Another small, disembodied limb showed up on my feed. This one was wearing a Hello Kitty sock but no shoe. Beside it was a flung-open lunch box, but no lunch. The image was almost dimmed to grayscale, except for the dark red splatters across a tiny, dimpled knee, and I realized that the grey was just the flour-fine dust of collapsed concrete.
I quickly dusted the image from my eyes, but a memory rose— a good man’s femur, dug up when they built the wall around First Light. I remembered an afternoon long ago, sipping tea with Mrs. Enayat, whose name meant “care,” while she told me all about it. She said she hadn’t known at the time that the bones belonged to a man, let alone a good man, but Mrs. Enayat’s husband, a doctor, had known his skeletons well. These were not the bones of donkeys or camels. These were people-bones. I wondered if he had actually said “people-bones”; a strange thing to have come from a doctor.
Soon, Mrs. Enayat said, more bones followed: tibias, fibulas, a sternum here and there. A narrow pelvis or two. Crania, white like calcium and good milk, missing many teeth. But the first femur always had a special place in her heart. Brick by brick, the wall grew stronger, built on good bones—and at least they hadn’t had to cut down the acacias. That would have been irredeemable.
I had just volunteered to work there three days a week. Mrs. Enayat was elated. She said she couldn’t pay me yet because she hadn’t made any money herself—she was still distributing flyers and relying on good word of mouth—there was no social media back then to spread the word—good or bad. I told everyone I knew, but in the end, the spring-green banner swinging on the new wall of the new preschool was all the word she needed.
Parents queued up for a tour, nodded and laughed, sipping watered-down orange cordial. By the end of the day, they had signed their children up for hours of crying-away-from-home, babbling in the baby pool, blobbing snot and paint onto each other. Special prices for the first five to enroll. Delight.
The cat in the corner belonged to Halloween, but she made do with a sandpit. She nibbled her fleas with relish and watched the stupid humans who had to pay for sunlight and fresh air.
Not a mother yet, but I soon attuned myself to the rhythm of the children: the chubby fingers gripping crayons, the clambering, hair-pulling territorial fights for laps and beanbags. I knew the sequence: lunchboxes, flung open to rainbow fruits and boneless chicken; the sippy cups with syrupy juices to nip good teeth in the bud; diapers heavy with their weight in pee, and poop so thick it could have been asphalt; then the wind-down songs, babies bathed and coated in sweet powder and crisp cottons, their limbs heavy as nap hour arrived, and the sun climbed to such a height it seemed unattainable, only to fall into the room like divine grace. I could have closed my eyes and prayed, as the children closed theirs and slept—except I didn’t. I made tea.
I listened. I could tell their snores apart, each a tender note threaded through the still air. It was so quiet in that dead corner of town, it did not feel like Cairo. In the distance, Moqattam cliff rumbled, as yet another gas cylinder exploded. It sounded like a growl from an empty belly. I hoped it wasn’t too serious, that no one was hurt, especially not the children.
I thought of the ones I had seen, descending from the slums, skeletal, their hair like messy, abandoned nests, their clothes overlain with shit and grime. And hungry. So hungry.
Mrs. Enayat brought my attention back to her First Light.
Wasn’t this a lovely place? Her life’s work.
She sipped her tea and awaited my response. I managed a nod.
The school had been built over a cemetery, she said, and if that told you anything, there had been at least one good man in there. It took just one to make a difference. Those were no ordinary bones. She had known when she saw that femur that she was dealing with a man of God.
The tea scorched the roof of my mouth and cooked its skin. I didn’t ask her where the femur was now. I had heard about cities sprouting over necropolises–that this neighborhood had cemeteries of different faiths–entwined like roots beneath it, and I thought of all those Abrahamic bones seeping their light and their darkness into the foundations of houses, not being able to Rest In Peace, perhaps never having lived in it. I wondered how they could bring peace to the households above them.
It was all so long ago, that quiet afternoon, when we could talk about dead bones with ease, when distant explosions were unplanned, and burials beneath us were.
Now even the light has reversed.
