The Wound I Watch

by Yasmeen Fahmy

Mama asks on the phone “شو شكلها؟” What does it look like?

I’m not sure how to respond.

So I start scribbling in my A6 notebook in between shifts: like a glistening wound at sunrise, gelatinous and holy. Like a trick of the eye at noon, floating yet shadowless, hallucinatory. Like a sanguine sliver at dusk. Infernal.

I’m not fluent enough to translate these so the next call I just say, “حمراء جدًا” Very red.

None of it makes sense of course. It should just be black. That’s what we always theorized about rips in spacetime. But it isn’t.

At the distance and angle I observe from, it appears suspended fifty meters up. Its edges warp the unchanging background, a sandscape of glinting rust-colored ridges and arid wind.

It can’t be any bigger than a chest freezer, though I’ve never been close enough to be sure. You can stretch your legs near the perimeter and like many observers, I often do, but there’s a threshold we’re not supposed to cross, except at daybreak.

This is the bit I don’t speak to Mama about. Nor will ever be transmitted on any airwave or printed in any newspaper or textbook: what exactly emerges from the wound I watch.

Corpses. A couple dozen every evening.

The sheathed dead thump down like sacks of root vegetables. A few fall still writhing, but not for long. Bipedal creatures like us, it’s clear. But we don’t know much beyond that. Overseers worry prodding will invite unwanted attention.

At dawn, we breach the perimeter to tag each one, disperse them, and make way for the next day’s batch. We arrived at this agreement with no one. And no one has brought us harm, so it continues. Nothing living has ever come through. For now, that’s enough.

I know Mama would wonder about them if she knew. “حَرَام” she’d say. It’s not right.

It’s not right. I glimpsed the tip of an appendage once. Thin wispy webbing over a mass of ashen digits. More than ours to be sure, but how many? I couldn’t count quickly enough. I tucked the limb back into its shroud and continued.

We give them numbers but surely they had names. Siblings, lovers, children. We lay them beneath a barren sand sheet and pray whoever killed them won’t kill us. What did they pray for? We’ll never know.

We are cowards indeed. “حَرَام”

Yasmeen Fahmy is an Egyptian American writer and mother based in New Jersey. Her stories are published or forthcoming in Inner Worlds, Saros Speculative Fiction, The Sprawl Mag, and If There's Anyone Left. You can find her on Bluesky @yasmeenfahmy and at yasmeenfahmy.com.