The Outcast Hours

by Mahvesh Murad

  “I had a daughter and now I don’t,” she continued. “I was a mother, and now I’m not. What do you call that, I wonder? What’s the word?”

  Essy’s eyes seemed to glow momentarily, and Iyere watched the pink flicker of her tongue dampen her lower lip. “I don’t know the word in English,” Essy said, her eyes fixed on Iyere, travelling over her face. “But then there have always been other tongues.”

  Iyere nodded, considering the idea of a grief translated, wondering if her heartbreak might taste differently in new words. She felt more speech rising in her, almost unbidden as she asked Essy if she could see her after her shift.

  “Why?” Essy asked.

  “Because you want to take me home with you and the house always wins?” Iyere said with borrowed confidence.

  Essy laughed and Iyere realised it was the first time she had seen a genuine smile cross the other woman’s face. Iyere wanted to know everything she could about that unknowable face, kiss everything she could from this stranger’s lips and much else besides but she would be happy with whatever Essy might allow.

  “Fraternising with patrons outside of the casino? We’re not supposed to,” Essy mused, making the pale marble of the roulette ball weave through a twist of her fingers as she thought. “But I’m open to persuasion.”

  “Hospitals. Police stations. Mortuaries. Strip clubs,” Essy counted the words off her fingers as she listed other places she had worked. They were sat in her kitchen, drinking hot mugs of peppermint tea. “Always night shifts. It’s just better. I prefer the places and times where you meet people at a crossroads, so to speak.”

  “Why?”

  That’s how I feed.

  Or at least this is what Iyere thought she heard but when she looked up, Essy had her mug to her lips and appeared to still be pondering her question. “I guess you could call me a people person.”

  Iyere thought this was both true and untrue. She was not entirely sure that Essy liked people, so much as she liked collecting their stories and there was something undeniable about Essy that made people want to share them. Iyere had already exhausted her own sticky mess of secrets; the stolen money, the gambling, Ivie being sick and what happened to Ofure.

  “Grief,” Iyere found herself saying, “has skinned me.”

  Essy nodded and leaned forward slightly, her elbows resting on the grubby Formica table top. “Go on,” she murmured, and it took Iyere a few moments to recognise the look on her face; it was the same avidity, she realised, that Ivie would wear on the days that her lips were too cracked, her throat too sore to eat anything of substance. On those days, she liked to sit and watch Iyere eat, her eyes tracing the column of Iyere’s throat as she swallowed, and though Iyere hated it, hated the feeling of being consumed by her sister’s gaze, she allowed it each time.

  “Grief has skinned me,” Iyere repeated, “but I think that maybe you might change that.” Iyere didn’t know she meant to say it until she did, but she was struck by the rightness as she uttered the words.

  “I think,” Essy said, setting her mug down with a smirk, “that you might be overestimating the restorative powers of a one-night stand.”

  Then they went outside to Essy’s back garden, the night lining their skins and their lungs smoky with petrichor. Iyere’s idea; she had half remembered something about a meteor shower tonight and so she had suggested they go out and look.

  “The Perseids,” Essy sighed, her eyes scanning the skies as if she could see things that Iyere couldn’t, her gaze somehow able to penetrate the light pollution and constant cloud that hugged this part of the Earth’s atmosphere, to reach the stuttering trail of meteors shaking themselves free of comets.

  Iyere knew fuck all about astronomy but she had managed to watch half an episode of the Sky at Night once, and so she’d remembered that shooting stars weren’t even stars at all, just bits of rock, debris and dust burning up as they tore through the atmosphere, blazing themselves into nothing, mostly gone before they could hit the ground.

  Iyere took a deep breath so she could exhale her daughter’s name. She sensed Essy shift as she listened. Iyere had noticed this about the woman; she liked to listen with her whole body as if words were vibrations that she needed to catch and recalibrate before she could issue the right speech in return.

  “What’s your favourite fairy tale?” Iyere whispered.

  Essy shook her head, her eyes gleaming suddenly. “People don’t remember my favourites the way they used to. Some do, but not like before. Maybe not even you, Professor,” she said, her already raspy voice further thickened by a sudden emotion Iyere couldn’t decipher.

  Iyere watched the way Essy’s right hand was working, as if she were still making that roulette ball dance through her fingers and without giving herself the chance to second guess, Iyere grabbed those fingers and entwined them with her own, before bringing their joined hands up to her mouth.

  “Let’s go back inside,” Iyere said, the words damp against Essy’s skin.

  “What now?” Essy said, her hint of a smile unfurling into another grin when she saw Iyere’s sudden bashfulness. “What are you after? Something new for the scrapbook?”

  “I’ve been with women before,” Iyere replied, allowing a mild dart of irritation to colour her voice.

  “No doubt,” Essy nodded, her gaze pinning Iyere where she stood. “But you haven’t been with me.” She was silent for several long seconds, scanning Iyere’s face while the latter held her breath, scared at the thought of being dismissed, but equally scared of the thought of getting what she was so clumsily asking for.

  Essy shifted the hand that was still in Iyere’s grasp so that she could trace a light finger across Iyere’s cheekbone, leaving a tingling warmth in its wake. “You said grief had skinned you…I guess we’ll see.”

  “How will we see?”

  Essy shook her head slowly. “I’ll need an offering.”

  “Alright,” Iyere said, Essy’s hand cupping her face by now, her thumb resting at the corner of her mouth and so she turned her head slightly so she could lick it, kiss it, envelop its oddly nutty sweetness in the dark warmth of her mouth for just a second and Essy smiled, delighted and surprised at Iyere’s fleeting boldness. “Alright,” she repeated, as Essy gently rubbed a stripe of wetness along Iyere’s jaw.

  Essy’s bedroom was quiet, teased with traces of moonlight, and time went elsewhere.

  The bed was a mess of sheets and Iyere knew that Essy’s skin was the warmest she had ever touched, heat radiating from its every inch.

  Things were different in this kind of darkness; the gleam of her knees on either side of Essy’s head like the curve of smooth rocks breaching the surface of a pond. The curl of Essy’s back as she writhed above her was like the roll of a night ocean and when they kissed, it was sugar and salt on their tongues.

  Essy liked to stop and watch whenever she made Iyere come, the look on her face unreadable as she scanned the other woman’s. Iyere never knew what she was looking for but when she found it, there would be a half smile and then she would lower her head and give soft little licks, lapping at the beads of sweat on Iyere’s stomach, or a tear collected in the curve of an ear, or the dampness between her legs, and this is what she had meant, Iyere realised in a half-dazed wonder, when she had said she required an offering.

  Essy’s attention was relentless, of a kind that didn’t care if the recipient could bear it or not and there were times Iyere was not sure she could bear it, the sensations so thick that they seemed to slow her breath and blood. Each time she gasped, it was half a show of delight and half a reminder for her lungs to keep working, and she would tear her eyes away from Essy’s penetrating gaze to the window, searching for the night sky with its trails of bruised clouds making distant cathedrals.

  Her blood was still thundering in her ears when Essy sat up, her gaze solemn as she wiped wetness from her mouth. She stroked Iyere’s face with the back of her hand and then she placed a cool palm on the centre of h
er stomach and pressed down firmly. Iyere jolted immediately, her mind transported to a sunlit afternoon in a cemetery when she’d sat by Ofure’s grave after all the mourners had gone, save for Ivie. Ivie who had stood and watched Iyere as she’d sat by the mound of freshly turned over earth and dug her hands, wrist deep, into its coolness as she cried. Iyere had made unintelligible sounds that came from a place within that she had never known of, that she in fact suspected had not even existed until Ofure’s death had torn her open somewhere, concealed claw marks that remained deep and bleeding.

  Essy removed her hand and Iyere drew an agonised gasp of breath, sitting up and scrambling away until her back was pressed against the headboard. “What did you—”

  “You gave an offering, I accepted, so…you get another spin of the wheel,” Essy said.

  Iyere stared at her blankly. “What are—”

  “You know what,” Essy said. “And you know how.”

  And as she said it, Iyere realised this was true. Maybe part of her had realised it from the moment Essy had spoken of crossroads, because Iyere had heard of Essy’s kind in half-remembered stories from her aunt. While the old woman had called her by a different name, a different gender, Iyere recalled a couple of salient facts: a bringer of mischief and chaos in the guise of teaching a lesson.

  This is how I feed, Essy had said.

  Iyere had fed her and now Essy would give thanks by giving her a choice.

  “I’m sorry about just now,” Essy said, gesturing to her stomach. “I had to see what it is that you really want. People tend to lie, even at times like these. Especially times like these. It’s strange, the way your kind does that. Even if it means you fuck up your chances.”

  “A chance to…Ofure?” Iyere stammered. “Back here with me?”

  “Ofure,” Essy said. “Although you should know that death has a scent.”

  “I wouldn’t care.”

  “Hmm,” Essy smiled thinly. “That’s what they all say. More importantly, death will not be denied, which means we’d have to make a trade. No such thing as something for nothing after all. If Ofure comes back, someone else has to take her place.”

  “Someone else would have to die?”

  “And it can’t be you,” Essy said quickly. “Can’t be some random either. Has to be your blood, or close to it. Hey,” Essy continued, raising her hands in supplication. “I don’t make the rules. But I get them. I mean, if there’s no skin in the game, are you really even playing?”

  “No one would make that choice,” Iyere said, her gaze fixed on the knot she had made of her hands in her lap. She was dreaming, she decided. She was dreaming and any minute now she would wake up.

  “You’d be surprised at what people would do,” Essy replied, her voice suddenly flat, her gaze dull and Iyere remembered the fevered nightmare of the days just after Ofure had died; all the bargains she had tried to make with indifferent gods for just a second of grace. Iyere would have traded anything and anyone, a whole world perhaps, for one moment of Ofure’s breath against her face, or the press of her chubby arms around Iyere’s leg.

  But the only person she had to give up was Ivie.

  And she’s sick anyway.

  Iyere winced, trying to dampen the sharp voice inside of her.

  Ofure was meant to have had so much more time, and if Ivie herself could choose, wouldn’t she want the same thing, in fact, hadn’t she said (albeit when her tumour was still a blossoming secret, even to her) that if she could change places with Ofure, she would?

  You’re dreaming, she reminded herself, but her heart was weighing options all the same. If such a choice were even possible, she understood that one couldn’t make it without being diminished, without being punished in some way. No doubt there was a further, final offering that Essy was eager to collect?

  “Why me?” Iyere asked, understanding now that it had been Essy who had chosen her tonight.

  “Because,” Essy shrugged. “Because out of all the people there, I could tell that yours would taste the sweetest.”

  It would be easier at night, Iyere realised, for Essy to find what she needed; people were so much more vulnerable during these hours, hearts tilted so they could spill more easily, wounds so much more visible in the right kind of light.

  What Iyere wanted was both of them; Ofure on her lap and Ivie by her side with the years stretching out ahead for all three of them like open roads. But if she had to choose, how to choose? After all, her aunt would always end her stories with the words ‘you can’t out trick a trickster god.’

  You could refuse the bet, Iyere reminded herself. You could walk away from the table for once, before you lose what you can ill afford to.

  But Iyere knew that she had been maimed by her daughter’s death, grief skinned as Essy now knew, and the existence Iyere had experienced since then was for the most part in a half-light, in half measures, the half-life of her devotion to Ofure one of the few things that allowed her to stand.

  And yet, that memory of the afternoon in the cemetery, which had stretched into the evening, then an all-night vigil, Ivie with her the whole time. The following morning had been fresh with dewdrops, making their funeral clothes damp. The spring of grass blades beneath her hands. Hearing the growing tangle of birdsong as her ears became re-accustomed to sound. The weight of Ivie as she shifted, placing her head in Iyere’s lap. The last of the night’s thin trails fading from the sky, taking with it the strange gravity that made hearts tilt. Iyere had felt her own heart quiver and shift as it tried to right itself, but she hadn’t wanted to let it, had wanted it to remain forever tilted, always on the edge of spilling with tales of we loved her, she loved us and the daylight can’t take back what is ours.

  What was the lesson, Iyere wondered?

  Was it to seize second chances no matter the cost, or was it that your life simply had to be lived, tragedies and all, to make it complete?

  Iyere, you’re just dreaming, she told herself again.

  But what if I’m not?

  “Would I remember any of this?” Iyere asked. “I mean, if I made a choice, how would it work? And would I know what I had done?”

  Essy just stared at her, her gaze implacable, and so Iyere took a deep breath, and decided.

  (After he’s treated an estuary according to his technique, infusing the substance of the bank with powders and liquids, chucking them out of the back of his old tug to the derision or disgust of the more swish local river-users, when the tide goes out and the mudline is revealed it spells out words in a line of sloppy script. That soon shuts up his neighbours. But there’s more. Those revealed letters stretch and slur as gravity tugs the silt, of course, but they don’t simply become shapeless runoff. Instead, they morph from one word to another, to a third, sometimes to a fourth before they finally give up any semblance of legibility and surrender into muck. Kids play among them like mudlarks in Victorian times, looking for treasures, and the words crawl away from their feet. They always seem random. Gibbon, might say the waterline, changing to spur, then irenic as the river thins to a creek.)

  In the Blink of a Light

  Amira Salah-Ahmed

  The woman on stage twists and turns her body in ways he’s only dreamed about, letting her limbs take control of the exaggerated movements and contorting her figure along with her clothes.

  How is she doing this, Hassan thinks. How is she allowing herself to show her body moving in this way?

  This is a public event. Cameras are everywhere. Mobile phones in every hand, snapping pictures and broadcasting live for the world to see. And here is this woman, her suggestive movements, on full display.

  The stage is built in the center of the audience. They are seated all around her, allowing them a complete view of her entire body.

  He would find it less scandalous if she was on a proper stage—at least then her back would be facing the wall.

  But here, there is nowhere to hide.

  What is most troubling: she is not actually
interested in hiding anything. She is doing the opposite—putting herself on full display; the performer and the performance of this one-woman play.

  He is more concerned with all the men seated in a circle all around this woman, enjoying a full view of her backside as it moves to the left and to the right, then rolls to the floor before springing up in the air.

  What must they all be thinking? How can she show them this?

  When she twirls wildly to face the other side, he has to look away in disdain.

  There he sits, in the background, manning a light mixer that is pushed to the corner of the room. He is as far out of sight as the space will allow. Had it been humanly possible to stuff him and his equipment into the wall itself, that is where he would be sitting now.

  His dark leather jacket protects him from the winter chill, but the shivers are still uncontrollable. A scruffy beard and mustache somewhat mask his face as wisps of his black hair fall gently on his forehead. It is as if the clothes and his facial hair were always meant to shroud whatever was visibly human and male in him.

  But nothing can hide his eyes. His unadulterated disgust is unmissable, and that is how he means it to be. Almost as if to say, I am here, doing this job, but I do not approve of this message.

  He forces his face into a more solemn sulk whenever the performer moves in him any profound sentiment. There are moments when he can relate to her palpable vulnerability as she shakes to the sound of bullets blaring from the speakers. When she arches forward and backward and lets out a visible yet soundless cry for help. When her shadow moves violently against the white sheets hung on the walls behind the audience, juxtaposed with the projected images of families fleeing terror in the desert.

  In these moments, Hassan forces an even more visible expression of disgust to hide the feeling of wanting to touch her. Not in a sexual way, but with comforting strokes to ease the mountains of pain she was expressing. He could feel it through the floods of lights; the sound poetry choreographed with her silently shattering movements.