A Once Crowded Sky Read Online Free

her and smiles.
    Anna doesn’t laugh, she just looks back at the TV. “You could’ve gone with them. I would’ve been fine.”
    “Hey, I retired from all that. What’s the point in retiring if you’re just going to keep showing up?”
    She reaches over and puts her hand on his. “I would’ve let you go.”
    He tangles his fingers into hers, wraps his arms around her. “I know,” he says.

 
     
    3
     
    Mashallah #211
    “I could give a piss what your little hen-picked husband thinks, you’re coming.” The voice is tense, and it calms her. “It’s Ultimate, Christ, you’re coming to his funeral.” Maybe because it is familiar, maybe because it is different.
    “Alice, I can’t possibly—”
    “ Strength. You called me that then, you call me that now, all right? Just because the power’s gone doesn’t mean I lost that.”
    “Well, that is fine for you then.” Mashallah pauses and allows a crackle to snake through the satellite phone signal. “But for me, it is not the same. I am Fatima now. And my husband has a say in my life now, however he was picked, that is not—doesn’t matter. He has said I cannot go.”
    “Fuck that. You’re Mashallah. The beam of light who used to blast all those villains’ asses, God rest them. That’s you.”
    “No.” Mashallah tugs at the head scarf bunched along the back of her neck; a seller is coming to the house with some fruits, and she will have to pull it on quickly when he arrives. “I am sorry, I am, but no.”
    “All right, enough of that shit. You need to come home.”
    “Alice . . . Strength, you have to understand. I appreciate you. But I love my husband. He’s a good man, and I have to respect him. We are learning to live as a family.”
    Strength sighs. “Okay, look, you of all people know I don’t want to play this card, but, Soldier’ll be there, right? You know that? He’s giving the eulogy along with my dickless ex.”
    “My sister,” Mashallah says as she strains to keep her voice sounding effortless, “you know, that was . . . that was a young girl’s . . . that was not anything.”
    “Ma, what’s the point in saying that? I mean really.”
    “Soldier doesn’t—I am married now. Soldier does not affect me anymore.”
    “Girl, you know better than most, Soldier affects everyone. All big fancy three of them do. Did.”
    “That’s done. We made our decisions. Soldier is done. I’m done.”
    “Yeah, look, whatever, believe whatever stories’re easiest, and he’ll do the same. All I’m saying is he’ll be at the funeral. And you should be there.”
    “I am with a husband now. A family. Soldier or no Soldier. That’s finished, we’re finished. I don’t fly, it’s done.”
    “Right, when were any of us done?” Strength laughs, a strong, fake laugh. “Look, if you change your mind, Star-Knight’s paying for all the tickets, like always, so just get him at the usual place, all right? Just come back.”
    “You think it is so easy?”
    “No. I think it’s pretty fucking hard.”
    The conversation pitters out with nothing solved, like in all of Mashallah’s endless arguments with Strength. Eventually, Mashallah hears her brother answer a seller at the door, and she excuses herself knowing she must go to pick out the best fruit as Khalid will always choose only the ones that are perfectly ripe and the fruit will undoubtedly be spoiled by the time it gets to her table.
    The loud haggling over price begins, and her household erupts in Pashto voices. God help us. She recalls the wonder in her heart when she was young, studying her mother shepherding a family a dozen times this size only a few blocks from here. As she pulls the hijab over herhead and clasps the material over her face, she reminds herself it takes a woman of exceptional fortitude to keep the chaos from overwhelming them all. She walks toward the door and imagines herself again soaring as a streak of light, a gift of God scratched white across the night sky.