Celestial Bodies

“That someone arrived.”

As much as Mayya focuses on her sewing, as much as she only has eyes for Ali bin Khallaf, her mother wants nothing more than a man to arrive and fall in love with her. The quote above is framed with an almost fairy tale aesthetic, the handsome prince arriving to marry the heroine. The sentence itself is isolated to strengthen its impact; it refers to the “someone” who is impressed by her dedication to sewing: Abdallah. To Mayya, he seems like the wrong “someone” (15). As much as this might seem like a fairy tale romance, it is not Mayya’s fairy tale romance.

“The tubes going into his body sucked the life out of me.”

Abdallah, speaking in the first-person perspective, is open and honest about his relationship with his father, but his honest appraisal is that the relationship is incredibly complicated. He loves, loathes, and fears his father; laying in the hospital bed, the tubes attached to his father’s body cause fear, worry, and guilt in Abdallah, eating away at him just as his father’s age is eating away at his own body. As his thoughts jump around in the narrative, Abdallah returns to the most painful and regrettable moments, hoping that he could change them.