The Queue Read Online Free

cursing at him, and hit him with her bag, which opened up, and the broken old rotary phone she’d taken from the office to repair fell onto the floor. The man panicked at the clatter, leapt toward the metro door in fright, and jumped out before the train stopped at the next station.
    Shouts of fear and confusion rose up from the women around her. She heard mutters of shame from a few passengers, and a tall man whispered that a woman’s place was in the house, his gaze fixed on the ground. Someone else quoted a passage from the Greater Book, and although she couldn’t make out what he said, she sensed from his tone that it was directed at her. A young boy came up to her and asked if she was hurt; he was no more than twelve and wearing a school uniform that was clearly old but well kept. “Bless you, darling,” she said, as she patted him on his shaved head. She continued the string of insults she’d begun, and then bent over to pick up the telephone and reattach the handset, and sat down again. The man had really scared her, but she blamed herself. After all, she’d decided not to give up her seat across from him, and she had sat there while the rest of the passengers had given him space as soon as they’d seen him.
    She was forever cursed with bad luck, and there was no end to her problems, no matter how much she tried to set things right. Her eight-year-old son was sick with a bad kidney and was always in and out of the hospital for more treatments. She’d taken him in several times in just the past month, and watched as his slender body was pumped with what seemed like gallons of medicine. Her two older daughters couldn’t help with the bills because they were both weak with rheumaticheart disease. By the time the doctor had read her the results of the X-rays and medical tests that had diagnosed their condition, they had already fallen far behind in school.
    All she had was two rooms in a damp ramshackle apartment, buried deep in an alleyway in the old District 3 where the sewers bubbled over, and a husband who never left the coffee shop, who’d quit his job and wandered around idly in search of hash and pills. She saw him only when he ran out of the money he took from her small salary, sometimes by pleading with her and sometimes by force. Every so often at night he would leave the coffee shop and come begging, demanding more money, and when she scolded him he berated her and sometimes even beat her. On top of all that, two months ago she’d fallen and broken her hand while cleaning the ceiling in the office, and then she broke her left foot when she’d jumped off a microbus. The pain hadn’t let up since then. As if everything else wasn’t enough.
    Neighbors who noticed her never-ending woes advised her to find out why she suffered such misfortune, and so she did. She visited the High Sheikh, before that too was forbidden—forbidden, at least, without a permit from the Gate—and he told her bad luck followed her because she’d neglected her prayers. The remedy to poverty was to bow down and pray and to stop her grousing and complaining. Her head filled with so many words, and a way out of this suffering seemed to open up before her. Tears of humble remorse flowed down her cheeks, and she swore she would uphold her religious duties and never miss a prayer. She even bought a white scarf to keep at Amani’s mother’s house so she would be sure to have one for praying there, but she stuck to her new commitment for fewer than two weeks and her bad luck never left her. Some days sheforgot, and on others she put off her ablution until she finished work. At the end of the day she would discover she had all her prayers left to do, and, exhausted, she’d vow to start anew the next day at dawn. But then she’d wake up late and run straight out the door, intending to make it up throughout the day, and on it would go. She had so much trouble sticking to what she set out to do, sometimes she wondered if she might