MENTORSHIP RECIPIENT​

Mentor Commentary
Laura Maylene Walter

Recipient Reflection
​​Yasmine Rukia

Eid Mubarak

Fiction by ​​Yasmine Rukia

I count the potted plants on the terrace; a vine of white jasmine, a bush of lavender, a yellow tulip bulb and three little cactuses. I’m no gardener—no mother earth but I like to think I’ll suddenly turn optimistic and rosy cheeked if I can live life through things that turn toward the light of the egg-yolk sun. It’s four am and my cigar is a smokestack, I am the smog overlooking Altar Road. I imagine free-falling from the holies of holy to amuse myself; what would The Mother of the Savior Lutheran, the dome-topped Armenian, its sister Orthodox, and the two watchful minarets of the mosque that act as absent Baba, the Right, always right, and Mama the Left, think of this scene?
 
My body spayed on dirty pavement, broken like all the promises whispered within their walls. If their carved wood and marble could talk they’d ask my spirit how religious I am, and I’d laugh and say I go to church every day, but not with truth. The truth is like all the salt you pick up on the day of judgement with your eyelashes, what good would telling anyone that I drop my knees at the mosque every day, hoping to see my sister? When you’re disowned, potted plants become your family and you get ready for a long day of fasting, orally fixating on your death.
 
*
 
I walk into the prayer room of the mosque, and there he is, at the minbar, as constant as the prayers I cry out when he fucks me. He is a dirty old man and I am a young desperate woman. Or so he likes to pretend. His robes fool no one to the kind of man he is, they see it in his Italian leather step, the shimmering shine of his motorbikes, the beam of his beamer, he is kindly, ambitious, and ubiquitous, at least when standing next to me.
 
He says “good” like English is his third language—it is—whenever he sees me near my easel, or as I set a new painting to dry in my flat. He likes my paintings. He whispers in French before he kisses me, that he loves my face, despite that I don’t care for French. He repeats like a bad joke, that to know the language of love, francaywayy, you must live it and I flash my Culverin smile. Our meetings are the farthest things from love, but I don’t mind being mut عaah meat if it means having someone here to make fire with, to pass cigars and burnt offerings of broken stories in quiet conversation that waft all the way up to lower heaven. He leaves me money sometimes too, tells me to buy myself something nice, so I pay my rent, buy more paint and feed for my flowers.
 
I am a starving artist serving coffee to college kids who slurp their insomnia way. Most nights I serve piping hot plates of rice and meat sprinkled with pine-nuts to old women at gender-segregated weddings. My hunger lies not in my belly full of leftovers or pits of empty tip-jars but in the folds of life itself. What is living if all we’re destined for is to die? I smear red, and blue, create purple-majesty and brush a sky I wish to see outside in-between the cold minarets. The color of a sky I could drink water under.
 
*
 
The stark marble of the mosque floor off-sets her black pumps perfectly, and she is talking to him. I sit and clutch my wooden prayer beads a little too tightly my eyes closed but ears fixed as close to the conversation as his jugular vein. It’s strange being married but not, it’s an open relationship with god’s seal pressed upon it but with less love, no children and curated conversation. When at mosque I listen and think, I venerate God by being the kind sinner that I am. The conversation is hushed but years of middle child syndrome has made me an expert at the art of eavesdropping.
 
“I want to leave him, but our children—”
 
“They will be fine. You are good mother, and he owes you the aakhair post-deevorce so do not worry about money, god always takes care of the faithful,”
 
He lowers his eyes and lifts his ringed hand and she steps in closer.
 
“I can also help if needed, I know it hurts to be alone for the beautiful.”
 
She breaks into Arabic and I will my mind to switch gears, remember the language of green parsley and lathered chick-peas, but they groan in protest. Never enough olive oil from the tree of knowledge for them to make the leap comfortably.
 
I admire his rings instead as I plan my exit.
 
First finger, maroon oval carnelian as big as a cat’s eye, tasteful sliver band. He wears it on his middle finger when he’s feeling frisky.
 
Index finger, square emerald stone, his thick sliver band of permanence, never moved out of rotation or onto other fingers like the others. I forgot to ask him about it when I noticed it our first month together. But when I do I also remember why I shouldn’t ask in the first place. The mention of rings might make a man think things I have no time to think about.
 
Pinky finger, dark opal dainty sliver band. The left means pleasure the right means pain, today it is on his left.
 
He doesn’t even meet my eyes as I pass them, but I know he feels the folded flower I left in his shoe. Inside is a daily prayer from the Kamasutra, a lust-note from his favorite believer. They walk toward the elevator and disappear behind sliding doors as I run the drinking fountain.
 
I know about her, but she will never know about me.
 
*
 
Fadwa barges in before my shift at The Bellagio Banquet Hall, crying. Crying is Fadwa’s forte, her special brand of dua’a and as her best friend I play intercessor, so the universe will hear.
 
I hand her a cigarette and she plops onto my white faux-leather couch, slowing her sob only to light up. She opens her mouth to wail, but I interject.
 
“You’re going to just break up with Jay? His taste in music is trash, he needs better hygiene and he can’t help but break your heart. Please, this time, for real? You have 10 minutes before I leave for work, so say yes.”
 
“Fuck your job, fuck my job and fuck the dicks of the world.” She stabs her cigarette, scattering ash in the gray carpet and then side eyes me, “You’re not smoking with me, scliky?”
 
“I’m fasting—”
 
She laughs and sneezes on par with ambulance sirens and her chest moves with the flashing of lights.
 
“You’re fasting?” She mocks the same way she did when we were twelve and I asked if girls bled out of their butts.
 
I shrugged. “Well yeah,”
 
“You pray too?”
 
I shrug. “I’m trying it out, I really like Friday prayer.”
 
She leans over and pats my shoulder “good for you habibti,” then pulls her phone out, “I saw the messages between him and Dina, he asked her for nudes. He goes ‘baby you’re crazy, you don’t even have my facebook password, I don’t even talk to Dina, but that’s fine if you want to end everything we have—”
 
“Want to drink tonight?”
 
“I thought you were fasting,”
 
“After sunset,”
 
“Get me coffee from work I’m just going to sleep here until you get back,”
 
“yallah bye.”
 
“yallah.”
 
*
 
I love weddings, despite not buying into love. Nothing is done for free or out of altruistic duty. Life is constant capitalism and it weighs me down in ways I enjoy thinking around. My coworker Jennah and I are behind the dry bar filling chipped coffee cups and rolling fancy silverware.
 
The wedding tonight is lavish, unsegregated, and is a sea of sparkling white linen, cream accented napkins and faux gold gems filled in tall vases with puffy pink hydrangeas, baby’s breath and spray-painted roses. There are two meager steps between each table stretching the room to its brim, and I can hear Rim in the back singing off-key to Fairuz.
 
Rim is the elderly lady that arranges the platters of food to be served. My feet turn to roots in the synthetic linoleum at the sound of her voice.
 
“It’s a Yemenie-Lebanese wedding if you can believe it,” Jennah says in the naïve way I would have in high school.
 
“Times they are changing,” I quote, busying myself, wiping spotless glasses for extra shine.
 
Hunger and thirst during Ramadhan have almost left me in this third week, but tonight with the sight of familiar faces trying to get my attention with their eyes in the crowd, I am suffering. The room is tight as sardines and hot despite the commercial air-conditioning whooshing like cheap turbulence over my head.
 
Rim calls my name during the main entrance of the bride and groom. There are men with swords and drums alongside dancing dervishes singing their praise as the couple reaches the dance-floor. Fireworks erupt around them as they embrace, and I hear the smoke-detector sing a foreboding ballad worthy of the oracle of Delphi.
 
I pass the dusty curtain and Rim greets me, kisses both my cheeks and hands me a small glass with ice. I smell that it’s arak and breathe “You’re the best.”
 
“Break you fast on the good stuff with me my girl,” she says in broken English and we toast to brief salvation.
 
Rim and I inhabit a comfortable silence as we down our drinks, we understand the rationale of our people and we are not bitter. Rim holds strong her faith the way her mother practiced through dream interpretation, prayer and only wearing skirts.
 
“What did your dreams tell you today?” I ask. “Did it say for me to play the Lotto?” I joke before stuffing my mouth with a kibbe football.
 
She laughs with the deep throttle of a ford mustang and recites in Arabic before filling my glass again: “be like the flower that even when crushed gives its fragrance.”
 
“Just Imam Ali quotes, no numbers, not even one?”
 
“Fiive like the prayers.” She laughs again and waves me away, “go tell Jennah to come break-fast.”
 
*
 
I cross the veil and Jennah glares at me as I come out the back. By the way her nostrils flare on her large nose I see that she can smell the alcohol on my breath. More than once she’s tried to give me the religion talk out of “Muslimah” duty, of how hell is around the corner for women like me who don’t fear anything.
 
“Why don’t you go and break your fast, I have this covered.” I motion to the empty dry bar as the male waiters roll out the feast.
 
She says nothing before disappearing.
 
People are still eating, and two women come up for coffee, the dabkeh blares in full-swing. I watch and feel my roots dig deeper into the stone-foundation of the fancy hall. As much as I’ve tried to escape the circumstances of my unamerican birth, my feet always find their way back, I can’t help but tap along to the one two-step as I serve the ladies.
 
One of the lady snarls at me, “I said two sugars and one cream.”
 
I nod. “My apologies hajji, let me get you a new one.”
 
She mutters under her breathe in Arabic too quick for me to hear and I notice the redness of her eyes, she sits down suddenly.
 
“Are you okay?” her friend and I say at the same time.
 
The Hajji nods and waves her hands in finality as she takes the cup from my hands. My husband-who-is not-my-husband’s lover from the mosque enters the scene and approaches the mutual standing friend and they begin a hushed conversation. As I turn to fill a pitcher of water I see the old woman at the dry-bar collapse. I turn hurriedly and try to help her.
 
Before I have a chance to speak, my husband who is not my husband’s lover screams at me in her notorious self-righteous manner I’ve seen from afar on countless occasions.
 
“HOW DARE YOU HIT HER!” and plunges over the bar at me with her acrylic nails. I duck and cover as more outraged women swarm the bar. The ring leader wailing a battle cry something out of the crusades, “By allah did you see her smack our elder, tear her eyes out!”
 
I am suddenly surrounded by women trying to dislodge my roots with their slaps and scratches. They didn’t imagine my father to be a martial artist and his daughter a shining pupil with anger issues. With the Arak coldly pounding in my veins I swing my arms as if I am Jackie Chan on an adventure. Jennah comes out of the back confused but resorts to using her empty silver tray as a shield.
 
“What the fuck is going on?” It is the first time she’s used the word outright and it makes me grin like a fool.
 
“She thinks I hit her sito!”
 
The fight stops as soon as my knight in shining stunner-shades, Ali Ibn Abu-Kasab, runs up to the bar and separates us. He wanted me to suck his dick in high school and called me a whore when I didn’t, is this what we call irony?
 
*
 
The morning after is neither as glamorous nor as demoralizing as they want you to believe. We both smell, and I’m not sure if I really like him. But things happened fast, his aunt it turns out was ground zero of last night’s fiasco. In his car, post-rescue, my adrenaline mixed with a full stomach of arak lead to lustful revenge and a fist-full of hair. Regret isn’t something actively sought but a meager consequence, the skin of last night sheds with each puff of my Sherlock Holmes pipe.
 
I salaam to all my potted beauties before staring out into the holy abyss. I pack another bowl to counter-act the fog of an imminent hangover.
 
I can’t remember the last time I was so reckless, but I do. I told Baba what happened to me. The lock had been picked by a lowly creature and that made me worse than dead. From there on, it was a downhill tumble of the house of cards I built for him. The ultimatum didn’t hurt as much as the oceans of disappointment in his eyes, the coldness in Mamas. Marry and move back across the ocean, or become the walking dead.
 
Fadwa is fast asleep on the couch with Twinkie and Turkish delight wrappers around her like a blanket-fort. She didn’t bother us when we came in but let me know via whatsapp that going back on my word about Ali meant I was finally growing up.
 
A sudden knock at the door startles me and I begin to walk towards it. The peephole illuminates a saintly figure. My husband-but-not, here for a booty-call before dawn.
 
I crack open the door and without pause he kisses me full on the mouth. He smells of Calvin Klein and is in his signature afterhours adidas tracksuit.
 
“Hello Sweet,” he breathes in my hair as we part.
 
I try not to look guilty and smile with my eyes. I stay silent and motion to the couch.
 
He immediately steps away as Fadwa’s dramatic roll-over causes an avalanche of wrappers to fall to the floor like confetti. I can tell by the movement in her hands that she is awake and listening.
 
“Sorry my friend slept over, she had a bad day.” I offer to still my nerves, afraid of what scene could erupt if he found Ali sleeping in my bed, or if Ali woke up to use the bathroom…
 
“It’s okay, I go now, tell me next time if friend sleeping over.” He announces in a quick whisper before grabbing my ass. And with a wink he’s gone as quickly as Ali came inside me hours earlier.
 
As soon as I bolt the door, Fadwa is upright with a cigarette.
 
“You fucking cheated on him!” she howls.
 
“No,” I begin but my heart is racing above the decibel of a whistle.
 
“Yes, you did, I’m just sorry it wasn’t me who did it first,” she says, ashing wildly onto the mahogany coffee table’s slopping ashtray.
 
I pace from door to couch like a confused clock.
 
“Okay so I guess I did—but I’m more like a call-girl with a steady income then actually married?”
 
“Are you calling yourself a hooker hamara?”
 
“Better a hooker than a cheater.” I sigh at how cheap my words feel. The truth is I don’t feel sorry for any of the things I’ve done despite the nagging feeling that I should.
 
Fadwa side-eyes me and throws the cigarette pack at my head. I catch it as it bounces off my temple and sink with the pack into the fleur-de-lys patterned antique armchair I hustled from an estate sale out in Grosse Ill.
 
Fadwa gets up and prepares Jack and Coke in the small linoleum lined kitchenette to my left. As my cigarette is down to its stub she comes back and hands me the over-juiced drink.
 
“You know what teta always said.” She cleared her voice, “Ya habibti, marriage is prostitution.”
 
We clink our glasses together in silent cheer.
 
“Allah yerhema your teta was such a feminist.”
 
“Feminism is for ugly women, not you guys.” Ali’s voice radiates out of the bedroom.
 
I look over to Fadwa, who is laughing into her drink.
 
“Well if you looked at the guys we’ve fucked, you’d think we were absolutely hideous,” I chip back.
 
Ali stomps out of the bedroom, a buck in headlights.
 
“That’s not what you were saying last night,” he quips, grabbing the drink from my hand.
 
I encourage his pull and flick my wrist to spill the admixture of america all over his armani dress shirt.
 
“You’re fucking joking right!” he growls.
 
“I was drunk last night, thanks for the dick, you can leave now.”
 
“OUT!” Fadwa barks, “You heard her habibi, get the fuck OUT.”
 
He begins cursing us loudly in arabic as he puts on his shoes and disappears out the door without fumbling with the lock as anyone without a life dedicated to fitness and fine motor skills would in his position. Fadwa and I lock the door behind him and put on Bab-El-Harab, a Ramadhan tradition until sunrise.
 
*
 
It is Eid and I am at the Altar Road mosque, covered the way I imagine my parents would kill themselves over to see. In my elegant forget-me-not blue and white-gold embroidered a عbya gifted from my sort of husband. I feel like The Mother of the savior meets Chanel, in my silk floral scarf covering my curled hair partially. I’m hoping to run into anyone on this joyous day: my mother, my father, my sister, the ghosts of my ancestors, if not the hidden imam himself. I settle for the nice Armenian woman down the hall and gift the painting I only finished this morning. A painting of the remaining plants that thrive in my garden, three cacti: cool-blue, acidic and Forrest green. It is the first year I have finished the prescribed orthodox fast alongside attending every single Friday prayer throughout the holy month.
 
Now that I can finally eat, indulge during the demanding summer days, I have no desire to. “It’s funny how often we find ourselves believing we need more than we do to survive.” In the absence of parents, right and wrong, water and conventional relationships, there are roots that touch magma and grow flowers instead of smoke.
 
The mosque’s prayer room and its green and gold carpeting is overcapacity, but I see the door to the minaret in my sweep for a spot, but not its faithful guard. I mutter excuse me and apologies as I make my way through the sea of women and children on the second floor. The truth is if I’m caught, they’ll most likely ban me from the mosque, but my desire to see the city from its beating heart is too seductive to pass up. In my pursuit I stumble over a proud optimis prime transformer and by some miracle spot my younger sister in the crowd. It's been a year since I’ve seen her, when you’re disowned, only plotted plants are allowed to be your family. We often were regarded as twins and acted like them despite our two-year and three-inch difference. She looks older now and hesitates when I grab her hand, she knows the risks but when she returns a squeeze, I know she’s willing to take the heat for me, as I always did for her. I smile at her and motion to the door. She looks quickly to her right and left, none of our family or village cousins are here yet, and nods.
 
We take off as fast as we can for the door, prop it open and slip in with only a few people noticing.
 
We race up the steps like children, the warm air pushing at our robes, sun kissing our exposed hair, our laughs richening the cool walls—the top of a minaret is what you would expect, a tower, a smoke-stack, orally fixating on its death, waiting for the city to notice its colors. 

Yasmine Rukia 

Yasmine Rukia is a first generation Lebanese-American performing poet, short story writer and meme artist from Dearborn Michigan. Her poems, essays and stories appear in Mizna, Cliterature, The Porter Gulch Review, PaperMag, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, forthcoming and elsewhere. She has two sons, a typewriter, and a mean caffeine addiction. Follow her on social media to find out where she may be next.