Амаль Эль-Мохтар - The Truth About Owls

The memory is like a trap, a steel cage that falls over her head and severs her from reality. When the memory descends she can do nothing but see her father's face, over and over, aghast, more hurt than she has ever seen him, and her own words like a bludgeon to beat in her own head: "Fine, go back and die , I don't care, just stop coming back ."

She feels, again, the power lashing out, confused, attempting both to tether and to push away; she remembers the shape of the door knob in her hand as she bolts out of the flat, down the stairs, out the building, into the night. She feels incandescent, too burnt up to cry, thinking of her father going back to a country every day in the news, every day a patchwork of explosions and body counts, every day a matter of someone else's opinions.

She thinks of how he wouldn't take her with him.

And she feels, irrevocably, as if she is breathing a stone when she sees him later that evening in hospital, eyes closed, ashen, and the words reaching her from a faraway dimness saying he has suffered a stroke, and died.

"Anisa — A ni sa!" Izzy has taken her hands, is holding them, and when Anisa focuses again she feels as if they're submerged in water, and she wants to snatch them away because what if she hurts Izzy but she is disoriented and before she knows what she is doing she is crying while Izzy holds her hands and sinks down to the rain-wet floor with her. She feels gravel beneath her knees and grinds them further into it, to punish herself for this, this thing, the power, and she is trying to make Izzy understand and she is trying to say she is sorry but all that comes out is this violent, wrecking weeping.

"It's me," she manages, "I made her sick, it's my fault, I don't mean to do it but I make bad things happen just by wanting them even a little, wanting them the wrong way, and I don't want it anymore, I never wanted this but it keeps happening and now she'll die—"

Izzy looks at her, squeezes her hands, and says, calm and even, "Bullshit."

"It's true—"

"Anisa — if it's true it should work both ways. Can you make good things happen by wanting them?"

She looks into Izzy's warm dark eyes, at a loss, and can't frame a reply to such a ridiculous question.

"Think, pet — what good things do you want to happen?"

"I want—" she closes her eyes, and bites her lip, looking for pain to quash the power but feels it differently — feels, with Izzy holding her hands, Izzy facing her, grounded, as if draining something out into the gravel and the earth beneath it and leaving something else in its wake, something shining and slick as sunlight on wet streets. "I want Blodeuwedd to get better. I want her to have a good life, to… be whatever she wants to be and do whatever she wants to do. I want to learn Welsh. I want to—" Izzy's face shimmers through her tears. "I want to be friends with you. I want—"

She swallows them down, all of her good wants, how much she misses her father and how much she misses just talking, in any language, with her mother, and how she misses the light in Riyaq and the dry dusty air, the sheep and the goats and the warmth, always, of her grandmother and uncles and aunts and cousins all around, and she makes an anthology of them. She gathers the flowers of her wants all together in her throat, her heart, her belly, and trusts that they are good.

The truth about owls—

Anisa and her mother stand at the owl centre's entrance, both casually studying a nearby freezer full of ice lollies while waiting for their tickets. Their eyes meet, and they grin at each other. Her mother is rummaging about for caramel cornettos when the sales attendant, Rachel, waves Anisa over.

"Is that your mother, Anisa?" whispers Rachel. Anisa goes very still for a moment as she nods, and Rachel beams. "I thought so. You have precisely the same smile."

Anisa blushes, and looks down, suddenly shy. Her mother pays for their tickets and ice cream, and together they move towards the exit and the picnic area.

Anisa pauses on her way through the gift-shop; she waves her mother on, says she'll catch her up. Alone, she buys a twee notebook covered in shiny metallic owls and starts writing in it with an owl-topped pen.

She writes "The truth about owls—" but pauses. She looks at the words, their shape, the taken-for-granted ease of their spilling from her. She frowns, bites her lip, and after a moment's careful thought writes "Y gwir am tylluanod—"

But she has run out of vocabulary, and this is not something she wants to look up. There is a warmth blossoming in her, a rightness, pushing up out of her chest where the power used to crouch, where something lives now that is different, better, and she wants to pour that out on the page. She rolls the pen between her thumb and forefinger, then shifts the journal's weight against her palm.

She writes "ان الحقيقة عن البوم معقّدة", and smiles.

2014.

Amal El-Mohtar is the Nebula-nominated author of The Honey Month , a collection of poetry and very short fiction written to the taste of twenty-eight different kinds of honey. She has thrice won the Rhysling Award for Best Short Poem and once received the 2012 Richard Jeffries Society Poetry Prize. Her short fiction has appeared in multiple venues online and in print, including Apex, Strange Horizons, Lackington's , and the special "Women Destroy Science Fiction" issue of Lightspeed magazine. She also edits Goblin Fruit , a web quarterly dedicated to fantastical poetry, with Caitlyn A. Paxson. She reviews books for Lightspeed and short fiction for Tor.com.

Find her online at amalelmohtar.com or on Twitter @tithenai.