For Ummi

I'm still not ahead of schedule, and I foolishly stayed up til 5am last night with work today. Please enjoy this short story from my senior year that I'm oddly proud of.

Gabir rises from the table with two cups as the tea kettle whistles and turns the back left burner off on the stove, his mother sitting silently with her cup before her on the table. Twisting his waist, he grabs her cup and places it next to his before pouring the boiling hot water over the tea bags. “Would you like any honey with you tea, mother?” She shakes her head, her salt and pepper hairs slipping out of its loose braid – he would have to remind younger brother Fadi to touch it up soon – exposing more and more split ends. “I’m sure Iskandar will want honey. That man has a sweet tooth like a spoiled child.” After squeezing the bottle bone dry between the first two cups, Gabir returns to the table as he smiles at his mother, placing her cup down first.

“It’s nice of you and your older brother to visit your dear old ummu,” she finally breaks her silence. “I know how much of a bother it must be.”

“Please, we’ve wanted to come see you for the past five months. We just have busy lives with our wives and all.”

“Yes. I imagine you do.” Her eyelids slide shut as she raises the cup to her mouth, parting her lips to whistle into the simmering tea before letting it lightly scorch her tongue just as it had the skin on her left arm when she was still a newlywed in Lebanon. “I’m happy women were lucky enough to pick you two out as suitable gentlemen to marry. If only I were so lucky as to have that opportunity.”

“You’re not too old to remarry, yourself,” Gabir says. “You’ve been in America for 37 years now. You think you would have gotten used to it by now.”

“Not when you’re married to a man like your father for 32 of them. And I have no need to remarry. Fadi still sticks by his mother’s side. Just the other day, a girl stopped him while he was in the market with me in the produce section. He hooked my arm and said he already had a woman to serve and protect.”

Gabir’s little brother, a slender boy with eyes that perpetually burned with curiosity and a mind fixated on those he held dear, graduated college three years ago with a bachelor’s in engineering and stayed at home with her – having commuted the entirety of his undergraduate career – to help their mother make ends meet, since she was never allowed to hold a job herself, though Gabir and Iskandar often sent her checks for each season that passed since their father’s departure – enough to keep her comfortable in the only American home she had known. Iskandar often speculated to him that Fadi was a momma’s boy, but Gabir defended him as just acting as the baby of the bunch. When will he move on?

Gabir remains lost in his thoughts until his mother mutters something. “What?” he asks.

“I thought you turned the kettle off,” she repeates. He quickly realizes that a whistling sound has filled the whole house. Before he can respond, a loud bang replaces it.

“It sounds like it came from upstairs.” Almost falling out of his chair in a hurry, Gabir rushes out of the kitchen and up the stairs to see Iskandar standing in the doorway to Fadi’s room, smoke crawling along the floor out of the room. “Is he alright? What was he doing in there?”

“I can’t really answer either one of those questions, I’m afraid,” his brother replies. “I don’t see him. There’s just that.” Gabir follows Iskandar’s gaze to a cylinder shaped tin can that stretches from the floor to the ceiling in the corner across from a bed; the smoke seems to originate from its opening. On the desk to the right side of the tin can is a rectangular box, connected by a coiled wire, that displays a date and place in florescent orange lights: July 22, 1971, Tyre, Lebanon.

“He didn’t…” Gabir drags his brother with him and stuffs him into the machine. “We have to follow him,” he says in response to Iskandar’s perplexed look as he searches feverously inside the cylinder for a button that reads “Go” or “Launch” to no avail before stomping his foot down. Suddenly the floor of the machine glows, beginning from the middle until it reaches the side panels, and a flash of light engulfs the two brothers.

*~

The Shiite temple’s white exterior shines beautifully in front of them with pure elegance that would rival any bride on her wedding day, and fifteen year old Mariam dressed in a radiant white grab with gold laces outlining its hem was no exception as Gabir and Iskandar could see from behind an abandoned fruit stand as she walked between her parents into the temple. As the last of her party enters the temple, the brothers emerge from hiding place.

“Ummu really looks beautiful, even at this young age,” says Iskandar as he brushes sand off himself.

“I know.” Out of the corner of his eye, Gabir catches a man in a brilliant burnt sienna jacket with golden yellow wrists and collar walking with confidence along the side of the building and turns to his brother to say, “I think that’s Ibrahim.”

“Father?” Iskandar hides behind the fruit stand once again, looking in the direction that his brother points before rising up once again. “Where? I don’t see him.”

Before Gabir can clarify, he turns to find their young father is missing from the side street. As quickly as he ran up to Fadi’s room, he runs toward the last intersection he last spotted his father with Iskandar steps behind him, panting from the extra weight he’s put on over the years – a sound that nearly drowned out the moans of a man in an alley being struck repeatedly by a blunt object. Gabir stops at the mouth of an alley to see his younger brother standing menacing over Ibrahim with a dented garbage can tightly grasped in his left hand.

“Fadi! What do you think you doing?” Gabir calls out walking slowly towards him.

Fadi peers over his shoulder. “Oh. It’s you. Come. Help me finish off this fiend.”

“Be reasonable, Fadi,” Iskandar wheezes as he stumbles into the alley. “What do you think will happen if you kill him?”

“I will relieve ummi of all the suffering she’s ever had to endure,” he replies somberly.

“And you’ll erase us. If he dies now, then we can never be. None of us will be there to provide for her. How will she survive?”

“Maybe another suitor is lined up for her to marry,” Gabir joins in. “Maybe he’s even worse than Ibrahim. There’s no way of knowing. Then she’ll be in even more pain.”

“I can’t imagine anyone worse than him,” Fadi turns back to his father. “But if there be a worse man, I pray that there is another like me to travel through time and bring him down.” When he lifts the trashcan over his head, Gabir and Iskandar sprint into action as the can flies towards their father’s head ready to splatter it.

~

Sitting alone on a carpet in front of her home, Mariam’s salt and pepper hair flows with the Lebanese air of a summer breeze.  She closes her eyes, but images of her broken and bloody husband-to-be on that faithful night – it seemed like night to her – fill her mind as three men seem to fade away into a successful escape from the scene of the crime. The anniversary of her fiancé’s death still haunts her to this day as well as the lust for a family to call her own.  To care for. To love.

Farewell, Grandpa

It was May 22nd, a Tuesday.

I happened to be moving into my lodging for my summer job

when my older sister called me.

My mother called me the day before

informing me that my grandfather suffered a stroke 

and had been rushed to the hospital.

I expect the worse and received it as my sister sobbed through the hard news.

I stood in the kitchen of my new apartment practically unmoved,

both physically and figuratively.

Once we finished our short conversation,

I retrieved a shot glass from my belongings,

poured myself a shot of the Southern Comfort I happened to have on hand,

and toasted to the memory of my grandfather - the southern gentleman that he was.

I returned to Newark, NJ the Saturday following,

much earlier than I attended on arriving,

but something compelled me - perhaps the need to support my family.

I'd be lying if I said I didn't regret it;

my grandmother, mother, and sister were perpetually stressed making preparations for the wake, funeral, and arriving extended family members.

I don't like my extended family.

I barely know my extended family.

I don't care enough to get to know these older relatives that I see once a decade

recalling that the last time they saw me I was "this high."

However there are a few members of my extended that I enjoy seeing,

but it's most likely because I see them at least three times in a decade

and have grown to cherish them.

But all of this is best left for a different post.

My grandfather's wake turned out to be fairly emotional.

My mother cried as she expressed her love for her father, 

using their trip to and from my graduation as a comparison 

to the drives they embarked on when she was younger;

my sister allowed her face to once again become wet 

while explaining he was a father figure 

in the absence of her own father during her childhood;

even my niece turned away from the microphone

before she could share her seven years of knowing the man.

Tears rolled down my check through the sweat 

pouring down my forehead each time,

but it occurred out of sympathy not empathy. 

This lack of personal emotion 

stems from the little interaction I shared with my grandfather.

The most time I spent one on one with him 

was the day we spent installing my mother's new floorboards, 

and it was hardly a bounding experience. 

It was more of a "let's get work done" moment 

that led to a shared since of accomplishment.

Being a handyman was one of his many traits acknowledged during the wake

along with his fathering-nature, firm religious beliefs, 

support of others, and business management skills.

But his most referred to quality was his silence.

Perhaps this is why we never grew close.

I myself am a fairly quiet man unless spoken to first;

even then, I'm quick to fall silent again and go about my way.

But if the organist at my church can consider him a father figure,

why can't I feel some emotion over his death?

These past few days I've randomly reminded myself, "He's dead."

That phrase kept repeating itself, growing in regularity once I saw him in the casket.

I kept looking to my grandmother as she sat directly in front of her dead husband

seemingly unmoved but more likely attempting to hold strong for the rest of her family.

She'd been with the man for 55 and a half years.

There were photos of their time together 

spanning from their wedding day to my graduation.

Thinking of them apart made me cry most of all.

I think the fact that he died so soon after my graduation is what freaks me out the most.

Here's a timeline of events:

Saturday, May 19 - I graduate and we eat together as a family

Sunday, May 20 - My grandparents and mother ride back up to NJ

Monday, May 21 - He suffers a stroke

Tuesday, May 22 - He dies

It's almost like he wanted to make one last appearance before he died,

as if he wanted me to know he was proud of me

though he didn't say it explicitly while he was down in Baltimore.

I should add that my grandfather was the first man in my family to hug me regularly.

It started when I went away to college;

the first time I returned home, he gave me one of the awkwardest hug of my life.

It was the first time I remember him hugging me - let alone as an adult.

I didn't know how to take it, but I learned to take it as his unspoken love for me.

My sister and cousins can speak about their experiences with my grandfather,

but me being the youngest of my generation in the family,

I never got to partake in grandpa's stern but silent discipline

or being dragged to church every Sunday as a child.

I felt jibbed in a way; I still do.

So what can I do now?

I squandered the possible times I could have spent knowing my grandfather.

I had to learn from the funeral's program that he was born in Alabama, having always thought it was Georgia or Mississippi.

I knew from pictures that he was involved in the service, but the program informed  me that is was  the Air Force he served with for three and a half years before being honorably discharged, but for what I have no clue.

Though  I knew they had been together for 55 and a half years, it was during the funeral that I figured out my grandfather was 19 at the time of the marriage. But now I'll never know how they met or how he knew my grandmother was the one for him.

Now he lies in a tomb of sorts on the sixth row awaiting my grandmother to join him.

I should take this as a sign to spend as much time 

with the two grandmothers I still have on this Earth.

My father's mother is dangerously close to her end as it is.

But in all honesty, it's hard for a distant grandson to suddenly change his ways.

As much as I know I should, it's a struggle to even force myself to be in the same space as them - let alone hold an actual conversation.

But at the very least I can try.

My grandfather would have wanted me to.

If I ever want to be half the man he was, 

I have to at least start with that.

Word.