We all have a defining moment in our lives. One which, above all others, best encapsulates, and solidifies for the stars, what it was our purpose here meant, if such a concept as purpose is to be believed in the first place.
For your dad, that defining moment was meeting your mom. He impressed her almost immediately, but she was still able to hold on for an admirable four months before giving in and spending a night with him under the same set of sheets and stars.
You had a similar defining moment, when you saw your soulmate on the other end of the room in your History 101 class in college. She was visibly timid, the evidence of it almost apparent in the shape of her face, and five months later you were looking down at the crack of her flat Chinese ass as you fucked it from behind. Her defining moment happened three years later, when she thought you had tripped and fell to your knee (you kind of did), when you reached into your pocket and out came a little box. Inside that little box, a wedding ring.
Your brother’s defining moment happened when him and his team received an award in 2061 for discovering the gene therapy that would serve as the world’s first de-facto cure for cancer. As he was given his award, he looked out at the crowd to see your mother, aged but still beautiful, sitting next to you and your wife, clapping for her son. Next to her was an empty seat, as if your father were there in spirit for that day. And maybe that was the case. In a manner of speaking, it was his spirit that served as the motivation for your brother to cure the disease that took your father from him in the first place.
Your mom’s smile was striking, even amongst the sea of faces. But her body? Nobody there would know what it used to be. Just what a marvel of shape and hue it was. Your dad knew at one time. He could be tallied as profoundly lucky for knowing.
But he wasn’t the only one.
That leads to the question of your mom’s defining moment.
Was it the moment your dad proposed to her as they floated down the Rio Grande? Was it the night of their wedding as their lips met during the clanking of silverware and glass, and the camera’s flashed against their glistening skin which blushed under the lights of the hall. Was it the moment that your dad told her from his deathbed, his worn hand holding hers, that he would always love her, even from a place that had no space and time?
Your mom’s defining moment, as far as the stars were concerned, was none of the above.
This is the story of your mom’s defining moment. A warning before you continue. Don’t read if you don’t want to know. Some things are better left undiscovered. Some truths not only rise to heights of monstrous horror, but also sink beneath the sludge of a strange and upsetting banality simultaneously, choking out all implications of beauty and magic that rests within the accumulated residue of life’s less appalling happenings. This is one of those stories.
To begin, we have to meet this peculiar tale at its venue. That is, Islamabad Pakistan.
“English!? English!?” he called to his colleague.
“Yes,” he said, as he looked down at paperwork. The papers on his table fluttering under their paper weights from the air pushed by the office fan.
“From England?”
His colleague didn’t answer, his attention laser-focused on the bureaucracy of the page.
“From England?” he asked again, his voice raised.
His colleague looked up. “Uh, no.” He stopped, thinking about it for a moment. “Australia,” he said.
“Why!? What!? What!?” he asked with a furious impatience, his wrist twisting with each “what!?’ so that his palm faced upward at the last consonant.
“Passport. They took her passport.”
“Ah,” said Ayamin, slapping his hands together. “I know passport. Give her to me. I know. I know passport.”
Akbar knew what it was he was dealing with here. But he had no intention to step in its way. Not because he supported it necessarily. He didn’t have much of an opinion at all. But because he had never been put in a position to question it. He had lived in Islamabad his entire life, and he knew no other way to be a police officer. Even as a kid, more than half-a-century ago, policemen were what they were. He became one knowing this. His only confusion was why it was it was always the western tourists who came. The brown women, whether from Afghanistan or India, always knew better. There was a time when he was too happy with the end result to complain, but with age came a lack of desire, and with a lack of desire, came the passing of this tradition, like a baton, to the younger generation. And in place of action in the present came speculation on the actions of his past.
Ayamin’s eyes were bright and wide. As an old man, Akbar could at least be happy for the rookie. He looked out the window. Your mom stood there, sticking out like a sore thumb among the much shorter, darker lineup of exclusively men and old women. I guess Ayamin is a lucky boy, he thought. If she can get in here without starting a riot.
“Mommy, it smells,” your brother whined.
“Shh,” your mom said. “You wouldn’t like it if somebody said that about Brisbane, would you?”
Your brother didn’t respond.
She clutched his hand. “Just stay here close with me.”
In Pakistan, mothers were like jewels, as if the thousands of years of Hinduism, and its reverence for the beauty of motherhood, stood like a specter in the dusty allies of the now Islamified western chunk of the Indian sub-continent. While your mom was only a few blocks away from the Australian embassy, an area famous for its large numbers of living and visiting foreigners, the intimacy of having this western woman, a mother in fact, standing amongst them in that dirty lot, waiting for the slow gears of the same Pakistani bureaucracy to crank another inch clockwise, was reflected on the faces of the legions of men who stood behind and before her, in the closest thing the country had to an orderly line-up.
Your mom’s bare-white flesh, where it stood exposed, and her blonde hair which spilled out from underneath her embassy-assigned hijab, only served to make the men she stood amongst, most of whom she stood a full foot above, as sick to the stomach as it made them vibrate in their loins. An entire planet full of women, and it was only those who originated from a single continent, a continent associated with shine and opulence, who had hair that shone gold in the sun, as if the riches themselves ran through the veins of all who lived there, and the women had to be light enough in their flesh that they could blush pink for the grasping palms of their men.
This is why, especially at this time, the western foreigners, even when victims of blatant harassment - or worse - had a great deal of trouble extracting sympathy from the masses of the country. Even the women of Pakistan, who admired, and sometimes deified, the beauty of the white face and body, felt an anger at the precariousness with which western women carried that beauty around, as if they didn’t know that all the most precious jewels in the world had to be protected all the more. It was a little known secret that it was this which reduced the western woman to few allies in this region, even more than their usual status as infidels.
One of the women standing behind your mom, a sixty-two year old, noticing the beige flesh of her calf peaking out from beneath her dress, just shook her head, calling your mom in a murmur the Urdu equivalent of “stupid.”
Her nineteen-year old grandson looked to her and asked “do the white ones like the police?”
“No,” his grandma said and shook her head. “She just doesn’t know. They never know. White ones are stupid.”
“Wow,” he said, admiring her shape, only slightly obscured by her backpack. “Maybe I be police instead.”
“No, Ershan. Don’t say stupid thing. You stay in Engineering. Make big money. You get girl like that fairly.”
“No white one fair. White one take,” he said, and thrusted slightly with a smile.
His grandmother just shook her head. No matter how divided by border, culture, or religion, the worldwide sisterhood of women still held sway over the emotions, even if anger was the only guaranteed end-result of such nagging and endless concern.
Your mom had only been in Pakistan for a month and a half, flying out from Marrakesh with you and your brother only a few weeks after your dad got his job at the Islamabad embassy. She had no idea just how different urban Pakistan was to urban Morocco. If she hadn’t been standing directly in a police lot, she would have been in much deeper trouble. But as the locals always said: “Westerners never listen.” And they were probably right. That was how your mom had lost her passport to begin with. Some family was going to make six months wages off of it. The Australian passport being among the most versatile in the world, and therefore, one of the easiest for an “entrepreneur of the hands” (a thief) to sell.
Ayamin looked out the window, watching the blonde goddess, her son’s hand in hers, moving up another space, and another few inches closer to the privacy of the interrogation office. “I call! I call!” he said with wild eyes. “Mine! Mine!” He looked around the office for challengers. Luckily, his wild demeanor, even on a good day, and the fact that his uncle was the head imam at the local mosque, made it so that even with his somewhat-recent seniority, he still got his way, at least on matters like these, where he was willing to raise hell. That was how he got his space near the window to begin with. The name for it in local slang was “White Girl Watch Tower.” Every other officer there had known the feeling at some point. The cool air blowing in, and the once every blue moon chance of white flesh being dabbed among the sea of brown, standing like a strange vision above the brown-red clay of the lot.
Akbar remembered his greatest moment at that seat, the one which had defined his worth according to the stars, when the white flesh that appeared in his peripherals, in the stickiness of 1983, was of a paler shade of white than he had ever known or knew was possible. And underneath a giant sunhat, and within the barely-effective cover of her hijab, spilled out burning red hair. That was the first day he had seen an Irish passport.
Her two kids, who had come with their hands clasped to hers, stood in the corner, cowering within the shadow of what they were later witnessing. On that day, intoxicated by the whiteness of her flesh, like sheets in paradise, he was given to a sudden mood for charity, and the entire station shut down as his colleagues were invited in to taste the fruits of his gift from above. They called her Djinn, because her hair was red like fire, in more places than one, and the fiery eyebrows of her children raised over their wide eyes and trembling mouths as they watched the strange men rub their mother’s soft flesh like the lamp they imagined she squeezed herself out of. It was decided amongst the office that day that the Irish were a ‘round’ people. Not round in the sense of being fat, as, with this one, that was the furthest thing form the truth. But round in the sense of their fingers and toes and faces. Even the balls of their feet, if she was anything to go by, had a round, fullness to them. Her flesh, the whole body over, shared one shade, as if she had feared the sun itself, assuming it a messenger of Shaitan or his infidel equivalent.
Akbar felt that nostalgia flow through him as he saw Ayamin clutching the edges of the corner desk. Out there was a western one, a rare one, in the matter of speaking that she had the volume and shape of an Arab, but the skin, were it not for the licks from the sun, that blushed a pure white. He remembered how that shape, and others approximating it, had lit him on fire in time’s past. Ayamin, like many police officers in Islamabad, wasn’t good at his official job, if you at all took the “official” in it seriously. The name on the streets for police officer roughly translated to “Taste Tester” if that was any indication of how they were viewed broadly. It was a guarantee that the position would draw a little bit less than the best that society had to offer. The tradeoff being the pay was less than that of a janitor working in any establishment owned by western hands.
Even at this cheapening of the perception of his profession, Akbar couldn’t be angry. Half of Pakistan had yet to even see a western woman, at least in person. How could one feel right denying the other half that did an opportunity for a little bit more than sight, and a definable path toward that oppurtunity? Especially when he had once tasted from the trough himself, rolling in it with piggish glee.
Inside the interrogation office, blue flowers gleamed in the sun along the windows. In Akbar’s day, they used opium. If the tourist in question refused the tea, the method to get them to drink was to act offended, as if to deny an offer of tea was a faux pas of the highest degree. This wasn’t at all the case in Pakistani society, but the westerners never knew any better. Those that did, knew better than to bring any issue to the police at all. The officer who realized this trick of occidental opportunity was named Dayyaan, and when he passed, not a man among them questioned whether or not he had been welcomed into paradise.
Inside the interrogation office, blue flowers gleamed in the sun along the windows. In Akbar’s day, they used opium. If the tourist in question refused the tea, the method to get them to drink was to act offended, as if to deny an offer of tea was a faux pas of the highest degree. This wasn’t at all the case in Pakistani society, but the westerners never knew any better. Those that did, knew better than to bring any issue to the police at all. The officer who realized this trick of occidental pyschology was named Dayyaan, and when he passed, not a man among them questioned whether or not he had been welcomed into paradise.
These days the magic formula was contained within that blue flower. Westerners called it “bloo bellbut” and they used it as a party drug mostly. But even among the stupid infidels, there are wise-men, and those wise-men taught the others the trick of steeping it into a tea. But a tea destined for the lips of the fairer sex only. Or so they heard. Just one of many great contributions that Pakistan had given to world civilization. Though it was the encroaching soviets who first discovered the plant as a source for a sort of truth serum, sometimes used on brave Pakistani and Afghani soldiers to turn them, in their weakness, into cowardly apostates spilling news of brave jihad to every communist willing to listen. The irony was that now the Soviet Union was no more, and since then, there had been more than a few occasions where a lucky police officer, or two, was able to use this “truth serum” on the unguarded body of a passing Ukrainian, Pole, or Rus. The tables had turned with so much force that they were practically spinning.
The cool shelter of the door was one step closer to your mom’s knees, but she always marveled, and had since Morocco, at just how cool the hijab kept her head. Though the cloth of the hijab gave her a line of sight approaching tunnel vision, and she knew not of the aggravated glares of wide white eyes that were drawn to her with the violence of magnetic attraction.
“Stupid,” the old woman said again, and shook her head.
As your mom stood now, sun slightly in her eyes, close to the door, and the humid office air blowing outward via fan, not too far off, a wild and dark face glared at her with intention and singular and uninterrupted focus.
He turned his back slightly, seeking to project his voice back into the office. “Mine!” he said. “Mine!’
Nobody contested.
The lines move forward. Your mom stepped inside, her flesh now bathed in the shade.
Akbar looked up at the lady, his face pleasant. Western women could easily mistake him as an ally for it. “Hello,” he said. “Your problem what?”
Before your mom could open her mouth, and let the details of her grievance spill out from between her pink lips, a large man, significantly younger, came into view with the intensity of a wrecking ball. “Mine!” he said, so quickly and without context that your mother assumed it must have been a word in Urdu.
“Yes, yes,” Akbar said. “Ayamin, you go.”
“Step to office, I help,” he said with his eyes wide and white. Your brother stepped backwards, almost using your mother’s lower half as a shield. He peeked out at the scary man from behind your mom’s ass.
“Uh, yes,” your mom said, nervously.
“Come, come. I help. I help you.”
The other officers all stopped, some mid-sentence, to turn and watch your mom, hourglass shaped and bright, follow Ayamin’s pudgy, stocky, and tight gait to the interrogation office. Even Akbar couldn’t help but follow with his eyes, even just for nostalgia’s sake.
When your mom got into the office, they all watched as the door slammed quickly behind her, almost catching her on her ass, blowing the skirt of her dress against her cheeks like a small gust of wind, as it clapped shut.
The nomenclature for that moment, at least for the past three decades, was “case-closed.” Because once inside, everything else just snapped into place, predictable bit by predictable bit. It was as if the western woman, and her full limbs, were less that of flesh, and more that of a clanking wheel on the 12 o’ clock train, held tightly to the rigidity of the track and below the weight of its own cargo. The track was the upcoming steps toward the final destination. The weight being the officer who kept her there.
“Sit, sit!” he almost demanded and pointed at the steel chair.
“Okay,” your mom said, assuming she had caught the officer during a busy period.
“You passport lose? You lose?”
“I’m afraid lost isn’t the right word. I’m afraid it was sto-“
“They took your passport. Thief. Thief took passport. I know. So sad. I help. I help.”
“Good,” your mom said.
As your brother looked up at the two adults facing one another, even his childish thoughts scraped miniscully against the notion that two human beings couldn’t be more different. The man’s skin was so dark it almost qualified as black. His eyes bulged from his head with a yellowish-red, and his body, while pudgy, was more strangely rectangular than round. He had a sudden jerkiness to him, and his arms moved at his sides like an inarticulate action figure’s. His clothing hung from his body, almost in a way that made his official uniform look like dress-up, like it were a joke being made against the trappings of western professionalism.
Your mom sitting across from him sat with a natural nobility. Her hands extended delicately, palms down on top of her lap, and her eyes burned with a rushed concern and mirroring empathy for his urgency. Her blue hijab, decorated with flowers, framed the distinct structure of her face, and her body, serpentine above the waist, then gave way to measured increase of volume below, which continued down to her lower thighs, below which she rapidly began to become thin again, with her dainty, besandled feet hanging, one crossed over the other. Her dress clung to her like a dream, as she looked at the monstrosity before her. Though monstrosity was never a thought she’d consciously let cross her mind.
“Okay,” he said, and grabbed for the steel teapot shining in the sun, unplugging it from the recently installed input in the wall.
“Okay,” she said, and looked down at her hands. “So I was in Bakshar district and I-“
“You want tea?”
She was flustered by the abrupt nature of the interruption. She shook her head, and her bangs almost dripped with the sweat of her brow. “Uhh, no thanks. I was at the café, and-“
“You what!?”
She shook at the sudden outburst, rattled by its volume. Your brother’s chin retreated back between his shoulders, as if he were a turtle trying to draw his head within his shell.
“I-“ your mom started. “I’m sorry?”
“You no like tea?”
“I- no, no. I’m quite alright in fac-“
“Oh! Oh!” he said in sudden bursts, as if he were baring pain. “You no like. You no like. I prepare for you. But no. No. You no want paki tea. No.”
“I-“
“No, no. You don’t want.” He rocked back and forth in his seat, it whipping up quite a commotion, his eyes focused on nothing, as if they mirrored the indistinct source of his rage. “No, you no want. No paki tea. Paki tea bad.”
“No, it’s not-“
“Oh!” he said again, clutching his belly.
“I’ll have! I’ll have!” she exclaimed. She was used to these brushes against the iron curtain of culture, living all over the world with your father, but she wasn’t used to them becoming this explosive. And the fact that she was now seeing it from an officer of the law gave her worry an extra weight, and filled her with the understandable need to make it right.
“No! No! You don’t want my tea. I understand. No like. No like.”
“No, I want it! I swear. In our culture – I’m from Australia,” she said, with her palm now pressed to her chest. “-we don’t like to impose. You know? Impose? You understand.”
“Ippose?”
“Y-yeah. Impose. We don’t like bothering people to get us stuff. You know?”
“Oh!” he said, this time as if in his own personal eureka moment. “No ippose! Like when you touch rabbit ear for guest, but you leave other ear no touch.”
The corners of your mom’s mouth drooped and her head tilted back slightly. “Yeah, like that. Like… one ear but not… the other ear. That’s what I mean-“
“Good!” he almost yelled. “Good! Have tea!”
He began to pour it into her teacup, then he poured some into his own.
He handed it to her.
“Oh,” she said, with genuine amusement. “A blue color.” She looked up at him. “That’s interesting. I haven’t seen anything quite like that.”
“Islamabad delicassy. From the flowers. Look.” He pointed with an open palm facing upwards toward the flowers in their respective pots sitting on the window sill.
“Ah,” she said, looking over at them as she took a sip. “Mmm. That’s really quite tasty. I like it, thank you.”
“You’re welcome. You will drink all, inshallah.”
Your mom, stopping mid motion from setting it down, causing a bit of the tea to spill over the sides and onto her fingers. “Yes, of course I’ll finish. Divine tea like this? I have to.”
Your brother watched as your mother downed the rest of it, with her pinkie extended away from her face. She then put her cup onto the saucer and placed it down on the desk, so delicately it was as if she thought the slightest pressure would have cut the table in two.
It was only after the cup had been emptied into your mom’s gullet, that the roughest edges of Ayamin’s poise had evaporated, though as he spoke, a hint of youthful giddiness seemed to take its place. “Good you like tea. Okay. Now you tell me passport difficulty.”
“Well,” she said. “I was at the café, and I had my bag sitting at my ankles.”
“First mistake,” said Ayamin.
“Well, hopefully it will be my last,” your mom said. “Then-“
“It won’t!”
The sudden interruptions felt almost like psychological whiplash to your mom, who sat looking with her mouth open.
“Sorry, go on,” he said and waved his hand.
“You see, I couldn’t sit with it on,” she turned and looked at the bag on her back, squeezed between the chair’s backrest and her shoulderblades. “Well, I’ve learned my lesson now of course.”
“You gon’ learn two lesson today.”
“Indeed,” your mom said, unconcerned with trying to figure out what he had meant. And maybe, a little bit exhausted from the day’s events, something which must have been only now catching up with her. “I think I saw the culprit. But I didn’t see him take it, or anyone take it, in particular. It’s just-“
“You English?”
Your mom looked at him, then tilted her chin back and look down at the desk. “If I didn’t speak English, what would be this conversati-“
“Family from England?”
“Oh, oh. Yes. Of course, sorry. Yes my family is English. Some German and French. On my grandmother’s side.” She stopped herself and shook her head suddenly. “My mom’s side, I mean. Her mom, my mom’s mom… German and French.” She sat there for a second, looking at the table. Then she looked up at him. “What was I saying?”
“You telling me husband.”
“Oh,” she said. “…l see.”
“Husband English?”
“Yes, he speaks English. English is the only language I… know… some Arabic I guess. Moroccan dialect.” She stopped again, confused.
“Your husband English in blood? Like you?”
“Yes, he speaks it well.”
“Not speak. Is English? Is English? From England?”
“No, no. He’s from Australia. We both are.”
“Not from. Family from. Way, way back from?”
“Oh!” your mom said. “I see. He’s actually… he’s Australi- no. You mean…” She had an indistinct glare in her eye for a moment, as if trying to refind her place, then the look of discovery flashed in her features, knowing she had refound her track. “He’s actually Polish and German.”
“You happy?”
“Yes, very,” she said.
“Handsome man?”
“My father? I mean, my husband? Yeah, the most handsome man I know.” Her voice was becoming increasingly ethereal as she went on, only occasionally dipping the toes of one syllable or another into the cool water of any hard stress at all.
“Ayamin ugly.”
“What?” she said.
“Ayamin ugly,” he repeated. “It’s okay. Ayamin ugly, but Ayamin still fuck white girl.”
Your brother thought he misheard. If the policeman had said the swear word he thought he heard him say, he knew his mom would have reacted. After all, she said that a potty mouth is a potty mind. But she just sat there, looking back at him, with a slight and unchanging smile.
“Oh, I see,” she said. “You get many dates with western girls.” She said it as if she were reiterating what he said in proper English.
“Yes, many dates. In this office.”
“You have dates in this office?”
“No. Fuck in this office.”
“Oh, I see.”
“I fuck white girl. Drug and fuck. Put drug in tea and fuck girl. But white girl only fuck.”
“You put it in her tea,” she said, in increasing pitch, as if in banal realization of some point made by a friend. Her voice was fading now into that commonly known to be inebriated. “I see. They can’t say no because they’re dru…” her voice trailed off and she just looked at the table blankly. She then began to form a smile, and she snorted to herself. “That’s quite a coincidence,” she said. Then she touched the rim of her teacup with her index finger and pulled it down to look inside, tipping the cup over. “I just drank tea.”
“Yes,” said Ayamin, his voice straining with a ever-growing glee, as if the breath for it came from the lowest part of his belly. “You drank and now I fuck. You fat ass. Ass white fat I fuck. You delicassy. Fat white mummy ass.”
Your mom’s finger was still inside of the cup. She looked within it blankly. “Fuck? No, no. Not with my son in the room. It’s not appropriate.”
“No, son stay. Delicassy mom. Son stay and watch. You fat ass big and nice. Biggest ever. Ayamin never have so big. Son watch shake. He watch ugly Paki fuck beauty white ass. Touch both rabbit ear. That fix passport difficulty.” He had stood up and began removing his belt as his words progressed. “Take off Hijab,” he said, and he pulled his already-hard, brown cock from his underwear briefs. “Me husband now.” He reached across the table and pulled your mom’s hijab down from her bangs. When he saw her golden hair bare for him, his cock twitched powerfully. Her hijab fell to the floor, in a motion as flowery as the baby-blue image on the hijab itself.
“Blonde hair,” he started with rising intensity. “Like field of wheat. Field for farmer reap what sow. I reap now.”
Your brother watched as the police officer’s hands ran through your mom’s hair. The darkness of the fingers, as they ran through your mom’s golden locks, made him feel tingles in his tummy and legs. He knew vaguely that he was witnessing something which was to be kept secret. Like a naughtiness, the kind that made him feel wound up like a slinky when you press it tight with both hands. Vaguely in his mind, thoughts of nudity flashed in half-realized flourishes, and little did he know that that half-known desire would be fulfilled within that afternoon, and it would be a naughtiness that would wrap him so tight to keep it secret from daddy. Like when he seen mommy in her underwear through the door and she never knew.
“So nice blonde,” said the officer. “You suck cock. Son watch.”
He grabbed her head with both hands and then pulled her upper-body across his desk and then lowered her face to his brown and twitching prick. Your brother watched as the brown cock entered your mom’s mouth slowly. The officer then began to thrust her head mechanically toward the black shrubbery of his brown field of a crotch. First his head tilted back, and then he looked down at her, and saw her dress wrapped tightly to her ass in the interrogation seat, giving it sweet form, each cheek vaguely distinct from the other.
“What use hijab if white girl still dress like. White girl need spank. White girl need humbling.”
He grabbed the back of your mom’s dress and then pulled it upward, and slowly but surely, her panty-clad ass was exposed to the chipped walls of the room. Walls which had contained the various nudities of white females of so many varieties, their forms put next to one another’s like swatches for the possible European shade of Eve.
Your brother looked at your mom’s ass, then up at the officer, then back down at it. His slinky was getting tighter. “I won’t tell daddy,” he said softly.
“What,” Ayamin said, and looked at him, still thrusting into his mother’s mouth, his balls wet with the accumulated sitting of a day’s effort, now bouncing off her pure chin. “I no hear.” Ayamin’s brown butt-cheeks were clenched as he thrust.
Your brother stood there for a second, unsure of himself. Then he said more firmly “I won’t tell daddy.”
“Good, good,” said Ayamin. “Mommy mine now. Khuffar slave. Christian boy know. Know and like. Mommy naked fun. Okay?”
“Okay?” your brother said and nodded. His mouth was dry, and he was so frozen in place he had felt like a Sumerian statue.
“Me and mommy go naked together. Yes?”
Your brother’s breathing became heavy. “Yes,” he said. In his young mind, he assumed the question was of real consequence. And because of it, everything that followed that day, he believed well into early-adulthood, followed because he had given it permission. It was an amazing thing to do for a little boy, though unintentional, as what was now coming was colored, in warm globules, the same color and hue as your mom’s hidden lower flesh, contrasted deliciously with the blurry amalgam of all that stood within that humid room, her nudity soon to be of it all.
Akbar checked off a few boxes, and then looked up at the door. A Case-Closed always felt nice. Even in his geriatric impotence, he still missed the loving familiarities he had made in that very room. And in that flash of a moment, like the rest of the world, he had loved white women, even with all their well-discussed flaws. It was near impossible to not love a people when you have cradled an uncountable weight of their flesh within the crater of your pelvic nook. And when they had shape, like the woman Ayamin had in there with him, they were lovable all the more, lust being an exponential thing where love was linear.
Your mom’s legs stood up straight, as Ayamin had pulled her until her torso lay flat to the table. Her ass was bent over, large, and glistening in the orange sun. The muscles in her thighs and calves tensed as they held her up from one side of the desk, Ayamin’s left arm doing the remainder of the work form the other side. With his right hand, he pulled out a knife from his belt, and your brother watched as he leaned forward, placed the blade beneath her underwear, letting it lay perpendicular over her butt-crack, and then he slowly turned the blade outward and sawed the sweet fabric until it teared and frayed, and then fell to the floor, leaving your mom’s long, unbroken butt-crack visible to the eyes of your brother and the Pakistani sun.
Your brother watched as, after the knife was put down, the giant brown hand grabbed your mom by her white butt-cheek and began to squeeze. Your brother marveled at the sight that he had ostensibly provided the green light for. It was the confidence provided for by this moment, and the sweet thrill of its fruit, which had served to power the slinky of your brother’s ambitions for the rest of his life, leading to the greatest discovery in medical science, one which’s shadow was cast even over the sick and helpless of this very nation but decades later. It all started with one little naughtiness, and by the delicate shape of your mom’s ass and all that could be derived from it through the act of that naughtiness. The purest motion of naughtiness itself being that of the hip-thrust, and its soundtrack a cupping-slap sound, over and ever-repeating, like unto the dust of eternity itself, echoing what it implied without end. Your brother had yet to know that sweet fruit for its shape, size, and taste. But its discovery was fast approaching.
“Here hold,” said the man.
Your brother looked at him.
He pulled your mom’s wrists with both hands, causing her to rock over the table, her butt jiggling in response. “Hold!” he said, now sounding frustrated.
“Hold?” your brother repeated, his voice weak.
“Come! Come!” he said, jerking his head. “Come here boy!”
Your brother came around the desk, and the officer pulled up your mom’s hands and set them down in an instant for emphasis. Then he said “hold.” Your brother had finally understood, and he reach up to the table to grab your mom’s wrists.
As he did, Ayamin said “good,” and he stood up and walked around the desk, his cock, twitching hard and dark in the dusty rays of sun. When he got to the other side, he stood by your mom’s naked ass and looked at your brother. “Now, you people of the book. Quran say good, Christians good. But Muslim still up.” He held his hand out, palm down, and lifted it high, following it with his eyes. “You understand? Muslims up here.” He then held his hand in place over his head, and with his other hand, he pointed down at your mom’s large, bare ass. “Christians, down here.” And then he let his raised hand come down with gigantic force, so that when it met the flesh of your mom’s butt-cheek, it turned the heads of everyone in the outer office.
“Stupid,” said the old woman in Urdu. She was looking at the shut door. Then she shook her head, said “stupid,” and then looked away.
Akbar looked over his clipboard at her with a smile. “Oh! Don’t be scrooge. Is beautiful thing.”
The old woman just shook her head with a deep sadness.
“Cheer up,” Akbar said. “Like Isa say. Beauty in all things. In there, beautiful thing.”
Ayamin positioned himself behind your mom, as your brother watched him over the length of her back. Ayamin’s cock rubbed against her crack in the natural motions of his positioning. And when he finally got his awkward footing, he grabbed his cock by its stem and pressed its throbbing head against her pink opening. And then feeling it massage the tip of his penis like sweet honey, he slowly pressed the rest of himself into her.
Your brother saw the symmetry in it, and he noticed your mom’s white ass being pressed against the officer’s dark body, and he felt his slinky go so tight that he thought he’d snap in place of it.
Ayamin looked up at him. “Now,” he said, with authority, then stopped as if to think, then finding his words, he continued. “What mommy daddy do. Now… now I do. Me, mommy.”
He then took his first thrust, his eyes contracting as if he had just sipped cool water. Then he pulled out, their bodies making a sweating sucking noise at separation, and he thrust again, her ass slapping loudly against the cupping curvature of his pubic area. Then again, then again. And then he caught his rhythm.
“This good,” he said to your brother. “Ayamin, mommy, good fun. Good, good fun. She get job in Hindustan. Charm snake. Make snake feel good.”
Your brother nodded, assuming it to be real advice, then he felt your mom’s hand slip away from his, and she grabbed onto the desk. Your brother looked into her open eyes, and saw nothing. He knew she wasn’t there. Or that she was there in one way, but not there in another. And he knew, somehow, that what happened here now, though she wasn’t there, mattered as much as if she did. Like some point was being scored on some pointboard somewhere, above the clouds or in the court of some sultan or Persian shah.
And he knew that neither your mom or dad were here, but that this was a point being scored against them. An assist of sorts, of which he had made the initial kick. He had watched football back home in Morocco and that was the metaphor that came first to mind. He had gotten your mom, or not her, in a place, and he knew that place was naughty, he could see it in the contrast of the two bodies before him, but he knew that naughty paid in a currency so much richer with shine than all the others, and he sat before the living, breathing, panting, sweating embodiment of that truth now. His mother’s dress, crumpled to the floor like it were laundry back at the apartment bathroom. Living in North Africa, and now here, he knew, even more than young boys knew in the west, that where a woman let her clothes drop was always the most sacred of places. He had only seen his mom without her hijab at home, never outside of it. And he had never seen her naked, only pondered at it as he heard her bare feet slap against the tiles on the bathroom floor. He knew that female hair and nudity had a power, and that was why it always had to be covered. But whenever it wasn’t, it was a sort of magic. And he knew that now that he could see it.
And when Ayamin pointed down at the small of your mom’s back and said “she mine in paradise,” your brother didn’t know what to think other than he wanted it to be true. Your dad had always told him that “these people’s” faith wasn’t the same as “our faith,” but that “we” had to respect that faith and its traditions out of respect for the hospitality that they had offered in allowing “us to live here with them.” These were ancient traditions, born out of centuries of wisdom. “Who are we to say they’re wrong?” daddy would say.
Your brother had understood the wisdom in that now, more than ever before or after. Your mom’s body, though sanctified by the waters of Christ, now had to submit itself to the laws and wild desires of this land. Her flesh one with the hunger in the sand and bricks, the call to prayer just starting outside, sanctifying her body in its foreign accent, timbre, and tongue. Her shoulders and hips a rack to hang Pakistan’s needs upon like her golden head held the blue of that hijab up high, her private desires playing no part, double-enveloped by the sandy armies of the half-crescent moon, who growled through beards and spittle at the indignity of having to stomach her occidental will, if even just for a moment.
Your brother’s later atheism would only strengthen this conviction, but even now, in his naïve interpretation of Christian doctrine, did he see his mom as a Christian finally finding her place. The culture of Morocco had gotten to him over the years, and he couldn’t help but internalize (and again, later deeming it rightfully so) that his mom and dad’s (and even your) Christianity had made your family worthy for this moment. He had heard so much about Christianity from the Muslim perspective that he had begun to mistake their stereotypes and misconceptions as actual Christian scripture. And in turn, he assumed that the bible itself had taught of the Christian’s place below that of the follower of the Prophet. Or rather, in front of, bent over and subject to his followers’ wild thrusts.
Luckily, his transition through the years wasn’t one of mistaken Christian to learned Christian, but of mistaken Christian to scientifically-minded atheist, and as a result, he could retain the genuine conviction that what had happened on that day was a good and deserved thing. And years into his middle-life, this thought had aged well, as where he had lived then, going in between England and France, the majority of the population was religiously Muslim, with the children of MENA immigrants making up most of that number, but with a large proportion of native-born converts to the religion to buttress it. Christianity had become a more private faith, with its strongest believers still hanging on, and with the remainder of the society being made of the unbelieving or agnostic. While the Christians, being relatively radical, mostly stayed to themselves in regards to sex and dating, sexual contact between atheists and Muslims happened all the time. Often atheist women ended up with Muslim men, as Islamic faith offered a deluge of professional advantages. And darker members of the faith tended to be more desired by women than those of European ancestry, as they were seen to be more similar in look and culture to the earliest throws in the direction of immortality for the religion, as if they were generalled by the great Khalid himself and emerged from the settling dust-clouds of Yarmouk victorious. Plus, the white converts to the religion couldn’t shake the perception of being that of a conquered people, no matter how willingly they ran towards the faith, women’s desire being stirred by the flesh of conquerors, no matter its color, over those conquered.
Your brother watched your mom being conquered by the officer across the desk from him. It was the start, at least for him, of the wild ride that was the beautiful change of western Europe (Australia, your family’s home, was still lagging behind) away from its outdated Christian proclamation towards a more cosmopolitan existence, and an awkward alliance between Islamic theocratic notions and a scientific community which was left to its own Atheism out of convenience for all involved. But even under this theocratic structure, the rights of the Christian minority were respected. With most of the backlash and ridicule against the surviving Christians coming from the young and hip generation who saw them as passe and superstitious.
Your brother shared in that perception, and he viewed this day, the defining day of your mom’s life, as a beautiful assault on a dying world order. One which your mother deserved, in his eyes. He had even met his wife, an Italian supermodel, during a party in Lyons, where he relayed the story of this day to a room full of eager listening ears. She slept with him that night on the strength of that story alone, her being a recovering Catholic. Her fat Italian ass rode his cock on the bed, and those outside in the hallway could hear him exclaiming “you have an ass like my mom! Ride my cock like mommy! God is great!”
This sexual liberalism (detractors would say libertinism), delectable like the pure water falling down the length of a white woman’s calf, heel and toes, was the accumulating avalanche which had come as a result of a build up in the western mind of various moments like this. Each one sneaking through the Mediterranean sea on boat, filling the lands with the ghosts of wild romps. European woman, middle-eastern man. It would be the beauty of the European woman, and the creative perversity of the European man, which would be the latter’s undoing, and the former’s sudden explosive widening in the novelty of lifestyle and raunchy experience.
Europeans, or likely all Indo-European races, had the seed in them, the one that all the Caligulas and Neros knew well. The seed for the sprouting tree of sweet, sweet cuckoldry, which once bloomed, stretched so high toward the warmth of the sun, that it killed all other plant-life through its constant casted shade. Your brother’s timid excitement in that room that day, unlike any he had known, wasn’t unique to him in any shape. He was only the spear-tip at the end of thousands of years of cold and mountainous climates, which whitened the skin and robbed one of the shelter of indolence and uninspired thinking, leaving only a polished ivory at the end of it all. A polished ivory much cherished by the onyxed palms of the world, one which shone bright in the sun, but would soon feel the rough pulls against its thighs, down towards the clamoring mass below, until its last signs of individual uniqueness were snuffed out in one great, anticipated, and cherished orgasm.
Your father had never had those epigenetics activated, yet he passed their pandora’s box down to his son, who sat in that room that day as the sounds of the outer office assaulted one ear, and the chaos of the streets outside assaulted the other. *thwap thwap thwap* Could any other sound hear so deliciously to the European ear? Was the need to share the beauty, or even to give it away so carelessly, that much wider than the need to take it all for one’s own pleasure? Not just countrywomen. Daughter, sisters, and mothers. Thighs and wrists manhandled by dark hands, and walls of desert-clean flesh rubbed by the friction of rocky blackened pelvises. Your brother watched with the deliciousness of a son giving up the start of his world, in all its nuance, to the whims and flesh of an other. There was no greater goal in the essence and future of the European super-organism.
And with that spank, Jesus and Mary (as the Christians understood them) turned to ash and floated off in the wind in your brother’s soul. All that was left was a liberatory atheism, which culminated, through the testament of its own John of Patmos, in the annihilation of all that was sacred. The cleavage between the western woman’s butt-cheeks the pit of Abaddon. Her entire person the Whore of Babylon, with sweetly-ejected semen dripping from her used orifices. The Dragon with many-horns her disheveled hair. Her ass, tits, thighs, and face the Four Horseman. The entire reality of her whole being, formerly believed to be infinite through generational recreation, now shaking and coming apart in seas of fire and grapes of wrath. Her infidel hole but a glimpse of paradise and the unending pleasures that wait within. The excess fat of her body jiggles to the sound waves emitted by the call to prayer. Her stomach fattening with the seed of Ishmael and her ass stained with contact against the mark of Cain. It was the first female Yahweh worshiper who bit the apple on that forbidden tree and was chased by the sword of Michael from that burning garden into the desolate world below. It would be the last Christian female who took the intoxicating apple of interracial coupling and would be chased from the burning garden of posterity itself by Michael, but replacing his sword of flame, a sword with curved blade.
No race deserved it more, and that could be seen through the simple visual of your mom being taken in that room on a Sunday afternoon. Everything about the white race: their fragile beauty, their Christian doctrines, their sturdy alphabets, Roman or Cyrillic, their Platonic forms, Universal Spirits, formal logic, and Categorical Imperatives, all deserved to be swallowed by the flesh-toned conflagration of time. White women could feel it in their loins, and white men know it in their bones. Arousal and the simple question “can it be done?” the carrot and stick driving both of them, shining ivory tusks and all, over that cliff and into that pit of forever-black where nothing ever pulls itself out of ever again. Not even a solitary strand of blonde-hair. Twerk now PAWG while you still have a white ass left to twerk with. And this is how it all ends, not with a bang, but with the tightening of Ayamin’s ballsack.
“Aye!” he screamed, startling your brother. “I finish! I finish!”
The outer office looked at the door, a sea of grinning brown faces, with a single old lady shaking her head in disappointment. In her bedroom as a child, a photograph of Sofia Loren on the wall. An admirer of the European flavor of feminine beauty, marveling with bitter sadness at the shape of your mother’s face out in that parking lot, and loving it like one loves one of man’s great landmarks. Only for it all to end up on the other side of that door, where the only traces of what happened within spilling out through the stubby policeman yelling “fuck! Fuck! I fuck your mom! I finishing! Fuck fat white ass!” accompanied by the most thorough *thwapping* noises she had ever heard, solidifying the most final of indignities to the most dignified of body and faces. It was the contrast which felt the most cruel to her. To all the men in the room, it was the contrast that made the noise beyond so sweet.
Your brother, being male, agreed.
Ayamin felt his balls tightening and pushing out wave after wave of gushing cum, which exited the shelter of his brown cock and dropped within your mom’s sleeping body. When he was finished, he stood there, glistening brown in the sun, looking smugly down at your mom. He smacked her on her ass, less out of arousal (he had been emptied dry), and more out of a need to dominate her white being.
“Ayamin never have so good, boy. Mommy great.”
Your brother watched as Ayamin’s wet cock slowly shrank until it was that of a shriveled peanut. He marveled at how such a powerful thing had just been inside his mom, subjected her inner-body to such persistent friction, and then all but disappeared. None of the subtle musculature which existed in your dad’s torso existed in the officer’s. He towered over you mom’s golden husk, but more like a hill than a mountain, the fat of his tummy competing with the volume of fat of your mom’s ass. Both were voluminous, soft, and exciting to watch in the sun. When Ayamin turned around to pick up your mom’s hijab from the ground, your brother saw the dark line of his ass crack, and he thought about how he was living in a nation of bodies that looked like that. But they were all covered. Everything was covered. Like the whole earth was in cowering fear from the sun above. But why?
The officer placed the hijab back on your mom’s head with respect and care, but then backed off, went to the window, looked outside, with his flaccid cock bathed in the sunlight, and stretched his arms wide and yawned. Your mom lay there, her hair covered, but her soft flesh still exposed. Your brother looked into her face. Her eyes were shut. Ayamin’s secret was safe with him. How else would your brother keep that slinkie tight?
When Akbar was finished with the old woman, her head shaking all the while, even as she left back out into the sun, like she was some sort of Egyptian toy, he went back toward the office, drawn by its silence, and when he entered it, he gasped at the beauty of the form before him. He shut the door quickly behind him, fearing that if the men outside got even a peek, it would lead to another riot. Word on the street was that the last woman who had been dragged naked out of that office by rioters, after satiating the angry lusts of forty or so men, was seen years later, chained to a radiator in the basement of a rural farmhouse. That was the rumor anyway. Another was that she was now just a skeleton in the dirt laying nearby the local Mongol tomb. As the common saying went, rumors fluttered like a rabbit’s left ear, but really were more like the twitching of a rabbit’s right ear. Ayamin stood by the window, smoking, his brown butt cheeks hanging out. Your brother was behind your mom, with one foot pressed against the side of the desk, with both his little hands grabbing tight to Ayamin’s nightstick, trying to pull it out of your mom’s swallowing asshole.
Ayamin turned around and looked at his colleague. “I finished,” he said, without any of the force or urgency from before. Peace had finally found the lines of his face.
Suddenly, the nightstick came loose, and your brother fell backwards, trying for a few feet to keep himself up, before falling with the nightstick in his hands on the other side of the room.
“Sticking police stick up mom’s ass very offensive to Christians,” he said to Akbar, as if genuinely trying to explain a new custom he had discovered.
As Akbar let his eyes wonder over the peaks and valleys of the woman, who lay there like a pagan goddess - like the curves and lines of the Greek Aphrodite he had seen in that illicit history book his cousin had showed him in his youth, the one he had snuck back from England, the awakening which had provoked in him a deep lust for the European form – he could almost see traces, ever so faint like the surface of sand which held a buried trinket dropped by a rushed traveler, of that Celtic woman of green and red he had crossed paths and bodies with so long ago.
And in that wondrous moment of elation, without any other chord in his mind but for the one strummed by the fingers of overwhelming beauty, nostalgia, and peace, Akbar exhaled heavenly breath. It would be his final exhalation. He fell to the floor, his face still, eyes open, looking over at your mom, with a face that wore the calming lines of one who had witnessed eternity. Akbar was no longer. But when his earthly remains left that crowded office, the one he had known and loved for the entirety of his adult life, not one of his colleagues questioned whether or not he had been welcomed into paradise.
Your brother stood there with the nightstick in his hands, its furthest point resting on the floor in a diagonal position, sharing with it the blessings of your mom’s insides. He watched, under the electric light, which was orbited by moths, as each and every colleague of Akbar’s celebrated his wonderful life by emptying load after load into and onto the backside of your mom. Such beauty. Such love. The nights of the orient had a beauty to them that existed nowhere else. Your brother never knew how lucky he was to live there his entire life until he grew up and moved to Europe.
As he rode behind in the car of the funeral parlor’s owner, a heavenly voice singing in Urdu from the car’s speaker, he marveled at what strange changes the streets of Islamabad had made since he had left. The beggars and urchins had all but left, and were replaced by fat-bottomed Italian tourists who walked in packs along the sidewalks, in search for members of the Pakistani professional class to draw them aside with sweet words, and pump them full of their sweet, white seed, and they could come back from their odyssey abroad, their stomach a manger for the mixed product of such couplings (it was called Going London), and they could partake in the blessings of status the rearing of such children provided in the upper-classes of Rome or Milan.
As he rode behind in the car of the funeral parlor’s owner, a heavenly voice singing in Urdu from the car’s speaker, he marvelled at what strange changes the streets of Islamabad had made since he had left. The beggars and urchins had all but left, and were replaced by fat-bottomed Italian tourists who walked in packs along the sidewalks, in search for members of the Pakistani professional class to draw them aside with sweet words, and pump them full of their sweet, white seed, and they could come back from their odyssey abroad, their stomach a manger for the mixed product of such couplings (it was called Going London), and they could partake in the blessings of status the rearing of such children provided in the upper-classes of Rome or Milan.
Your brother saw one of these bare-bottomed creatures of Southern Europe being pounded from behind in the dust of a passing alley.
“They don’t make the women wear hijab’s?” he asked in Urdu?
The parlor owner looked over at him, and then back at the road. “No. It helps us identify them as tourists. Then we can fuck.”
“It’s not adultery?”
“No. It’s not adultery if they’re tourists,” he said and smiled.
Your brother smiled in turn, maybe the first time since your mother’s passing, and he looked out, seeing an hourglass shaped Italian body with a businessman’s brown hand on her hip, walking her into a hotel. He looked back at his driver. “You ever have?”
The man didn’t look at him, he just grinned as he looked at the road ahead. “Yes. Many times. I have money. They like men with money.”
“Yes they do,” your brother said and chuckled. “So you probably have children in Italy then.”
“Yes,” he said. “And maybe Spain and Greece.”
“Ah, which one is your favorite?”
“Italy,” he said, and looked into the rear-view. His eyes had a sudden wetness to them, as if he could see the past through that little mirror.
“My wife is Italian.”
He looked over at your brother. “Oh, lucky man. Very lucky. Ass like –“ and he took his hands off the steering wheel and held them a distance apart, with his palms curved like they were held against the ballooning sides of cheeks. “- like that big?” And he put his hands back on the wheel.
“Yeah,” your brother said, smiling. “She’s a beauty. You know why they’re like that?”
“No.”
“Because Arab men, way back when, conquered Italy. Just it’s south parts. And they slept with all the women. And now they’re great-great-great-great granddaughters are all big like that. Big Arab asses. It’s in their DNA now. Like a butterfly, changed to be more beautiful.”
“Like now,” his driver turned to him and said quickly.
“Exactly,” your brother said, smiling in the corner of his mouth. “Exactly like now.” Your brother sat there, his finger pressed under his chin as if he were checking his own pulse. He then turned to his companion and said “You know the man who cured cancer? Wouldn’t it be great if one day he cured death? Then you could see what the women of Italy, and Spain… and Greece, and England will look like hundreds of years from now. Just how pretty they’ll be.”
To your brother’s surprise, he shook his head, as willfully as if shaking a bad thought. “No. I don’t like,” he said. “I’ll go to paradise when I die. I don’t want to live forever.” Your brother nodded his head, understanding, but before the moment could settle, the man continued. “Also, I like European women. Blonde hair, blue eyes.”
“Red heads…” your brother mused.
“Yes. Red hair. Also, I like red hair. Maybe in Iran, they have some, but not many. Women of Europe, now, I like. I don’t want to see what they will be, because it will be the same like here. Maybe a little different. But mostly the same.”
Your brother stared at the side of the man’s face, then he turned and looked ahead. The back of the hearse in front of him rattled as its wheels crushed pebbles. “Blonde hair,” he repeated to himself. “You know who had beautiful blonde hair? When she was younger, I mean?”
“Who?”
“My mother,” your brother said.
“Oh,” the man said somberly.
“You would have loved my mom. Long blonde hair. Her ass-“ he lifted his hands and held his palms at a distance from one another. “Like that.”
“Big?” the man asked, excited by the conversation.
“Very, very big,” your brother repeated. “From Australia, you know? Her ass was taken by a Pakistani actually?”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah, a police officer.”
“Wow,” the man said.
“Yeah. Wow is right. I was there and saw it too.”
“Really? You weren’t scared?”
“No,” your brother said, and smirked humbly. “I wasn’t. Maybe a little, at first. But, thinking back on it, it was probably the best day of my life.”
“Ah,” the man said. “Western men like such things. Really interesting culture.”
“Well, you know what Isa said? In our book, I mean?”
“What?”
“He said when someone slaps you, you turn the other cheek. My mom had two cheeks as well.” He said it in a way where the man could understand the joke. And he knew his Urdu was still good when the man began laughing.
After the man regained himself, he took a breath, and then asked “why burry her in Pakistan? She loves Pakistan?”
“Everybody loves Pakistan,” your brother said, trying to make the man feel proud. “But she was supposed to be buried in Australia. Next to where my dad is buried.”
“Why not?”
“Because I didn’t want her there.”
“You have no other family? No one else cares?”
Your brother took a breath. “As far as they know, she’s there next to him now.”
The man looked to your brother confused, and then back at the road.
“Her coffin is full of rocks,” your brother said, and then he let his head rest on the window.
The man didn’t ask, but neither did he show any sign of judgement. The remainder of the ride was quiet somber, and the spirit of it was reflected in the depleting light of the horizon.
Your brother said goodbye to your mom under that depleted light, all in his own way, and then the casket was closed forever. It was lowered by ropes into the cool ground, where it would be shielded from the uncompromising Pakistani sun. The surface of the earth itself a hijab for your mom’s head.
Your brother held himself together as he let dirt drop from his hand, onto the face of her coffin, before the cemetery men filled her plot in with black spades.
After the men were finished, they packed up and left. And your brother stood there, hot wind blowing through his hair, cradling a few of his tears into the dry grass. And he looked up at the tombstone. It was big. Big enough to cover three plots. And your mother’s resting place was at the left-most side of it, aimed in the direction of the west. Her name on the left-most side of the tombstone, with a cross above it. To the right two names were written, both Arabic/Pakistani in nature, with half-crescent moons above them. One of the names, the one to the far right, was Effat Aamir. And below it, it said Loving Wife, with the photographed image of a modest brown-skinned woman, plain and homely, smiling pleasantly.
Your mom’s name stood-out to the left of the other two, distinct through its English-form, both her first name and her maiden family name. The photograph below, one your dad took, was of your mom from behind, her ass clad in a bikini on a beach in Sydney, turning around shyly and noticing the snapping camera. Your brother had chosen it himself.
Your mom, her golden flesh in its prime, highlighted and expanded upon by the gold of her head, which shone, glimmering like a bronze pearl in the sun. The weight of her ass swallowed the lowest portion of her bikini greedily. The sole of her right foot all the way up to the part down the center of her head visible to the camera’s click. And that ass, chewing hungrily on the hijab of its own, in pure western arrogance. Or as the locals would call it, idiocy.
Above her sacred form, preserved at its height of being, preserved even at the height of European being itself, its shining example, stood a simple phrase in Urdu. Her stone in Australia read Loving Wife and Proud Mother of Two. This one had it beat in its brazen and sharp simplicity.
It simply read Christian Sex Slave to a Man of God.
To the right of your mother’s plot, standing in the very center of that heavy stone, stood a familiar name. One that pressed your brother’s slinky up tightly into that of a thick circle.
Ayamin Aamir.
Below it, in Urdu, it said Faithful Servant of God. And below that was a photographed image of his bloated face, years older than your brother had remembered him. His eyes still wide, but calm. And his lips curved with a content smile.
The dirt over the three graves was flat, with your mother’s bare of yellow grass, just for the time being. Eventually it would grow over and no discerning separation between the plots would be derived. All of them one.
Your brother entered the passenger seat of the parlor-owner’s car, his eyes red and face haggard with silent pain. On their way out of the cemetery gates, he asked the man what paradise looked like. As he sat there, listening to the man describe, in a calm which raised in intensity but not stillness as it went, the palms which hung over above, casting shade on the dew-wet grass, dates hanging from its extended points, the cool breeze which kissed at everything, washing it of the residue of the hot sun which nourished from above, and the sweet river which ran through it, from one end to its other, ever refreshing, cleansing, and chilled, your brother saw a vision of a smooth white body moving through that blue water, as elegant as a porpoise, swimming toward the glimmering veil of its surface, an endlessness over her grinning features, and a body which gave beautifully under the pressure of the water’s resisting drag.
Just before that smiling white face, its golden hair trailing over the length of her back, reached the surface, which reflected the wobbling circle that was the source of all light, an obstruction slid into place, eclipsing the sun itself with its dark-brown shadow, casting a dark shade over the rippling yellow form.
The white body’s elegant feet still kicked through that darkened water, up toward the source of darkness and its halo of light. And just as she about neared the surface, two eyes could be made out, large and wide and white. She was so close now. And at only a moment before the top of her golden crown touched the surface, another whiteness came across the lower half of this face, shaped like a perfect smile, and a mouth full of ivory white teeth.
And it was in the moment of this invading thought, that your brother, the greatest scientist the world might have ever known, had, in his own esoteric and stubborn way, finally found God.
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