Category: Fiction
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Adnan Unredacted: I Became the Boring Guy at the Beach
I adore people-watching at the beach. They are completely free – shouting with excitement, jumping into the water, talking with their mouths full, careless and light. I, however, don’t like myself at the beach. I’m grumpy. I run away from the sun like it has a personal issue with me. I apply endless layers of…
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Maybe You Aren’t A Curse After All
The door creaks open, and Haleem appears – his plaid shirt flung open, belt barely done, sweat pooling over the wrinkles of his forehead; sweat that he could easily wipe away with the edge of his sleeve but chooses to ignore instead, sweat that Thuraya hates to see although they’ve been married for decades, and…
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Legally Blind
Life for her was a Monet painting, literally. She looked at herself in the mirror and loved her soft, blurry reflection. Everything others felt indifferent towards or called dull, she saw magic in. She felt like the luckiest girl in the world, when she married her “beaut” of a husband with his big nose, toes,…
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Adnan Unredacted: What If I Don’t Want to Count My Macros?
Today, I am a new person. Meet the new Adnan. Adnan, who wakes up at 7:59 a.m.- one minute before the alarm. Not because he wants to, but because his body has apparently accepted that sleeping past eight is personal failure. Adnan, who doesn’t check his phone first thing in the morning, but instead gets…
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The Hair Heartthrob
All the girls were obsessed with his perfect hair. It was his signature trait, yet, for some unknown reason, it was forbidden for anyone but him to touch it. It’s that hair that made him the neighborhood heartthrob; the one who ended things with girls before they even saw the light of day. One time,…
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بقعة
.شردت في البقعة على حائط غرفة النوم وأنا أفرغ أغراضي من شنطة السفر. ها هو ذا، أخي كلما ذهبتُ خارج البلاد وعُدتُ، أجده في مكانه، ولكن ليس في مكانه. فالبقعة التي تتخذ شكل إنسان، شكله هو، لا تزال في موقعها. لكن هيئتها تختلف مع كل رحلة. السنة الماضية كانت البقعة ترسم على الحائط شكل جسده…
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Two funerals and a love interest
“Love will find you when you least expect it.” That’s what her grandmother always told her. Today was her granny’s funeral. In her black dress, among the white flowers, she cried -a lot – until her eyes caught something they liked… a real gentleman who had left early without a name or number. She kept…
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Adnan, Unredacted: Just Wanted to Say Happy Birthday
I love birthdays. Every year around December, I buy one of those giant paper calendars they sell on the street, the ones that take up half the wall and come with holidays already printed in red on them with a special quote behind the back each day. Then I dedicate an entire evening to updating…
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Adnan, Unredacted: Somebody Should’ve Seen Me in the Kitchen
At 2:15 PM, I removed the extra “haha” that I had written on the work group chat. Earlier that morning, at around 10:00 AM, I had found out that Khaled got promoted. Khaled. My coworker who does, more or less, the exact same job I do. Apparently, he “needed the opportunity more.” Which, translated loosely…
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Background Noise
The sound of war planes and foreign drones has become the background noise to her life. Sometimes, she doesn’t need to turn on the TV in the living room nor the small, wooden radio she has in her kitchen when she’s doing chores; the hum of that white, six-legged alien in the sky is enough.…