The Thirty Names of Night

Back in the days when I knew you in Syria, my mother was beloved by everyone. Both the village midwife and dresser of the dead, she walked hand in hand with the shadow world, and the otherworldly became my constant companion. I played by myself in the fields, tracing the golden line of the steppe. Beyond were the ancient pillars and temples of Tadmor, the Bride of the Desert. It was on this desert road that the Bedouins sometimes approached our village to sell wool or livestock, though they came less often in those days than when I was small. On the day I began to bleed, I thought I’d grown beyond the age when magic approaches from the corner of one’s eye.

There, at the edge of the world I knew, I met a woman from my village who loved winged creatures more than people. To my mind there wasn’t anything strange about this, though our neighbors regarded her as quite the oddity. I came to learn her name was Hawa, like the first woman, and that she was building a flying machine.

Amongst themselves, our neighbors whispered about her and called her Majnouna. My mother’s friends gossiped about her flying machine as they picked pebbles from the freekeh one afternoon. I began to watch her while my mother was out delivering babies. Those who saw me returning to the village laughed and warned me away, but day after day, I went out into the fields to watch Hawa gather her materials. She built the double wings and the body of the machine first, then added the two wheels and the two rows of fabric draped across its back.

I never spoke to her until after her fateful flight. That was the day of the blood. Though my mother would have been ecstatic, I hid it. I didn’t want to tell her, maybe for fear she’d keep me home that day; or maybe it was the fear of what else it would mean, the new things I’d have to learn as a woman, the vague fear I had of marriage, the feeling that something was ending and