Verses in Rice Water

By Sophia Baryalai 

The first thing Laila hears is the alarm clock’s rattling buzz, a $3 plastic thing from Goodwill blinking 6:02 a.m. in stuttering red. It is 2006, but in this apartment the year feels older, worn soft as the peeling linoleum, as if time here moves slower than everywhere else.

From the doorway comes the scrape of boots, Baba’s, she can tell, by the cough that always follows his night shift, a mix of gasoline fumes and bitter coffee clinging to his chest. His boots have soles half-detached and his name stitched in threadbare black, a name they never say right. Today is the first day back after winter break, which means two lunches to pack, two alarms to beat, and no excuses.

Mama has already left for Arby’s, so Laila wakes early too, stitching the morning together with tea and Kamran’s buttons. The air still carries traces of her mother’s work, fryer oil and watered-down detergent clinging to the apartment walls. Arby’s opens early, and someone has to filter the fryer oils before the manager gets there. The ceiling creaks, not because it’s alive, like she used to believe, but because childhood ends like insulation: quietly, invisibly, behind the walls. Like rot behind paint.

She pulls on jeans and a long-sleeved shirt, though it’s already warm. Mama says her arms should be covered, that a girl’s skin isn’t for the world. At school, that’s enough for them to whisper she must wear a headscarf, too. Laila has learned not to argue, just as she’s learned how to tuck her shirt past her hips, how to say “I’m not hungry” when the other girls ask why she never eats lunch. There’s no mirror in their apartment hallway anymore, it shattered last year when her parents fought with the landlord about rent. Now, she smooths her hair using the microwave’s reflection. It’s too thick for braids, too fine to wear with pride.

By 6:30, she’s in the kitchen boiling tea when Kamran leans against her side, yawning, still rumpled in his superhero pajamas. He shouldn’t be awake yet, school is hours away, but in a house this small, the scrape of boots and the kettle on the stove tug him from sleep whenever Laila stirs. She buttons his shirt and wipes milk from his cheek while Baba leans against the wall, not really awake. He hasn’t slept. His gas station shift ended just an hour ago. He smells like gasoline and old coffee, his shoulders hunched under the weight of another night of swallowed insults. Laila is only in eighth grade herself, but mornings have already made her feel older. She doesn’t ask him how work went. They all know. A man yelled. A child stole. Someone tossed pennies and laughed.

Sometimes, Baba tells his friend Rami, a fellow immigrant from Kabul who once studied medicine, and who the children now treat like an uncle, things he won’t say around the rest of them. Laila only hears fragments from the hallway, like how a drunk man refused to take change from “a terrorist’s hand.” Or how someone filled their tank and sped off laughing. Once, a man called him a cockroach with an accent. Baba didn’t say anything. He just rang up the next customer and swept the floor with shaking hands. In Afghanistan, Baba built bridges. Real ones, across rivers. Of steel and stone. Spanning valleys.

Here, he scrapes gum from concrete and gets told he’s lucky to mop. “Once,” he told Laila, “a flood split two provinces. I built the bridge that stitched them back together.” Now, even holding a mop feels like a punishment for pride.

Mama has her own share of quiet humiliations. At Arby’s, she scrubs toilets and smiles through the sting of bleach. Customers complain that her accent is “too thick.” A manager once joked she should stay in the back so she wouldn’t scare off families. Mama nodded and scrubbed the fryer until her knuckles cracked. Her degree in literature from Kabul University is tucked into a plastic sleeve beneath her sweaters. On Sundays, she sometimes takes it out and wipes it clean with an old scarf. No one ever sees.

She once told Laila she used to recite Hafez poems in front of chalkboards so old they curled at the corners. Now, the only words she memorizes are “Would you like curly fries with that?” and “Sorry, we’re out of roast beef.” Her pride stays folded between apron straps, buried beneath a name tag that says “Marie.”

On the nights he can’t sleep, Baba adjusts the antenna on their small TV and hunts for Afghan news through the static. The footage is grainy. Soldiers on rooftops. Smoke where markets used to be. Women sobbing behind hands. Baba leans forward like the screen might breathe him back home. Mama never sits when they watch the news. She just stands behind him, arms crossed. Laila once saw her mother press her wrist, the one where her gold bracelet used to be. The bracelet her father gave her for graduating valedictorian. She traded it at the border for Kamran’s milk, for papers, for the kind of future that doesn’t come with jewelry.

“I’ll walk him,” Laila says. Baba nods, eyes closed.

The walk to Kamran’s elementary school is three blocks. Laila holds his hand tight. The pavement is cracked, weeds clawing up through the breaks. A sprinkler stutters to life and splashes their ankles. At the crosswalk, a car honks. A voice yells something she doesn’t catch but feels.

At the school gate, Kamran tugs at his backpack straps, still too loose on his fourth-grade shoulders. “Do you think I’ll be the only brown kid in my class again?” he asks, his mouth bent into a grin too quick to be real.

“Probably,” she says. “Make it count.”

He grins and runs off, his backpack thumping against his back. Laila watches until he vanishes into the crowd of sneakers and noise. Then she turns and walks the next three blocks to her middle school. Alone.

Her first class is English. The teacher mispronounces her name again: “Lye-luh.” Laila doesn’t correct her. She just turns in her assignment, an allegory about a girl who steals rainwater to grow a secret garden. Then she waits.

“Use simpler words,” the teacher says, frowning. “You’re not writing a novel.”

Laila nods. She’d pieced those sentences together like patchwork, word by word, in a language that never fit quite right.

During silent reading, the girl behind her kicks her chair. Twice. Her leg twitches for the next ten minutes.

The rest of the day unspools in soft blurs. In the cafeteria, she unwraps the lunch she packed that morning but eats quickly, not looking up as two girls wrinkle their noses at the smell. “Bet she wears a headscarf in the shower, too,” one of them mutters, as if the cumin in her lunchbox was reason enough. Laila doesn’t even wear one. But rumors are resilient, like mildew in corners, like rust on old memory.

 

In math, she scores a 93 on her test. Her teacher smiles. At home, that won’t be enough. Her mother will glance at the paper and say, “Next time, study harder.” Not because she’s cruel. Because she remembers being the top of her class and still ending up cleaning floors.

School ends at three. She picks up Kamran at the gate, his backpack slipping off one shoulder, an action figure clutched in his fist, a hand-me-down with its cape fraying, though Kamran swears that only makes it fly faster as he swoops it through the air on their walk home.

Rami is in the kitchen that evening, head bent in his hands. He says he has a headache and stays slumped at the table while Laila moves quietly around the stove. She doesn’t press. Like Baba, he works too much, odd jobs, late shifts, paperwork he can’t quite decipher. Back in Kabul, he’d carried books heavier than his body; here, even the smallest bills slip through his fingers. Baba had asked him to stay for dinner, easier than watching him go home to an empty kitchen.

So tonight it’s Laila who stirs the lentil stew, the kitchen thick with cumin and soap. Kamran sits at the table, giving his action figure a new name: Captain Fix-It. He makes him fly across the salt shaker. “He doesn’t need his arm to be strong,” Kamran says.

The apartment feels full, not with space, but with trying.

When Mama comes home around 5:30, she’s limping. A blister the size of a coin has burst on her heel, and she’s tracking vinegar across the tile. Still, she starts chopping onions without sitting down. Her apron smells like meat and lemon cleaner. Her eyes are red, not from crying, but from nine hours of grease.

“Your science quiz?” she asks.

“Ninety-three.”

“Next time, study harder.”

She says it like prayer spoken through cracked teeth, believing if her daughter could outrun failure fast enough, maybe the past won’t catch them both.

Baba wakes briefly during dinner and asks about the rent. Rami lies and says it’s fine. He doesn’t need the notices to know—the silence when the phone rings, the way the landlord lingers at the door, it’s enough. Laila knows it isn’t. The lights flicker sometimes for no reason at all.

Dinner is rice and lentils. Kamran eats with his hands. Rami jokes about his sticky fingers. Kamran giggles so hard he snorts. For a second, everything glows. Then Baba snaps, tells Kamran to quiet down. The joy drains from the room.

The belt hangs near the door. It hasn’t moved in weeks, but they all remember the night it did. No one speaks of it. But everyone sees it.

One night weeks ago, Baba hadn’t meant to lose control. It was late, and the power had just gone out again. Kamran had been crying for over an hour, unsettled by the dark and the thick summer heat. Baba raised the belt once, not out of hate, but out of exhaustion. It left more silence than pain. Afterward, he sank onto the floor by the door, the place he always stopped short of bed, as if it were the only ground low enough for his shame, head in his hands, though the table stood untouched, as if the quiet were punishing him back.

Laila watched from the hallway, small and still. Later, when she tried to name what she’d seen, only a verse rose to meet her:

 “And when the girl who was buried alive is asked: for what sin was she killed?”

A verse from somewhere holy, older than grief. Her mother used to murmur it while washing rice, letting the words drift through her fingers, as if they could ward off the world. Some verses came like mourning doves. Others came like rules. 

“Men are the protectors and maintainers of women.”

Laila thought of the word protector, and how soft it sounded beside leather. How love, starved long enough, shrivels into silence. And how some daughters learn to flinch not from strangers, but from the hands that once rocked them to sleep.

Tonight, after everyone else had gone to bed, Baba stood in the doorway a long time, staring at the belt. Then, quietly, he unhooked it and placed it in a drawer.

“I’m sorry,” he said, not looking at her.

And somehow, that was enough for now.

Later, Mama opens the freezer. “Someone left these at Arby’s,” she says, holding up a box of strawberry ice cream sandwiches. She doesn’t smile. Just unwraps them and hands them out, one by one, like offerings at a shrine made of plastic and hunger. They don’t bother with the table. Instead they sit cross-legged on the kitchen floor, knees touching, like worshippers lowering themselves, as if being closer to the ground could keep the moment from being stolen away by the world. Kamran gets it on his cheeks. Rami draws a face in the condensation on the fridge. Baba is asleep again. Mama closes her eyes while chewing, like tasting memories.

The next morning comes quickly, and school hours pass without much to notice.

By the time the last bell rings, the day has already slipped into noise. That afternoon, Baba takes Laila to the gas station, his version of bonding. Errands done in silence, under the buzz of fluorescent lights.

Laila doesn’t mind. She watches him sweep, refill windshield fluid, and change the receipt paper. Even tired, he stands like a man who remembers how to carry weight.

A man walks in. Red ball cap. Loud voice. He throws a crumpled dollar on the counter.

“Keep the change, terrorist.”

Laila freezes.

Baba just nods and counts coins.

But today, Laila doesn’t.

She steps forward. “His name’s not terrorist.”

The man turns. “What’s it to you, towel girl?”

Laila’s voice trembles, but she holds his eyes.

“It’s to me,” she says. “He built bridges. He’s my father.”

The man snorts. Shrugs. Leaves.

The silence afterward cuts deeper than the insult.

Baba doesn’t look at her. Just finishes counting.

The manager calls. The cord stretches between Baba’s hand and the wall, tight and trembling.

“Causing trouble.”

“Can’t have complaints.”

“We’re letting you go.”

Baba doesn’t speak. He just listens, nods once, then sets the phone back in its cradle like it might break.

His hand stays on the receiver a moment longer than it needs to.

Outside, a car honks. Inside, the clock ticks.

And still, he doesn’t speak.

The silence presses against her chest, teaching her what it means to carry a father’s quiet like another piece of furniture in the room, heavy, unavoidable, always there.

That night, he doesn’t speak at dinner. Mama stares at her hands. Rami had dropped by again with a wrench in his hand, but he stayed long enough to share their meal. He promises he’ll help with the rent if it comes to it, though the words hang heavier than his wallet can carry.

Laila says nothing. The strawberry wrappers from last night still sit crumpled on the table, left there when everyone was too tired to clean up. She smooths one flat and folds it into a tiny rose, placing it near Baba’s spot on the floor by the front door, where he lingered as if half-belonging elsewhere, his boots nearby, his hands always shaking but never asking.

He looks at her.

And nods.

Later, when the others are asleep, Laila stands at the window beside him. Outside, the street is quiet. The moon hangs low, like it’s listening.

“They think we’re all the same,” she says. “Like bin Laden. Like the ones who did it.”

She remembers third grade. The day the towers came down. A boy asked if her family was celebrating. She had only blinked.

Baba doesn’t blink.

“We should say something.”

A long silence.

Then he says, “You said enough.”

Laila wants to believe him. But the belt remains in the drawer, not vanished but recessed, its silence heavier than sound. To hide a thing is not to erase it; certain objects retain their gravity even in darkness. It hasn’t moved. But it doesn’t need to.

In the other room, the $3 alarm buzzes against the dark, a sound too thin to fill the space it breaks. She stands, walks to the freezer. The last strawberry wrapper sits crumpled on the floor. She picks it up. Smooths it flat. Folds it into a rose. Then tiptoes to his side and folds the rose into the hand that once steadied hers when crossing rivers.

And though they will call him a terrorist again come morning, tonight his daughter gives him Kabul, folded small enough to fit in his hand. His hands once built bridges, meant for homes, for roads, for daughters. When he falls asleep, fingers curled around the paper rose, she watches the silence soften. It isn’t forgiveness. It isn’t safety. It is only a verse steeped in rice water and prayer, left behind to bloom in his palm.

 

Sophia Baryalai is a second-generation Afghan writer based in Austin, Texas. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Eunoia Review, Lemonwood Quarterly, World Insane, Seaglass Literary Review, Beyond Words’ Father anthology, and Flash Fiction Magazine. She also serves as an editor for Mockingbird and Wire.