Zahkia
68 Zahkia Highway City, California Once a week Zahkia Famie made the trip to the butcher to ask after the legs of lamb. After inspecting what lay chilled in the case and what the butcher lifted from its hook in the cold box, after careful deliberations based on several lifetimes of experience in the markets of the Middle East and the peculiar culinary esthetic handed down through the family for generations, after commenting on the weather and inquiring about the health of the butcher, his wife, his children, she made her selection and paid with cash. Though her tongue was at times as sharp as her knives, she sang behind the screens of her kitchen or beneath the olive trees as she cut the lamb into portions and set aside the fat for soap. What she thought about the Doors, “Purple Haze,” and the young men and women who swam naked in her water trough, only a native speaker of Arabic could say. Matriarch of the secret gardens on the outskirts of Highway City, where illegal soldiers of fortune slept beneath the poisonous oleanders and whole families came with buckets to harvest the fallen figs, she dispensed wisdom like a turtle, grace like a fox, and fed whoever was hungry. I don’t know if her gift was dignity or craft, though she possessed both in abundance. What I took from her was what I needed most, a temporary home and that kind of confidence the uprooted young take 69 from the steadfast old. She didn’t seem to notice the screaming in the orchard. She didn’t stare at the full moon from the bottom of the water trough. She didn’t scrape the black powder from the bullet to light the hookah with a flash. She rose each day at dawn and watered the tomatoes. ...
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