominent family and as such considered to automatically be a devout Catholic. In truth, Gaberielle was more than a little bit disillusioned with the idea of religion, but this reality was well masked by her mother’s careful efforts to appear to be the perfect Christian family. That Gaberielle was having doubts was none of her mother’s concern; it only mattered that the outside community thought of things. As though it were other men, fallible and ignorant, who were the judges of faith, rather than God Himself. The idea of it left a bitter taste in my mouth.

Not to say that I didn’t doubt religion myself, sometimes. It was hard not to blame Allah when things I felt or saw were unjust. It was hard not to be tempted into believing Science and religion were incompatible and in competition. It was hard to see the terrible things carried out in the name of Islam and wonder why Allah had allowed them to occur even though they were blasphemous. It was hard to endure taunts and teases as a child and later, accusations of allowing myself and all womankind to be oppressed, because I chose to wear the hijab. It was hard to be thought of as the bride of terrorists. Unlike Gaberielle, though, my mother didn’t ignore my doubt just as long as no one else saw it. My mother loved me, understood that even if the community was oblivious to my doubt, Allah saw it, and that it was His opinion that mattered, not theirs. She valued my happiness, the happiness I could only get by worshipping Allah, over some selfish happiness for herself that could be gained by having the approval of some community. And that was why she nurtured me, guided me, held me when I cried, prayed with me and for me and showed me to where I could find the truth in the Quran but also in the world around me.

The scrape of a chair being pulled out from the table and the audible thud of someone sitting in it caused me to look up from my thoughts, smiling gently in the way I always did when Gaberielle arrived. She was tense all the time, but I found merely smiling at her, offering her food and saying nothing, would often cause her to relax enough that we might share polite conversation. We were both private girls, and the grittier parts of our friendship, her issues with her mother and possible eating disorder, and my constant battle with the roll I forced myself to play (the shining Muslim girl—quiet, polite, conciliatory—even though I was, beneath the surface, quite stubborn, even brash) went largely unspoken. We dealt with our problems not by discussing them with one another, but rather by simply being around one another, accepting and supportive.
When I looked up, however, it was not Gaberielle sitting across from me. Straddling the backwards chair was a male classmate, leaning onto the table toward me and smiling in a way that made me bristle. I instinctually reached for the loose portion of my tan hijab that normally draped around my neck, pulling it up with one hand to shroud my nose and mouth. It took all my effort not to glower or shout; I managed to control myself enough to settle with an arch expression of distaste. Men smiling would never offend me, usually, but this one, a lolling half smirk, smug and assuming, reminded me too much of a cartoon drawing of a wolf trying to seduce a sheep.

“Are you a transfer student?” he asked, unhindered by my reaction and still smiling, leaning closer, even. He had an accent. . . French?

“No,” I replied briskly. I almost added a ‘why do you ask?’ but decided it would be better for my temper if I didn’t engage him in unnecessary conversation.

He ran a hand through his perfectly-coiffed blond hair, arching a carefully plucked eyebrow at me in silent invitation. “Then why haven’t I seen you around?” he purred. His expression, though, asked a different question: ‘Why haven’t you thrown yourself at me yet?’

I chose not to respond. My stomach was churning. I wanted to make a scene, embarrass him, tell him off, swear at him, spit at him, push his face away with my left hand. Instead, I sat very still behind the shield of my improvised veil, wishing, as I often did, that I had a crass older brother to defend me at times like these.

“Don’t talk much?” he prompted, and then shrugged and continued before I could respond, “That’s okay. Most girls who spend time with me find they don’t need to.” That disgusting smile.

My patience ran out. “You’re obscene,” I hissed. His blue eyes flashed, and for a moment he looked taken aback at the thought that a girl was able to refuse his charms, but then he smiled dismissively, leaning back with a shrug.

“I’ll be around, Princess Jasmine,” he offered over his shoulder as he walked away.

“Thanks for the warning, Iago,” I muttered behind my veil, glowering at his back as he disappeared into the crowd of students, though truth be told the annoyingness of a squawking parrot didn’t do him justice.

Gaberielle approached, just then, turning the chair around carefully and seating herself. She noticed the expression in my eyes, the hiding of my face behind the veil, and smiled a sort of lopsided smile.

“That’s Luc Fourcade,” she said in an uncharacteristically easy voice, smoothing out the wrinkles over the lap of her long black skirt. “He considers us religious girls to be a delicacy. Shall we say grace before we run out of time to eat?” She gestured toward the food I’d brought and I lowered my veil, nodding.

Remembering Tadpoles

My hands on my belly
frame a picture.
In the depths
a tangible shadow
slippery, suspended
with webbed hands and protruding
amphibian eyes.

When we were young
we caught tadpoles,
up to our shins
in a stagnant pond.
They burrowed in the mud, tails flicking madly
but sometimes
we watched them writhe in our hands.
We kept them in buckets,

submerged in backyard hose water,

were distraught when they died.
I tattled on a boy--
grubby and curious, a young Mengele--
who smashed his, squirming, under rocks
and poked at their glistening insides.
Mine merely floated belly up,

translucent and gray.
I dreamt of them often, dead tadpoles.
But I didn’t wake until morning.

Terrorist

In my last year of junior high, I managed to get myself on the bad side of a couple of skinheads. Not because of anything I could control, really, besides breathing. Skinheads don’t need much reason to be angry at you beyond you having a level of melanin in your skin above ‘Aryan’ and your, well, existing. And I, being of the same racial stock as one O. Binladen, well, I’m sure you can guess how I made them feel. They cornered me on the path through the woods that connected the school’s baseball fields to a residential area, two of them approaching me from either direction on the path. I wasn’t looking for a fight; I raised my hands in surrender, weakly tried to reason with them, averted eye contact and pleaded in a slow, clear voice, “C’mon now, you don’t really want to do this. . .”, treating them like a pack of vicious dogs. I guess I shouldn’t have spoken, because after I pleaded with them, they didn’t even bother with laughing at my cowardice, instead becoming enraged at the accent that tinged my voice. They unleashed the whole range of slurs on me, from ‘Towelhead’ and ‘Cameljockey’ right through to ‘Sand Nigger’, gnashing their teeth and circling me, closer and closer like bloated buzzards. They asked me patronizingly if I wasn’t going to ask Allah to save me, and I didn’t bother answering. I’d never really believed in Allah, not like Mom and Dad had, but I figured they wouldn’t believe that answer. How could I be a terrorist if I didn’t believe in the terrorist God? And there was no way I could be Arab and not a terrorist, certainly. I considered fighting back but realized I was outnumbered and outmuscled, the four of them having an average of about seventy pounds of advantage over me. I dropped my backpack, thought about running, but found my escape largely obstructed by the treacherous trees of the forest.

Even as I was trying to plan out a route of escape, the first punch collided with my jaw, sending my head reeling with an awful crack that resounded all the way down my neck from my ears. I righted my head again just in time to receive a second punch, this time to the nose. I felt the blood running down my face and shut both eyes, shielding myself with my forearms even as I took a blow to my stomach that doubled me over and dropped me to my knees on the muddy path. I wanted to cry out, to beg them to stop, but steeled myself instead, hoping that maybe if I didn’t fight back, they’d give up on the whole thing out of boredom and find a Chinese or black kid to beat up on for awhile. After a knee to the side of the head, I curled up on my side in the dirt, arms over my head, feeling a little bit like a caterpillar playing dead after being prodded by a child’s grubby finger. The four of them seemed to be losing heart at this point, kicking me listlessly at random and muttering allusions to September Eleventh in annoyed voices. Back in a safe corner of my mind, disassociated from the pain, I wondered if they’d actually even lost anyone in the attack, even mourned when it happened. I had.

When they were finally beginning to lose interest, I heard footsteps approaching but was too scared to look and confirm whether the newcomer was my saviour or another skinhead. “Hey!” I heard him shout, the ‘h’ awkwardly pronounced. “Fuck off, you fucking Nazi fuckers!” Some cynical part of me, separated from all of this, commended him on his use of vocabulary. The other part of me was whimpering with utter joy at the fact that help had arrived. The skinheads responded to his jeer in kind, swearing and shuffling all around me. I received another boot in the ribs and wheezed, peering up to catch a glimpse of whoever had come to rescue me.

I was met with shined brown leather shoes, pre-faded tight jeans, a silk button-down shirt with its sleeves rolled up mid forearm. Perfectly coiffed hair.

Later, as we lay together on our backs in the mud, sniffling back the blood clots in our noses and watching the sky darken above us, he turned his head toward me with an awkward smile. “So, uh,” he began, expression nervous, unable to look me quite in the eye, “you’re not a terrorist, are you?”

“Of course not,” I replied, laughing, “If I was, I’d have reached into my jacket and blown those infidel mothers up for so much as looking at me!” He looked relieved at that, returned his gaze to the sky a moment before looking to me again.

“But uh. . . you can still put a Jihad on them, right?”

“It’s not a fuckin’ voodoo curse, man. You don’t. . .put a Jihad on a person.”

A minute or so passed and I listened to our rattled, laboured breathing, considered getting up but vetoed the idea after the mere thought of physical effort in my condition.

“I’m Luc,” my companion introduced, but through the congestion of blood in his nose it sounded a little bit more like “Loog”.

“Jeff,” I responded.