forward

When I was cursed, Mama wasted no time. 

She had every right to crash to her knees, to wail with an agony so pure she could be put behind ropes in a museum as a monument to grief. She had barely aged out of her own childhood, my papa had left her without a word or any money, and now her own sister had used her dark magic against her child. But love was the language Mama was most fluent in, and so it was the one we used with each other.

I was 4 when I was cursed. I barely moved, back then, stayed rod-straight, so afraid of what the slightest move could destroy. Mama tied a fat rope around my middle, tying the other end around her waist. She walked ahead of me, slept ahead of me. My mama, in my memory, is a bouncing head of chocolate-brown curls, her blouse billowing in the breeze, looking over her shoulder, keeping my gaze with the shock of her sage green eyes in her olive face.

Cruelty of this magnitude at such a young age shocked me into silence. In the beginning, I would have to reassure Mama that my auntie had not taken words from me, too. “I just don’t know what to say anymore,” I’d tell her in a voice so small it could fit in a thimble. Mama filled the air with words, with stories told to me over and over, my little back pushed against the wall, my eyes wide as the Caspian Sea. 

She’d pull my day-clothes off, letting my nightgown spill from my shoulders to my knees as she told me, “I didn’t know what I would name you before you were born. When they placed you in my arms, it came in my head like you told it to me yourself. You were every beautiful thing that ever happened on accident, so perfect that it could only be coincidence. Zahrah, flower. Flowers in the wild are little poems from God.” 

I’m from where they make perfumes, and spices, which coil in the air in thick spiraling clouds. We weave baskets and walk along rivers, we do spells with sugar our grandmothers passed down to us, we dye fabrics in magenta inks and dance at firelight to drums. 

Mama made sure I never missed seeing the world. With my curse, and her worry, it would be easy to lock me in a cage, to clasp a trap around my neck which always guaranteed my eyes stayed forward. But a life lived in fear isn’t a life at all. Many of the stories Mama told me had heroes who defied the odds, who did it scared. “Just like you, Zahrah.” Really, just like her. 

So she gave up a stable life. No home where we made bread and led little busy lives, a garden we could tend and watch grow. We were nomads. The sound of walking feet on the soil became the metronome of my waking existence. I could never look behind me, only forward. Whatever I passed disappeared behind me, never to be seen by me again. I could only go forward. I could only follow Mama, through markets and mountainsides, cities and seascapes.

I was thirteen. We had gone through busy markets like this one so often that Mama didn’t need to repeat her stern warning: “In crowds, your eyes stay on me.” She knew I loved them the best: the colorfully decorated booths of fruit, or dresses, or crystals. The shouting of merchants and children and thieves interweaving over and under each other like a new basket. I couldn’t buy anything. We lived meagerly, being unable to stay in one place for long. Mama would dance on any stage that would have her, stomping defiantly and turning like a spinning top. Still, the coins to be made were few, and they had to sustain us for many months. 

We were going to pass through to a stable that a friend of Mama’s on the road had agreed to let us sleep in for the evening. I hoped they had a horse - I loved to feel the soft velvet of their noses. 

I collided with Mama’s back, my face planting in her wild curls. I felt a pickpocket’s slender fingers in the folds of my skirt before its empty, disappointed retreat. We hadn’t had a collision like this since I was very small. We typically moved in tandem, limbs to each other on the same body. I pulled back to look at Mama. Her mouth gaped open, her wide eyes frozen in fear. My mama feared nothing. I knew it was true danger.

“What is it?” I asked, breathless.

In horror, Mama shook her head. “I can’t say it.”

It was only magic that could have done it. Never in my life had I turned my head around. It wasn’t even a habit I had to get myself out of. But when a voice curled itself like smoke over the shell of my ear, leaking into my brain, spilling out of my eyes, calling “Zaaaaahraaaaah” like Hell’s lullaby, I did what I had never done: I turned around. 

Auntie. 

Her violet eyes framed in dark lashes. Her curls, like Mama’s, hung well below her bottom. She dressed immodestly, her breasts bound in fabric and a floor length sheer skirt, but naked otherwise. Around her neck hung what must’ve been a hundred gold necklaces. She smiled at me, her canine tooth golden, winking. It felt like a bite.

Her mouth didn't move when she spoke, the words echoing in my head as if we stood in a mausoleum. "Time for you to find out the truth on your own, Zahrah."

As soon as I saw her, I knew it was too late. With a laugh that carried on the wind, she disappeared. Everyone did. Where there was the din of the crowded market were now acres of golden sand, pulsing from the heat of the sun in the clear sky. I had turned around, and now, here I was. No Auntie. No Mama. 

Just me, alone, in the desert.