Virgin Ash

"Come help me carry the basket," her mother calls to her, while Zahra beats the dough with her soft palms.

Zahra al-Bassam's face competes with the sun and adorns youth, and her wine-colored neck is painted in a somber tableau, while the dough flows, surrendering to the tenderness of her hands.

She drifted into a scene from the past, when she received a certificate of appreciation from middle school for coming first; she dwelled on the teachers' appreciative looks and their joy at her excellence.

She awoke to the sound of crackling and the oven's blaze; the straw and wood burned, just as her dream burned in the furnace of tradition.

For she was a woman created to be a wife who enters Paradise clutching her husband's garment and reward, worshipping God and prostrating herself before her husband. This is how her family sees her future, according to flawed custom and lived reality.

Her father told her about the groom coming from among her cousins, and that they had decided to settle for a commercial secondary-school certificate—two pieces of news that strangled her dream and her feelings, leaving her without a dream and without the right to feel.

In the evening, she sat on the bench in front of their house, the forelock of her hair rebelling against her headscarf and flowing over her eyebrow, while her imagination sat on the distant horizon, where the one whose eyes held a silent confession that her heart had read passed by. She wanted her eyes to meet his and punish him with a frown.