The Heroes

By Sagirah Shahid

It’s so hot. I can taste every raggedy scent in the air—the exhaust pipes of Mrs. Ayub’s hoopty struggling to slug its way back up our block, fat and swollen trash bins dotted along the curb in anticipation of the garbage truck which had the unusual habit of being too soon or too late with its arrivals. I even taste the smell of that weirdo stray that keeps tryna lure my cat out of the house.
My cousin Aziza and I sit on the curb closest to my house. Technically, we don’t live in Detroit. On this end of the block, we’re residents of Hamtramck, population of: enough to squeeze way too many kids into three elementary schools and call a strip of three blocks a downtown.
Aziza is fiddling with the tangles in the yo-yo she bought last week. She bought it with the last bit of her moving-to-Michigan money. Their mom sent them that money—Aziza and her older sister Yasmin–because she has no intention of moving here with them. My mom says I shouldn’t say things like that aloud. I’m a quiet kid. So whenever I say anything I feel like the whole world freaks out because they never noticed me sitting there at the kitchen table or whatever.

Aziza and I are basically the same age. We have nothing else in common.

Our grandmother once called Aziza spunky because she wasn’t too afraid to dunk her whole head into a barrel of floating apples during the Minnesota Islamic Center’s Eid carnival. Aziza was the only 6-year-old to get 4 apples in under a minute, her scrawny neck like a viper darting into the water. I was too busy freaking out about getting water up my nose and swallowing floaty-s leftover in the water by that kid who called me a hippo in Arabic class. I didn’t get any apples. Aziza won a beanie baby. That was four years ago.

I’m an artist now—at least I wana be one when I grow up—that or a photographer. I haven’t really decided yet. All I know is I can’t tell my mom, or anyone in the family really until I’m a grownup and living in New York or something. Aziza is the only one who knows. She found one of my sketched pads hidden beneath the shoe box I stash all my collections in. At first I was scared because I couldn’t make out if she was gona tell on me—there were portraits of that dead baby bird we found outside the morning after a nasty storm—drawing faces and animals is Haram, I know, but I couldn’t help but want to sketch the way its little beak was. The way its featherless head seemed too exposed, out of place—the big alien eyes that never got to see stuff.

But Aziza was cool about it. She actually said she wished she could draw like that. Later on that night I tore all the bird portraits into tiny pieces of paper and snuck them into the trash can before my mother’s tiny Masjid Al-Asqa shaped alarm clock sounded off the adthan for Fajir.
That was two weeks ago. Around the same time Aziza and Yasmin moved in with us. Now I stick with drawing safe stuff. Still life—rocks, trees, our crummy block, you know anything that won’t get me in trouble.

I’m sketching the edges of this white plastic bag that’s stuck in the branches of our neighbor’s tree when I feel Aziza jump up from beside me on the curb.

“Yusra, look he came back!”

Aziza points in the direction of the Detroit half of our block with her right hand. Her left hand is wriggling to be free of the yo-yo string, “You coming?!”

The last time the Ice cream man came we missed it because he turned his van around the second his it got close to the Hamtramck end of our block, an instrumental of “pop-goes-the-weasel” growing fainter as the van disappeared back into Detroit. But we’re in luck this time. Some kids on the Detroit end flagged him down. Aziza is already on the move.

“Come on Yusra, what are you waiting for?” she yells over her shoulder. Her lean legs are quick and steady as she races down the block, her jilbab gathered up in one hand. Her tangled yo-yo in the other.

I hate running, but now there are only two other kids waiting in line, so I put my sketchpad down and try my best to jog over to Aziza without breathing too loudly. Aziza is already next in line by the time I get there.

I can tell Aziza is stalling for time when she flashes her sheepish Aziza smile at me. She doesn’t even have to ask. I know she wants to borrow a dollar. I only have a dollar seventy-five, but I’m too embarrassed and out of breath to say no. I lift up my jilbab and pull out my money from my front pocket. I hand Aziza the dollar and try to figure out what I can get with seventy-five cents. I settle for a 50 cent Captain America Popsicle even though I only like the way the blue part taste.

“mmm….eyeballs…” Aziza plucks out one of the gum-eyeballs in her Power Puff Girl ice cream, she doesn’t care that her fingers— the same fingers that were just digging a hole in my backyard to bury a dead worm we found on the sidewalk, touches the ice cream. She licks the hollowed out eye-socket first then, one at a time, she licks her sticky fingers. “You want the second one?” She offers, shoving the Power Puff Girl in my face. I shake my head no.

It’s only then that I see them, the Ahmed brothers, straddling their bikes in front of my house. The boys are laughing at something. Abdullah Ahmed, the one who’s in the same grade as me, leafs through sketchpad, he rips out a page and passes it to his older brother, Jamal.

“Hey, give that back!” Aziza yells at them.

In a flash Aziza races towards them— half eaten Power Puff Girl and all. Aziza has only lived with us for two weeks, so she doesn’t know about the Ahmed brothers, and how they once threaten to throw a girl into a dumpster for refusing to share her Doritos with them. Or, how once during recess none of the teachers saw when Nasir Ahmed spit on that epileptic kid while he was having one of his episodes. The kid’s body rattled uncontrollably against our playground’s asphalt.

Abdullah takes one look at tiny Aziza and laughs harder. “Make me.” He says. Abdullah tears a second sheet out of my notepad. I try hard not to cry. “ Look at how stupid these pictures are Nasir—wallah there’s trash in this one!” Abdullah leans over against his handlebars to hand his brother the picture. I close my eyes because I don’t wana let them see me cry.
That’s when I hear a high pitched shriek. I open my eyes afraid to see what they’re doing to poor Aziza.

But it wasn’t Aziza. Abdullah who is now drenched from the neck up in Power Puff Girl ice cream, is desperately trying to swing at Aziza while wiping the sticky goop from his eyes– an action that causes him to fling his right sandal off. Aziza catches the sandal mid-air and throws it at Jamal who is charging at her with his bike. Jamal slows down to duck and notices too late that Aziza has kicked the front tire of his bike causing him to lose his balance. Jamal falls body first, to the ground and Aziza, still quick as ever, raises her tiny fist up, mincingly at Nasir, who at this point looks as if he’s seen a small jinn. He drops my stolen sheet of notepad paper and fumbles to reposition his bike in the opposite direction.

“RUN, YUSRA, RUN!” Aziza shouts.

Quick as a bee, she snatches my sketchpad from beside Abdullah’s bike. He’s cussing us out in a mix of English and Arabic we don’t understand. We race towards my yard, this time I don’t care how slow I run, I tell my body to make it to my front porch.

The Ahmed brothers, don’t dare follow us. They know how scary my Baba gets when they come into our yard. Aziza sticks her tongue out at the boys and sways her body. I copy her. And it feels good. It feels really good. The boys, press up against our fence and tell us they’ll get us back. I bring my sketchpad to my chest and squeeze it. It’s only when I turn to high-five Aziza that I notice the old Bosnian woman who lives in the house next-door to us. She’s watching us, all of us from the stalks of wild grass circling her house.

“Oh my god that’s so weird.” Aziza declares the next afternoon. We are supposed to be cleaning up my bedroom before we can to go outside, but right now the room is still a mess and we are sitting on my sheet-less mattress. “Right?!”

I’m telling Aziza about the time the Bosnian woman next-door came into our house one morning to bake tiny loafs of round bread. My mother, tried hopelessly to speak with the woman, not knowing at first that the woman did not speak English. The Bosnian woman smiled and placed her tray into our oven as my mother attempted to communicate—-her speech exaggerated and loud as if the woman were deaf. My mother, finally wising up, gestured for the woman to sit down with her in the living room and told me to prepare a kettle for tea. When I finished making the tea, and brought it in to them, the woman, placed her dingy hands against her chest and smiled. I can still smell the sour scent of the woman’s body odor mingling with the smell of the fresh mint leaves I’d placed on a saucer next to their tea cups.

Aziza’s older sister Yasmin walks into my room just as I am telling Aziza about the missing front tooth the Bosnian woman has. Yasmin, is the kind of teenager that makes all the boys act weird when she enters a room. She’s an effortless beauty. Even the grownups stare at her. I use to wonder how it is someone so beautiful could be related to someone who looks like me. My mom says I’ll grow into my face, but I know better. That’s why I draw. My sketchpad is the only place where I feel in control.

Yasmin scans my messy room without saying a word. I know Yasmin me is looking for my cat. Part of me is happy to know that Yasmin won’t find my cat in my room. The cat is the only one in our house Yasmin likes right now. I know I shouldn’t be jealous considering what happened to her, but I still wish she would stop acting like she owns my cat. Yasmin, walks over to my closet and ruffles through the piles of dirty laundry crammed into my closet before turning over to face me, her eyes are anxious.

“She’s looking for the cat.” Aziza says to me first and then turns over to face Yasmin. “We haven’t seen her ‘Mina.” Aziza assures Yasmin. Yasmin, pauses for a second, sighs and then slinks out of my room without so much as a thank you.

Ever since their brother Hamdi died, Yasmin refuses to speak. At least that’s what Aziza told me the first night they came to stay with us. At this point, Aziza does most of the talking for Yasmin, jumping in to relieve Yasmin when my mother asks her if she wants a second helping of rice or, the onetime my mother asked Yasmin if she had enough sanitary napkins. Yasmin, faded into the background as Aziza, bubbly, chipped-tooth and scrawny Aziza answered for Yasmin, as if the question already belonged to her.

Aziza says, the last time she remembers seeing her brother alive, Yasmin was angry. Their mother was forcing Yasmin to babysit Hamdi while she drove Aziza to the Family Dollar for new school shoes. Hamdi had the sniffles and sat in front of their small T.V. watching Power Rangers and munching on off-brand cereals directly from their giant industrial-sized plastic bag.
Aziza said by the time they’d come back from the store, she could tell something was wrong by the way her mother dropped her bags in the driveway and sprinted to their partially swung open front door. Aziza heard her mom’s piercing scream before she had the chance to make it all the way up the stairs. When she finally did make it to Yasmin’s bedroom, her mother barked at Aziza to stay away and told her to call 911. Aziza said she could feel her heart thumping so hard, that it hurt. Her mother had never yelled at her that way, and by the time she could find the phone she could hardly talk because of the tears. The soft voice on the other end of the phone asking Aziza what her emergency was.

Aziza said the neighbor wanted to rape Yasmin. Aziza said the neighbor didn’t know Hamdi was downstairs. Aziza said he climbed in through Yasmin’s bedroom window. Aziza said Hamdi heard their sister screaming and ran to protect her. Aziza said when the man flung Hamdi off his back, his vertebrae snapped against the bedpost. Hamdi was only seven, so when the man saw what happened he ran out of the house, out of the front door and into his pickup truck. The doctor said Yasmin was in shock so that’s why she couldn’t move, her eye bruised, her once perfect lips, bleeding a little.

“Now, what Nigger Bitch!?”

Abdullah says before summoning a thick wad of spit from the base of his throat. Abdullah shoots the wad into my hijab, which he now gripping in his hands. I’m in too much pain from the punch that landed me on the ground. I know my nose is bleeding but I’m too scared to wipe it. I feel so exposed without my hijab, when Abdullah snatched it off my head I felt the cut of the summer’s humid air pierce my ears, my neck.

“I didn’t think you were a Nigger Bitch with skin like yours” Abdullah laughed

“Damn, Nasir look at her nasty hair, wallah that shit is ugly” Abdullah scrunches up his face like he’s caught a whiff of sewage.

Two nights ago when I let Aziza practice braiding my hair into wayward cornrows, I thought she made my stubborn hair look like a copper colored hair maze, I thought it looked fun. Now I regretted letting her do it. I regretted not waking up Aziza to walk with me to the corner store, I didn’t want to borrow her some of the 50 cent I found in the kitchen drawer, so I left Aziza, sleeping away the morning on my bedroom floor and walked to the corner store alone.

Sometimes I think about what happened to Hamdi and Yasmin. I wonder why people are so mean to each other, for no reason at all. The Ahmed brothers make it a point to be the meanest boys on our block and I think I know how they got to be so mean—-what with a Baba like the one they have, always beating on everything, even their mother, even that stray cat that keeps wondering into their messy yard. I know they come to school in the same unwashed clothes for days, sometimes weeks. I know they never miss a day of school because sometimes it is the only place they get to eat. I know this but I still wonder why they have to be so mean.

I think about this as Abdullah shoves my wet, spit filled hijab into my face. “Thanks for the money Nigger Bitch” Abdullah says as they ride off towards the corner store.

It has to be a few minutes before I try to stand up. My nose is still bleeding. I feel dizzy and weak so I prop myself up against the chain linked fence in the alley. I wouldn’t say that the Bosnian woman appeared out of nowhere, but it felt that way. I’ve never seen her leave our block, so it startled me to see her in the alley, looking at me.

She looks taller than I remember. Her hair less frazzled. Her dress cleaner. Before I could say anything, she was pulling me up. Like I was some dainty infant and not a hefty soon to be 6th grader. The Bosnian woman, gathers my wounded body onto her shoulder and carries me home.

The whole way there I couldn’t tell if it were real. Was I imaging this strange woman carrying me?

We reach my front porch.

I hear a skin piercing shriek emit from a throat. I feel the Bosnian woman setting me down before I open my eyes to see Yasmin crying uncontrollably. Her face puffed up and distorted, her nose snotty.

“ No-no-nonono-I won’t let it happen, I won’t let it happen, I won’t…”

Yasmin is sobbing and gripping me so tightly now.

“I won’t let it happen” she is saying it into my nappy hair this time. This is the most Yasmin has spoken to me all summer.

I know these tears have nothing to do with me. I know I am supposed to let Yasmin cry it out, but I can’t help noticing my cat—it must have escaped from Yasmin’s lap. It’s edging out beyond our fence. My cat is sniffing its way towards the curb now. I hear “pop-goes-the-weasel” growing louder, closer, the song on our end, the Hamtramck side of the block for a change, I think—my cat is so far away. I want so desperately to abandon cousin’s arms. I want to be like someone else, someone who rescues my adventurous cat from the heartlessness of the street.

But I don’t. I stay and wait for it to happen.

Sagirah Shahid is a Minneapolis, Minnesota based writer. She is a 2015-2016 winner of the Loft Literary Center’s Mentor Series Award in poetry, Sagirah’s work has been published or is forthcoming in: The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, Mizna, The Fem, Bluestem, For Harriet, Black Fox, Alyss, Paper Darts, Switchback, and Qu Literary Journal.