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By Reda Abdulrahman

I refused.

In my village, girls are married without question—neither form the girl nor from the village. Her father’s word is law, and then her husband’s. When I was fourteen, the fourth and last of my eldest sisters had moved to a neighboring village: safely, quickly, and unhappily married.

Look, my mother told me happily, it is now your turn. You will be wed to a man and your life will change forever. It will be very exciting.

Exciting was not the word I would choose. My mother was brave to try to comfort me—or perhaps very stupid, believing that I would believe her. I had seen all too often the world pattered on her both, a bruise on her arm the size of North America; a cut on her lip that ran like the Nile; a blackened eye that spread to take on the color of a ripe fig and the contours of Australia. I didn’t want to be married. I wanted to read Geography in the stuffy little classroom of the thin old schoolmaster.

You are fourteen now, my mother said. Too old to be learning. Too old to be under the gaze of any man who is not your father or your husband.

I refused to get married. I did not want the faceless man I ran from in my nightmares. I did not want a charred skeleton, a lost angry soul like my father, who would tattoo my body with bruises of the world.

I could not tell my mother, but she could read it in my eyes.

You must not be selfish, she retorted, and the bitterness of her tone cemented what I had known all along: her unhappiness. You have brothers and sisters who must also wed. But your turn is first.

The next day a young man visited our house. I was cleaning the yard and had taken off my dark veil in the heat of the noonday sun. He stepped in through the archway of our courtyard without knocking. He was tall, chiseled cheeks bristling with very short, very fine black hair, and his eyes were like sparkling emeralds. Another man followed him, gaunt and hunched and wrinkly. When they saw me, the younger man winked, and the older gave me a hideous gap-toothed grin. I dropped my broom and ran inside.

I ran out the back door without telling my mother of their coming. She called for me from the kitchen. I ran and kept running. Everyone was indoors to escape the unbearable sun and heat, and the village streets were deserted except for the occasional chicken or goat. Sometimes I paused, and wondered if the young man was for me. Then I remembered that grotesque smile, and fear clutched my heart. So I continued running.

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