The Turtle of Oman Read Online Free Page B

example—before he started eating the rice. He ate the salad last, like a French person, his mom had told him. He drank water between each course. And he liked to eat very slowly.
    His dad’s chair was just sitting there empty with the echo of his dad in it. By now his dad was—where? High above the clouds. Dozing on a little airplane pillow with his earplugs in his ears. Aref closed his eyes to imagine this.
    What did people eat on airplanes?
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    Jumbo jet menu
    1. Dad says they eat sandwiches.
    2. Mom says they eat peanuts.
    3. Sometimes airplane waiters serve hummus in sealed cups, with a sack of chips. This is hard to picture. But I hope they give it to me.
    4. Maybe the passengers gobble gigantic mounds of cotton candy since they are above the clouds.
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    After dinner, Aref quietly turned the handle of the front door and stepped outside by himself to memorize what his house looked like under the moon. He needed its shape and shadows. He wanted to press all its details into his brain so nothing would disappear.
    It would have been nice to walk around the whole neighborhood, staring at every single other house, tucking all their windows and doors and roofs into his memory too. But he was afraid of foxes. At night foxes wandered through the city, poking their noses into gardens and trashcans for scraps. They had large ears and looked regal and a little scary, sneaking around. Aref had seen them from the roof. But he didn’t want to meet one up close.
    Still, he wished he had been born a fox.
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    Fox Facts
    1. Foxes have fur between their toes so their feet won’t get burned on hot ground.
    2. The British School has an Arabian Foxes Hockey Club which Diram is going to join.
    3. Foxes are not afraid of the dark. They just wander wherever they want to go when they feel like it. No one puts a leash on them.

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    Even better than a fox, Aref wished he were the endangered Arabian leopard in the Musandam peninsula. Almost no one ever saw it. So they couldn’t tell it what to do. He would not wish to be a crab (caught and eaten) or a spiny crayfish (too spiny) or a bonito.
    Aref thought about climbing the stairs to their flat roof, where his parents draped the bed quilts on clotheslines for airing and his father often sat with friends in a circle, especially in winter, eating sunflower seeds and drinking tea. In the daylight, you could see the ocean off in the distance. You could see Jabrin Castle. You could wave at the one-hundred-year-old lady Ummi Salwa in her pink satin robe taking a nap in her long chair on the next roof.
    When they came back from the United States, Ummi Salwa would be a hundred and three.

Better or Worse

    A ref said to his mom the next morning at breakfast, “I dreamed about a word, it was all lit with spotlights.”
    The word he had dreamed of was “halcyon.” In his mind, it looked like a tipped balloon with the air coming out a pinhole on one side. Sulima was throwing it at him and he opened his hands, but dropped it.
    Halcyon meant a period of time that was happy and peaceful. You never heard anyone say it, though. That is what my life in Oman has been so far, he thought. And now it will be all shaken up.
    â€œThat’s nice, habibti ,” said his mom. She didn’t ask him what word it was. She probably thought he dreamed about a simple word like “lucky” or “ mabruk ”—“congratulations” in Arabic. She had no idea how many words he knew.
    Aref looked out the window at a streak of orange clouds with a bend in it. The clouds reminded him of an arm with a muscle. At breakfast, he nibbled a cucumber, dipped a carrot into the hummus plate. He stared at his scrambled eggs, taking a few small bites. His mother had mixed some white cheese into the eggs. He didn’t think he would ever like eggs. But his mom kept serving them. When he was younger, he ate so slowly, his mom said every day was an “endless