Fatima

She found herself caught between the one that disappeared and this other one, submerging half of her in their strangeness. The first one, like water, was impossible to hold while the second one felt like an anchor she had never chosen.

They made the first one disappear because they knew everyone would ask the question. Everyone asked it anyway. The question that meant she would have to get up from their table, walk past the fence of their garden, then a little further, beyond the edge of the village until she would have crossed five of those invisible lines they call borders. They always expected her to go West, as the sunset seemed friendlier to them than the sunrise of the East. She would leave no trace as she walked past Vienna through Hungarian plains where language became alien, through Carpathian passes – further still? They would ask with that certain irritation signalling that she might have gone too far.

Yet, by now, she was on her own quest – too far to hear their voices. She would roll its sounds off her tongue, but no one recognised it until she had crossed the Danube into Cyrillic and heard the call to prayer in Trabzon. She did not know their prayers, but they knew her name. She found it in someone’s letterbox, an envelope which held her meaning on the inside: Fatima (f-ṭ-m), the one who separates. Water became silence first, then tears. Separates from what? she wondered. Separation from worldly attachments, purity, growth – why that name when all she longed for was to dig her toes into that soft, warm soil like roots.

When she returned, they would look at her with a righteous smile - as if they had placed bets about how many invisible lines she would have to cross until her sound held meaning; until her name became small enough to make room for what they needed her to be. And so, she gave them that other one, the one that smelled like onion cake and bratwurst and made it seem like half-timbered houses were imprinted on her skin.

With her feet again under their table, she forgot. She simply forgot to name herself in between.