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Fiction
When the Buildings Began to Bleed
Their mistake was simple: They sent her body to the masjid
We say her body was the seventh ’cause that’s what we could gather from records. Truth be told, she could’ve been the eighth. The 10th. The 20th. It both does and doesn’t matter.
When the story first broke, the media called her a “woman,” but she was freshly 18. Just a week before, she had walked across a stage with her new diploma in her hand, khimar pushed back on her head to show the red streaks in her hair. A week out of high school—does that really make you a woman?
It started with the bodies of men from prisons built outside the suburbs, far up in northern Minnesota. Most of the dead had no families. They were buried outside the walls they suffered in without a marker to find them.
A few made their way back down to the Twin Cities to be met by grieving parents, siblings, and people made family through sheer will alone. Those families agreed to a closed casket with little resistance. People are malleable in their grief.
If you wanna get real about it, though, the inspiration came before the fog, in chairs and handkerchiefs and dentures and stuffing for cushions. Black skin stretched out where it didn’t belong. The idea of taking without giving a fuck ’cause what our bodies had wasn’t even ours. “Tools” can’t own things or be violated. Tools are meant to be broken down, ripped apart, dismembered, and built up again however the master desires.
My sister didn’t come from prison. She was in the country jail downtown waiting on a court date. Maybe they could’ve gotten away with it if they picked another girl out of those cells. But their mistake was simple: They sent her body to the masjid.
For the first time in years, I turned to see my sister with her forehead pressed into the carpet, old duas falling — rusty and sincere — into its fabric.
The fog came when I was 11 years old. Its descent was gradual, a slow blot rolling across the sky and intruding upon the sun in her domain. There was something almost beautiful about the takeover. I watched at the…
