Losing, now there’s no mystery in that. As in giving up, as in letting go of the hand that slipped my grip years ago, if I ever had it at all. All the synonyms for grief we might find in the world’s most appalling thesaurus next to An Atlas of Cursed Places. And that’s a real book bound in red and black, I know that, it sits on my bookshelf next to the family albums. There’s something in the blood and bone and sinew of this sharp-toothed world that needs its own ritual, its rites, its communings. Not even water from sunup to sundown in this dry, flat desert Emirate. I was not born here, my skin wasn’t meant for this sun. But I know this—how to lose. Jobs, loves, car keys, I’ve lost fifty pounds these last six months. Less of me every morning when I look in the mirror. But imagine—after all those hours of pain, of thirst. You will never come back. Let that grammar ambiguate. Let it sink in. But every evening, here, during the month of Ramadan, a great feast. Iftar. Restitution. Satiation. I’m no believer. But that, I think, could be a miracle. It must be.
                        

(Duluth, Georgia, summer rainy season)

It was June when the clouds rolled in, grey and black and fat like a flock of sullen, yellow-eyed sheep glaring from a muddy hillside pasture. At first, we thought nothing of the rain—just a summer shower like any other, needed to fill up the Chattahoochee River, the reservoirs, to keep the lawns green, the azaleas moist. But then—thundercrack, then power flickers, the transformer near the street blowing in an arch of sparks. The water rose, it rose some more—the sump pump in the garage just couldn’t keep up. Rills of water, ripples of blood-warm water rolling down our steep driveway hill like angry tears, like arterial spray. And all the while the shudder jerk and twitch of the live wires where an old oak branch had fallen, downing the power lines. We thought that God had sworn it would be fire next time. But that was long ago, something in this new rain roared, that was another covenant with some other god. That was before you invited us in, before you in your model homes in your shiny new cities conjured us with the smog of your offering, the children you gave to the river, all those brown bodies you never really accounted for, all those names and faces you thought we’d forgotten. But we haven’t. We haven’t. Not us.