"American."

And then they took us to the village.

زهورة [Zhoura]’s hands are calloused, rough as peeling burns. Sheafed like the morning I stuck my thumb in a spout of teapot steam; coarse with dead and dying skin.

A calf is used to prime all four teats. Udders swollen and vein-ribbed with weight, the small cow’s desperate grip makes the Young Mother kick in reflexive protest. زهورة breaks him away, restraint rope fraying, blue beneath brown. She milks all four in turn, leathery fingers pulling, squeezing the hot milk in frothy blasts. The sound against an empty plastic pail, muffled by an ascending cushion of perfect white foam. Starbucks $3.55 Macchiato foam; glistening, popping and weightless. The Young Mother filling many small pails before her calf, writhing, wrenching wide-eyed is loosened.

Old Mother gave only a small bubbling bucket, contents slackened, her flaccid, sagging breasts encased by the sharpest of pelvic bones. Points and creases, mud and feces on her neck, her matted flanks.

زهورة spins the wooden stake up her chocolate shin teasing combed wool batting into catching; matting the foreign pieces seamlessly into beautifully imperfect skeins. Cord twisted and spun, pilled and strong.

She wakes me to make bread. “Msammen.” Kneading, full-fisted while she squats between her thighs. Entire body weight. Sticky. Wet. Devoid of ingredients, consistency stringy and weak like cheap gum chewed too long. Oil, milk, flour. Saufee. She smears it into three, makes the first a long flat oval and douses it with oil. From one end she gathers, rolls and flattens, then pats down the log lengthwise, tucking the outermost layers into its center, a sheathed spiral. Smashing the cinnamon-roll-structured ball, the thick and slick tortilla is thrown sputtering into the hearth-heated skillet, sizzling until flipped. Once fried, زهورةcrunches it slightly, held like a dinner plate, until rifts and fissures lift and spread over its shiny face. Slapped on a plate, drowned in olive oil and globs of soft foam butter that melt on contact and slide along contours. My fingers so slick, tiny tea glass requires the bracing of ten fingers, its contents sweet enough to catch my throat and make me cough.

Bamboo wielding, she drives me out to brickle-barbed pasture after the cows and calf, before the three goats their coats manifesting the spectrum from spoilt cream to caramel. When they nibble at buds beside me, small spring saplings finally coming undone, زهورة scolds in my direction, indicates a motion to strike out so I shoo them. “Not the trees,” is her implication.

When I take out my camera, her modeling is immediate, pressuring.
By the stove. Before pots and pans. A pile of blankets, tagine-in-hand.
She pulls me, “Hadji!” from room to room, refolding her hijab, straightening sparse shelving, unfolding her latest woven-wool rug. Stock-still and unsmiling. She unpacks a bag of photos, showing me her son, grandchildren.
Directing me to take pictures of the pictures.
Demanding to “shoofee” the photographs, once taken.
She begins a pile sent by a previous student, handing me images of the girl, images that the girl had taken of her.
زهورة instructs me to send her the photographs I had just captured, her poses laughably redundant when compared with the other student’s pile.
“Send me these pictures. Like the other American,” she motions the addressing of a letter with her fists.
Beside the olive tree. Beside the loom.
She mimics writing, the fingers of her right scratching the ham of her left, “Send me these from America,” she grovels in darija.

At night I find my lower back like Old Mother's. Sharp and distinct. Her skin taut around open sores like burnt black plastic. Hide already cured in sporadic spots devoid of hair.

I watch her at the loom. She told me to, after all. “Gillsee,” I’m instructed. So I sit, reading de Bernières. It must be lonely here. The flies jump from our knees to the rims of our leban glasses, the milk sour and pulpy, not at all like local grocers’. When we swat, they lift obediently, resettling without hesitation. The flies call our bluff – we pose no real threat.
زهورة beats the virgin wool, combing and compressing it amongst the stiff, wooden frame. Black lines bordering the wild gamut of Technicolor X’s. She watches me when I watch her, chewing tiny slivers of coveted gum, smacking succinctly as the she pounds and pulls.

Circling the yard, crash of patchwork gates; so many dirty, broken things still serving an exact and tiny purpose.

Our dinner guest was beanied, his prayer faster than عباد[Aubaud]'s, creating a sort of Qur'anic echo in the whitewashed room, walls 18-inches thick. زهورة breaks out the student’s photographs again. She unwraps never-been-used coils of rope. “American,” she exacts, shaking the cables in front of me, indicating their origin by pointing at the girl's image.
A kitchen sponge. “American.”
An oven mitt. Serrated knife. Minnesota book. “American... American... American...” I nod, annoyed. “Yes,” I say with finality, “I understand. Yes. From America.”
We review the girl’s pictures and E picks through them, handing me those featuring their previous student.
“American,” he says, nodding toward the images, “A-mer-i-can.”
“YES. I know. American,” I respond, ready to scream, “I understand. I KNOW.”
زهورة motions letter-writing on her fist again, spilling forth incomprehensible darija although her point is clear. “From America,” she passes her hand over the table, gift-strewn.
عباد hands me an apple and pushes the knife toward me, “American,” he says, gesturing toward it.
“I UNDERSTAND,” I say slowly, teeth clenching, “It’s all from America. OK.” Their guest, sticking dirty fingerprints over the center of each photograph pauses and points at the tiny black and white TV screen near the door.
“Malikee,” my king he enunciates. “Yes,” I nod, “I know this.”
“MALikee,” he tries louder, عباد and زهورة looking from me to the screen and back. “YES,” I try, exasperated. “OK. YES.”
“MAL-I-KEE,” he stabs with his finger, “Shoofee hoo-a!”
“MALIKEK,” I almost scream. YOUR KING. “I UNDERSTAND.”

I am so done.

Once I have spent a sufficient amount of time sitting near زهورة at her loom post-lunch, I manage to break away, spending each lazy afternoon alone in a high clearing; head in the wildflowers and the whole world sideways. My mom would love this.

زهورة tells me to come and I follow, down the sloping prickly-pear path. I am not allowed to hold the rope. I am not allowed to lead the donkey. I cannot stand near the well while she bails.
I am here to watch.
Tadpoles scatter into violently green algae when she drops the bucket. The donkey’s too-delicate hooves tiny and tilted like the boxes of Pointe shoes. Tick tock on layered shale.

In a very real way I am recognizing how education is a luxury of affluence. I think sleep is, also. Love. Vanity.

She makes the same motion, relentlessly addressing the letter that is her hand. “Baity al-Druz,” زهورة says over and over. The Druz’s House. Where I’m supposed to send the letter. The photographs. The gifts.

Herding the slanted pasture in mid-morning, I stretch the rubber of a bottle cap and later tear burs and copper mud from fresh, nappy wool. Before breakfast I baby powdered my roots to soak up the oil. Threatening dim goats with my splintering bamboo staff.

Trying to ask about their family, again I’m inundated with demands for a letter.
“Baity al-Druz.”
زهورة tells me an article of clothing I own is “zwena,” beautiful. I point at the piled pieces in turn, “This?” I ask, “this one?” When I get to the bottom of the pile, a hidden pair of leggings, زهورة nods.
“Zwena,” she says slowly, staring pointedly into my eyes and at length, unsmiling.

My true utility is making itself clear.

At night we layer wool blankets. Impossibly thin for being heavy as chain mail; vacuum-packing me to the hard rag-tie floor.

Then the day came when I breached new ground, when my hair held the shape of a ponytail once the rubber band had been removed.
I hadn’t gone a full week without bathing since I was probably six.

My eyes catch on the purple circles inside each knee. Surprisingly, these soft spots seem to have only made the piling of my joints easier for nocturnal posturing, like how the bruised hips of a grocer’s apples solidify the stacks.

She turns the half-loaf, warming it over the soot and coals, pouring me another glass of pale, clove-spiced “coffee”.
In case I’d had the chance to forget, she prompts me. “Baity – ”
“Al-Druz,” I finish, “I know. I KNOW.”
“Wakha,” she responds, satisfied.

Eventually we pile back into the bus, greasy-haired and malodorous as the livestock we slept beside. Passing above-ground tombs, long and raised like an inflated pool chaise. Many palms having been submerged and are now ugly-orange with sloppy henna. Anxious to know whether the lines on our ankles are the work of sun or filth, our smokers power through twice their average consumption during the sole bathroom break. We curse the students whose families packed them hard-boiled eggs for-the-road; the heat, fatigue and mountain roads making it impossible to read, impossible to think.

Back home but without my key and "Vivi" out for the mid-day meal, I go up to the roof, the perfect sun. Hiking my skirt up past dirty thighs, I sleep in the light. I soak it in and I sleep in the white African light.