Take What You Can Carry by Gian Sardar (superbooks4u .TXT) 📕

like spiraled clouds of color. When a woman appears from the kitchen, Delan looks up, hopeful, but then quickly studies the choices.

“She’s Arab,” he whispers to Olivia when the woman’s turned to get another box. Olivia looks, and after a moment, Delan leans against her, his chin beside her ear. “There are ways to tell. One is her head. Kurds have flat backs of their heads. From our cradles, when we are babies, the way we are made to sleep on our backs. But look at her head—it’s not flat. I don’t know where the family I knew went, but she’s not it.”

An assortment of treats in two boxes. One to bring home to his family and the other for his cousin. When the woman hands them little squares, pale pink and dusted with sugar, Delan becomes like a child with an unwrapped present. “You have no idea. Fresh. She just made it. This is a treat. Eat it now; she wants to see you enjoy it.”

Though the outside appeared firm, the inside collapses in her mouth. A burst of sugar and rosewater, a candied garden unleashed. The taste catches her off guard and without thinking, she brings her wrist to her nose, matching the scents.

He smiles, pleased. “One of the oldest scents and one of the oldest sweets in the world.”

Just then, his cousin appears, cigarette smoke still caught in his exhale as he leans in to Delan. They glance toward the street, and Delan turns to Olivia. “There’s a problem outside.”

The problem is a man who’s drunk on the sidewalk, yelling. In a dark-brown suit, he sits on the curb, swaying even while seated. He’s bald, but Olivia sees gray within his mustache, lines upon his cheeks. His brown shoes are covered in dirt, and a few buttons are torn from his shirt. As he rests his chin upon his chest, the vertebrae of his neck stand out, prominent. It’s on noting this, that his chin is to his chest, that she realizes the yelling is not coming from him. In fact, three men across the street stand behind the gate of what looks like a restaurant and are yelling at him. Now and then, they lift their fists into the air.

“What did he do?” Olivia asks Delan.

Though he could not have heard, the man looks up to the sky as if in response, and though his words are lost to Olivia, they’re loud enough that the men on the corner hear and yell in return. Trails from past tears are on his cheeks, having cut through a layer of dust. It appears as if he’s been walking for days just to sit on this curb and cry.

“He lost his son,” Delan says. “His little boy. That’s what he’s saying.”

Delan’s cousin pulls on his arm as one of the men picks up what looks like a pipe.

“Let’s go,” Olivia says.

The crying man seems incapable of understanding what awaits him, oblivious to the men who taunt him. They must be Iraqi military. Or secret police. Whatever the case, they seem to be threatening him, and the air on the street is tight with rage.

“Delan,” Olivia says. “Nose to the ground, right?”

“His son is dead. We’ll get him home.” He turns to his cousin and says something hurried, but his cousin shakes his head, furious, and yanks his keys out of his pocket, already at the car by the time Delan stoops down to the man. In one move, Delan has his arm hooked beneath the man’s shoulder and despite the danger before them, the trio of angry men who are now unlocking the gate, who are now stepping through the gate, louder and closer, the man on the curb stands wearily and turns toward Delan, studying him as if it were just another day and all the noise was birdsong.

“Ta’al ma’ana,” Delan says to the man. “Olivia, please. Take his other arm.”

The men, seeing this, perhaps noticing Delan and Olivia for the first time, step off the curb into the street. Their fists jam into the air. And though Olivia has seen street fights, she is hit at once with the difference: this is not anger; this is hatred. And now it is aimed at Delan.

“Shit,” she says, bending under the weight of the man. Out of the corner of her eye, she sees one of the men lean over and then rise back up with a large rock that must have been placed behind a car’s tire. The car lurches backward, hitting the one behind it, just as the man hoists the rock above his head.

“Move,” Delan yells. “Go.”

Delan’s cousin, one leg inside his car, sees the situation and races back to them, yanking Olivia away to take her spot. Together they hobble to the car under the man’s weight, and within seconds, they’ve shoved him into the back seat, and Delan and Olivia are running to the other side and jumping in. There’s a loud thunk as the rock hits the ground beside them, and the door shuts against her hip as the tires crunch on gravel and spin before taking hold. Then the car is moving, and the shouting is loud and then lost.

The man stares straight ahead, silenced. The turn of events has sobered him, Olivia thinks, but then she observes his stillness and reconstructs the moment. The man is not drunk. What she’d seen was grief. Pure, disorienting, numbing, risk-inducing grief.

“Now what?” she asks Delan quietly. In the distance there is a minaret, blue and green tiles faded in the sun.

“I ask him where he lives.” He turns to the man. “Wain taeish?”

The man nods and reaches for his suit pocket. As he does, Olivia sees that half the fingers on his right hand are missing, each digit nubbed at the knuckle. The sight is jarring. Then his wallet is in Delan’s lap, open. On one side is a card with writing and an eagle, wings stretched outward, its body that of the Iraqi