Sumayya stares at her hands and wrists. They are bare now. No gold bangles, no diamond wedding ring.
Her nails are long, shaped into careful half-circles, and she can see the traces of old wounds on her palms from the shards of a shattered glass tumbler. Staring into her hands, Sumayya sees the intense late-morning light reflected. A dazzlingly bright late morning, for two suns appear to her, giving off light. Sumayya can see a heavy rope stretched between the two suns. At one end dangles a tunic of hers, long and blue, and at the other end, farther away, hangs a worn blue dishdasha belonging to a shepherd girl.
Sumayya keeps looking at her hands. It is her hands that have created this heavy late-morning scene, just before noon. Sumayya sees herself hanging by her hands on the heavy rope, swinging between the two suns. Now her body touches her tunic, and now it touches the shepherd girl’s dishdasha. The wounds on her palms open. Thin threads of blood run from them, and her flesh tears. Sumayya cannot stop looking at her hands. She cannot open her mouth to moan in pain.