Lost Word
Fizza Shabbir Makina wasn’t dead, but she might as well have been, or so she thought to herself. Had the earth’s gravity not pulled her to the ground under her
feet, perhaps she would have floated long ago, approaching some distant planet by now. But that was not the case. She was here, and this was real. She was withering away.
It started when she was 8, the first time it happened. On the first day of
school, in the middle of April in Al-Wakarah, when the country practically felt as though it was placed on top of a giant God-sized cooker, in the
midst remained Makina and the forgotten word “from.” When the teacher questioned her, like she had every other student in the class so far, to tell
their name and where they were from, Makina felt an ache in her stomach that could not be remedied by any of the medicine found in the nurse’s
office, or for that matter even inside her grandfather’s Hakeem shop. She couldn’t understand what the question meant, for she didn’t understand what “from” meant.
Frantically searching her backpack of vocabulary for a word she never
anticipated using, she came to the conclusion that she never had it in the first place. How was she to make sense of something that she had never even known. How does one reach a location if there are no roads? The
ache in her stomach at this point had found its way to her throat, finally
resting in her mouth, as the words would not come out. She had always known what to say, but today was not one of those days. Today was a day that she would remember for the rest of her short-lived existence. While those around her appeared in wonderful writing and lovely
drawings, Makina had come to think of herself as an accidental mark that
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