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

people appear, ready and crying and without pause, and feels that instead the briskness here is because death is well practiced. Tragedy, quite simply, lurks around too many corners.

At last, there’s a moment. Delan finds her standing in the kitchen with the women and leads her to the stairs. “I need to go, but you have to stay,” he says quickly, and it’s as if his words have tumbled off an edge. “Please just listen. You stay with the women; I go with the men. There’s an order; it’s how it’s done.”

“Delan. Why him? What happened?”

Even in the darkened hall, his eyes go bright with tears. “There is no why. There is no reason. He’s dead because someone didn’t want him alive. It’s that fucking simple.”

“But—”

“I have to go with the men. Please.”

But she doesn’t let him go. Instead she wraps both arms around him and presses her cheek against his shoulder. With his arms at his sides, he breathes in and out once, twice, three times before finally hugging her back. But it’s quick. Done more for her benefit than his.

“I have to go,” he whispers in her ear, and she sits back on the stair and watches him leave, helpless at the time he most needs help.

Translations do not happen. Trying to stay out of the way, she remains with the women at the house. Cooking has started and songs are sung, notes hitting chords of grief, each one bringing her closer to an edge. The women rock, swaying and crying, and soon she finds herself doing the same, the understanding of what’s captured on the film in her camera hitting her in tumbles, rolling her stomach to the point where she must just think of the yard at home in Los Angeles, that essentially blank canvas, to not break down. She’ll get tomatoes in pots along the driveway. The grapes Delan wants on the wall. To calm herself, she sways and digs holes in her mind and fills them with things that will grow, that will become lush and verdant and life-giving, all while the women’s voices rise and fall and Olivia’s camera sits with a wretched moment captured within.

When the men return, there is a last prayer outside the house. Then more people in the house: friends, neighbors, family, even his cousin and new wife, who canceled the remaining days of their wedding celebration after the raid. Olivia remembers when her own mother died, how her father sank to silence and hid in his room for days. Weeks. It might have been months. There were no voices in her house. But now people have brought food, and their reddened eyes commiserate, fists held to hearts or to the sky. Dark coffee is served without sugar.

“Nothing sweet,” Delan explains, seeing her searching the table. “Sweet means happiness.” A pause. “This isn’t real.”

Again, he’s pulled away, and with the crowd, no one notices when she disappears to go upstairs. On her bed is her camera. Discarded upon her return from the mountain, inside a roll of film with Soran’s last moments. The fact that it’s there, on her bed, is so wrong, so horribly wrong, that she can’t even touch it. Can’t lift it or move it. To have sat taking photos while their son, his brother, struggled for another breath. And Soran. She’s betrayed him as well. She sat there. Capturing last moments she had no right to capture. What’s inside the camera—she feels it as a tiny, beating heart.

Like yanking off a Band-Aid, she removes the film. Quick. Never could she destroy it, but never does she want to see its images. Never does she want to accidentally develop and print and be faced with what’s there. Riffling through her purse, she finds a ballpoint pen and then the canister and digs in over and over with the tip till there’s blue on her finger and a deep, dented line like a strike. Even if the ink fades, never could she miss the indentation, the mark, the warning.

Olivia finds Lailan on Miriam’s couch, hiding under a tangle of blankets, lashes clumped and moist, face streaked with tears. Curling behind her, Olivia wraps her arms around the girl’s small shoulders. To say everything will be okay would be a lie. To tell her she is safe, another lie. That it gets better. That time heals all wounds. Every comfort, every reassurance, all of it, Olivia realizes, boils down to pretty words. Adages that are in no way anchored to this reality.

The hurt Lailan has been through—such an unfair allotment, more tragedy than most adults endure in a lifetime. But the girl knows none of this. Her life is all she’s ever known, and to her this is just another dark hour. Now and then, her shoulders tremble as she cries, quietly and unobtrusively, already a professional at grief, and when finally the sun takes a darkened dip, Olivia gets up and reaches out her hand. Together they stand, and it’s then Olivia sees Lailan’s doll, discarded on the floor by a table, its blonde hair colored in with a red marker.

A car idles in front of Delan’s house, the driver watching as if debating about paying his respects. About to open the front door, Olivia smiles a greeting—but the man looks forward and pulls away, as if the kindness was uncalled for. Lailan, however, doesn’t notice. Just stares up at the window, unmoving, as if understanding that this is the edge of something else. A first step beyond. That was how it was when Olivia’s mother died. This is the first time I’ve been to the grocery store when my mom isn’t on the planet. This is the first time at the movies with my mom dead. The first time buying clothes. So many firsts to be had. Olivia shuts her eyes with the burden of being familiar with this one slightly similar journey. But then the front door swings open and there’s Delan, eyes red, but