ghofranjournal

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[ghofranjournal]

Untitled flash fiction no. 2

“What have I done?” Amal said right before her mind started making images of all ‘key’ stakeholders in her grand mission from a mass of shadows. Frozen faces belonging to the studio’s landlord, customs agents, curators and friends, all danced along the surface of a cistern, brimming with dazed time. It would take another year before the borrowed studio would travel back to its origins and rightful owner back in Cairo. A persistent ache started to crop up, but light was distributed so perfectly even along the rudimentary sub-letted bedroom that it made it difficult to entertain petty shelled guilts against the bright, prudish walls. 

With a sure gait, Iman lent her stature to her exhausted friend. “If it all goes tits up… which it won’t! At least you gave their ghosts a chance to get a couple of holidays in?” Iman always sprung up patient, long native to Amal’s minefields, or like her name promised - possibly just faithful to the course, she seemed to have never minded the dips. Iman could blindly draw out the structures of Amal’s episodes, from when everything that was once teeming with velvety fate has its’ language switched and any reassurance is immediately distrusted as a honeyed lens to navigate blows of reality.

“If you think of it like that, all I’ve given them is a transporting white prison” Amal said, not truly believing her own words. It was all too hard to be a cheap endeavor, yet everyone swatted in her mad ideas like they were esteemed guests with ease and trust - they believed in her. From the evening she rose from the limestone tiles where she lay reading the old couple’s old notebooks filled with urgent beats advancing into storylines and shared ways of thinking, she went to ask the landlord who lived in the narrow flat below that never ceased churning coffee fumes, if she could take it all. The light trust that rose in her wouldn’t have been able to give her a force if she didn’t remember whilst reading the notes, why Amal would easily be able to navigate their records - her environment was made up of friendships. “It must be like what.. a few thousand hands rubbing up on their surfaces?  One girl even tried to pour his iced latte from the to-go cup into one of the mugs in the installation but… nothing’s been taken - I guess I technically kept my word.” 

It was clear to onlookers how Iman’s friendship coloured Amal; they knew it too, so they married a different kind of relation to their bond. Where all subtle talk ceased after they’d decided on being each other’s most important person, it creeped in again when the mirrored talk once wholly welcome, now macerated through Amal’s careful individuality. They’d both receive comparisons to the infamous director duo’s studio she installed in galleries to display for the world, their ideas once inhabiting the space at some stage, now uprooted to new proportions - no corner left behind. It was lost of most why this was the work that was absent of their collaboration and also, weighed heartily between the living pair. 

“Have you thought of where you’re going to stay after the exhibition’s over? The landlord’s insanely trusting so, don’t worry about the exhibition extension but… Amal I don’t think you should go back” Iman said, closing an aged silence of soft sentences between them finally. Immediately regretting the words after the scale of her friend’s shrivelled status, Iman stepped away in the direction of leftovers from dinner then walked back to bedroom with a plate of random sides and a soupy resolve that she’d no longer shy away. Although she raised her friendships with a promise to address any heavy talk of dissatisfaction with an ease if brought to her quickly before it gnawed at anyone, Iman surprised herself with how bad she let things get, not realising she had many still left inside her at 37.

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Untitled flash fiction

Nobody would blame you if you thought the water had reinvented her into a stiletto under the feebly lit pool. Tonight, her incisions into the salted water were unusually different, perhaps she’d already unfurled in her bed earlier, before she had come down to the cooled patio. It was the norm since the divorce that  she would begin her visitations by raving around the pool, then the crazed thrashes would clumsily descend into a more solemn beat. With each lap around the four corners of her mini-lagoon, she’d strike through an unfavourable memory, listen to the slow trot of her heartbeat and imagine that she finally had her legs back

Although the pool hosted many guests outside of her, she had still somehow imprinted her motions with the prescribed swims, faithful to each turn and curve, her movements scarring the frail water. Almost mistaking the sudden heaviness to be her itchy eyelids, the source of unbalance was in fact to be found below her hips. She was a blade in the water until she wasn’t, couldn’t distribute her weight across anymore. At the start, it was easy to tell herself that the wild disappearance of her legs underwater was only her strained mind throwing her a dream or an apparition of Ames’ legs; perhaps that was the case yet the chimera still persisted. Even at the start of these happenings, there wasn’t a brief minute of doubt that the piling legs that tirelessly kicked below her were unmistakably his. The shadowy outline of his legs were instinctually identifiable, even if they were hidden under a crumpled tent of cotton and dust. It could also be possible that she had gotten incredibly comfortable with all kinds of phantoms roaming, no wonder it felt like the same legs that she pedalled and dragged around pavements since her life’s advent. 

There wasn’t enough space to ponder the logic of stolen limbs, even when she’d slink back into the backlit bedroom, the mental looping was unbearable. Like clockwork, when she’d exit and  the wastewater would slide off her body - her own lithe legs would be rooted and pale like the early sunbeams that would be sure to grace them soon, her legs were back and longer than ever - even when she’d been taller in her youth. 

As if intoxicated, she could never remember when exactly the chimeric transplant would stitch onto her flesh - all she felt was the random bouts of fear over the possibility of being caught together again.

The memory of her first time briefly swept over her as she held all resolve in the bridge of her nose even as she lay above the sheet of water, eyes drilling holes into the flesh of the dark mass of night sky above. The friends she’d shared with him had lifted the camisole of ignorant bliss and fed her with news of recent exploits, but the cost of caring and gossip meant that she now had forgotten how to invent affairs of her own. Restlessly awaiting the conclusion of a heady night occurring elsewhere, the nightly swims were successful for sowing routined escapism. The proximity to knowledge, all in the name of playing it cool, would level the playing field she thought initially. Yet her evening ritual would open with her in a state of torpor, indulging in old artefacts and pre-history stored wherever she could find remnants of him left behind by the tide, desperate to consume his environment, she’d then planned on swimming to burn it off. All she had to look forward to was another night of loops, the pool below parasol of him.

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