Translated by ANDREW LEBER
Before my feet even crossed the threshold of the main door, her voice reached me from the courtyard. She appeared from deep within the cloud of dust kicked up by the sweeps of her palm-leaf broom and called out her usual warning: “Don’t you dare play near Khaduj’s[1]ruins!”
By ANIS ARAFAI
Translated by RUTH AHMEDZAI KEMP
They were first brought together digging up other people’s trash, trying to keep starvation at bay. And since that first encounter at the public dump on the outskirts of Marrakech, the two were inseparable.
Abbas gave him the name Minouche and saw him as the son he had never had. Abbas, whose mind was addled with the blind fog of hashish and such obscene quantities of alcohol as would have been enough to wipe out an entire building, was also a bohemian painter whose days blustered by in anxious gusts.
Translated by ADAM TALIB
1. The Story
There was a short story at my door. I ignored it even though I’d been expecting it.
I pretended that I needed to take a shower
to put on cologne
to drink something and melt the sun in its ice
to listen to music that escapes from its strings
to speak to someone I love
to—now what?, I wonder.
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