Ayse

“Now, twenty years later, I realize I have never been loved by a man the way my father once loved me. The boy from Shobrakheit hot-wires an intimacy just by sounding like him. He wishes me not a good morning, but a childlike morning or a morning of flowers. He texts, I hope your day will be like the birds. I hope your night will be like the childhood of trees. Don’t be sad, my moon. I have a remembering of the lives I didn’t live.”
― Noor Naga, If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English

“She asked me for a favor, to clip the flight feathers of her wings to the quick, and even in my frustration I was shocked. I asked her why she would do such a thing. “For grief, she said. For sorrow. When the world has changed so completely, why should I remain the same? I cannot remain. I cannot stay.”
― Nghi Vo, Mammoths at the Gates

“He dried his hair, which he wore as he had always worn it: a practical footballer’s cut, short all round with a side parting and tidy fringe, which, when it fell onto his forehead, as it did now, told him it was time for a trim. At Donnie’s nobody was ever asked what style they wanted: they simply got a shorter version of what they already had. Donnie had learned to cut hair in the army and viewed barbering as something akin to getting your toenails cut or brushing your teeth. It was a maintenance job, and not something to develop ideas about.”
― Ronan Hession, Panenka

“You’d walk in and be confronted immediately with the feeling that all the furniture was living in denial of its geographic circumstance, that the human who had done the arrangements was afraid of the city outside her windows.”
― Noor Naga, If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English