Fiction: Matchmaker, Martyr, Murderer, Mine

By Itto and Mekiya Outini

 

Four girls found dead. Four girls flung from a fishtailing vehicle, smeared across the highway, drawing hopeful birds. Four girls beaten to death by their one husband. Four girls’ gray matter splashed on the walls, a murder-suicide. Four girls identified in the smoking ruins, thanks to the melted fragments of their IDs. Four girls left alone in their childhood home, starved to death, decomposing, their faces eaten off by dogs.  

 

Does it matter how it happened? 

 

The sky is supposed to be blue, but it isn’t. Lunchtime was supposed to be noon, but it wasn’t. I’m supposed to be applying for jobs, but I’m not. I’m sitting in my car outside the bowling alley. My mother doesn’t know about the bowling alley. She doesn’t know about the ketchup on my fingers, the grease-streak rainbows on my phone, the way those grease streaks make the pixels of Four girls dance and shimmer, the way they lemon-juice the invisible ink—One of them, my sister—and the even-more-invisible ink: The girl I’m supposed to call my sister. 

 

The girl who lived with us for twenty months, sleeping in the room where I used to sleep when we moved to the States, before I went away to college. 

 

The girl my mother rescued from Afghanistan. 

 

Those grease streaks lemon-juice the most-invisible ink of all: Why couldn’t my mother rescue me from Afghanistan? 

 

Some kids are born without fingers and toes. Some kids are born without eyes, without ears, without certain chromosomes, without working kidneys. Some kids are born without a sense of smell, a sense of humor, a sense of direction. My sister was born without a lot of things—a family’s love, an immune system’s protection, and age-appropriate cognition—and that’s a tragedy, it really is, but for the record, I was born without something, too. 

 

I was born in Kandahar. That doesn’t mean I’m from Afghanistan. I was born to American parents. That doesn’t mean I’ll make it in America. I still haven’t landed that Fortune 500 job, the one my mother knows is in the cards, the one she wants to hear about so bad. I still pay to live in her basement, five hundred fifty a month, a real bargain. 

 

Lunch is supposed to be an hour, but it’s not. It’s thirty minutes. And they don’t pay you for it. And I’ve already used fifteen. 

 

The basement is supposed to be finished, but from the air mattress where I rest my greasy bones, I get to admire the spiders as they turn the plumbing into monkey bars and aerial rigging and pommel horses and jungle gyms. I get to imagine the boldest among them rappelling directly down into my nostrils as soon as I start to snore. I imagine the headlines—Four spiders found dead, unanticipated nasal turbulence, their fragile little bodies blown to smithereens—but I also imagine the claps on the back that the successful paratroopers will receive, the medals of honor, the lifetimes worth of accolades. 

 

Electricity used to fascinate me when I was a child, when I hadn’t seen much of it. Part of me is still fascinated. Part of me still imagines electrocution as some sort of joyride, like drugs, like an orgasm. Part of me still wants to bury my hand in the tangle of wires silhouetted by the narrow window, or the empty socket by the stairs, and see what happens. 

 

Part of me wants to give the old hot water heater the good, hard smack that it deserves for gurgling all night long, even if that does cause it to explode. But maybe it won’t explode. Maybe it’ll simply stop doing its job, and one floor up, my sister, luxuriously soaking in the tub, will slowly, quietly, heroically freeze. 

 

Four girls found dead. One electrocuted. One nibbled to death by vengeful spiders. One blown to smithereens along with the hot water heater. One trapped in a bathtub-coffin, cryonically preserved. 

 

My sister has a feeble body to complement her feeble mind. She’s twenty-four, two years older than me, but she wouldn’t have the strength to drag herself out of that bathtub. Once in a blue moon, she clambers out of her wheelchair and hobbles around just to prove that she can. Disabled people can’t do anything, she says. Someday, she’ll have a house of her own, a big one in Saudi Arabia maybe, a mansion, and a filthy-rich husband, and three cars, and plenty of servants to drive them. Maybe her tongue was a bulge in her cheek when she said that. She already had a house, three cars, and servants—my mother, my father, and me—to drive her wherever she wanted to go. 

 

One time, she said that God was the disabled one, deaf and blind, and that’s why He never answered her prayers. That made my mother suck in her breath as if she’d just cut her finger open slicing onions. 

 

“God is the reason you’re here, you know,” she said softly. “God’s love is the reason your father and I can care for you the way we do.” 

 

“Your father” is what my mother calls my father when addressing the girl I’m supposed to call my sister. 

 

“I know,” said my sister. “I know God loves me. Why wouldn’t He?”

 

Just like that, she was back to being a pious Muslim. 

 

That was the problem for the twenty months she lived with us: she was a pious Muslim, and my parents are pious Christians. If they weren’t, they never would’ve adopted a disabled Muslim girl from Afghanistan. They probably wouldn’t have gone there in the first place. I probably wouldn’t have been born there, blonde and blue-eyed and without a culture. I probably wouldn’t have spent my childhood toddling around between infirmary beds and operating tables, learning how to boil water over bottle gas and sterilize my father’s dental implements, reimagined as surgical tools, or holding metal bowls while he dropped bloody pellets and fragments of bone into them. My father has no training as a surgeon, but his patients mostly lived. He credits God. 

 

I have four years of training as an international relations expert, and a diploma to prove it, but my applications always seem to bounce off some invisible firewall, or else vanish into bottomless digital voids—unless they’re for the mid-shift at the bowling alley. 

 

I credit God. 

 

My mother credits my laziness. The economy may be in the toilet, but isn’t everything a matter of will? Was it easy for her and my father to choose the path of service while their friends were busy buying houses in the suburbs? Was it easy to trade in that middle-class American dream and go live in a country where there is no such class? Have I thought of that? 

 

Have I been praying? 

 

“Of course,” I say. “Of course, I have.” 

 

She never bothers to ask what for, so I don’t tell her. 

 

It isn’t that my mother makes me want to die. That would be melodramatic. My sister, for the record, is the melodramatic one. My sister is the one who wants to be a martyr, to fight for God, to die for God, here in this land of infidels. My sister is the one who made my mother make a thousand sandwiches for her and hand them out to homeless people all through Ramadan for two years running so that she wouldn’t have to fast—as if that’s how Sadaqah works. My sister is the one who parrots everything she hears on YouTube, no matter how senseless, no matter how cruel. My sister’s the one to watch out for. Not me. 

 

It isn’t that I want to die. I don’t. I want to live. More than anything, I want to live, to be there at the funeral, to hear how people talk about me after I’ve been murdered. 

 

I do sometimes want to be murdered. 

 

I do pray. 

 

Wanting to be murdered is not wanting to die. Not the same thing at all. Don’t believe me? Let’s break it down: it’s a lot more common, for starters. Most people want to be murdered. I’m convinced of that. I’ve seen how people behave. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t spend most of their waking hours doing things likely to get them murdered. Take my parents, for example. They didn’t manage to get themselves murdered in Afghanistan, but that was hardly for lack of trying. They stuck out like a couple of sore thumbs. My mother never would wear a headscarf except when it was absolutely necessary. She never let me wear one, either. The girls at the international school didn’t have to wear headscarves, and most of them didn’t, but I always wore mine to class and in the cafeteria because it was the only time when I could get away with it. I told myself that I was saving up for later, when it really mattered, stockpiling modesty to offset the stares that were bound to come whistling toward me when I ventured out into the streets. 

 

My father couldn’t do much with his hair to get himself murdered, but he did preach the word of Jesus Christ Our Lord and Savior to his patients as they writhed beneath his shining hooks and scalpels. They were always either unconscious or delirious with pain, which is probably why they never murdered him. He treated everyone, including the Taliban. 

 

Compare that to me, sitting here in my car beside the bowling alley—on the rougher side of town, sure, but my doors are locked, my windows rolled up, the key’s in the ignition, even—with my basket of fries in my lap, and my phone, and you’ll see that I’ve turned out a lot less melodramatic than I could’ve been. 

 

Four girls. Four girls blown up when the bottle gas overheated. Four girls mowed down in another school shooting. Four girls deflowered by their lovers, then dismembered by their fathers, brothers, uncles, sons. Four girls seduced by another suburban death cult. Four girls, four narrow-hipped teens, cracked open like watermelons by ruddy-faced infants, hellbent on clawing their way toward the sun. 

 

She’s got the narrow hips, my sister has, to match her narrow mind. It wouldn’t have taken a baby to crack her open: her first time with a man would’ve done it. He wouldn’t even have had to be particularly cruel. He just would’ve had to not know when to stop. And most men don’t. At least that’s what I’ve heard. I wouldn’t know. 

 

I’d be lying if I said that I’ve been praying for a husband. 

 

I prayed for a job and got this one. If I pray for a husband, I’ll probably end up hitched to the guy who runs the bowling alley. He’s a real catch: shaped just like one of those inflatable clown dolls that always pops back up no matter how many times you punch him, his sideburns soft as peach fuzz, with a piercing through his tongue. I figured he was gay, not just because of the piercing, but also because of his high-pitched whinny and the fussiness with which he mopped the counters, but then there was the night he walked me to my car. 

 

My mother doesn’t know about the bowling alley. Doesn’t want to know. 

 

She doesn’t want to know where I that get five fifty. 

 

She tells me that I ate her grapes, her cheese, her Cheerios, her nectarines. She says that my sister is innocent. How could a girl too weak to wrestle the fridge door open ever steal that food? “It doesn’t add up,” she tells me. “You’re putting on weight, aren’t you?” 

 

Is it my fault? Are the fries, the nachos, the greasy cardboard pizza slices my fault? How about the Sprite? The Coca Cola? How about the thoughts of pulao, khurma, ashak, and kabob? Is it my fault that there’s nothing to plug up those cravings besides a room-temperature hotdog? 

 

Four girls found dead—oh, wait, no, it’s only one. What a whale! Dead in her car, all four tires burst and sagging, the saucy remnants of her last meal dribbling down her thousand splendid chins. 

 

Don’t worry. I’m not there yet. I’m exaggerating. 

 

But my mother makes me feel as if I’m not exaggerating. 

 

My mother wants me to find a husband. My mother frets all day and night that if I carry on like this, I never will. My mother doesn’t seem to understand that even if I find a husband, my sister will steal him. My sister always used to say she wanted throat cancer because her favorite auntie at the orphanage got throat cancer, and she wanted to go where she’d gone. My sister had my parents, but she wasn’t satisfied. She had our God, but she wanted her own. She wanted a husband because husbands were rich. I wanted the best for her. Why not? Was she not the firstborn? Her needs are supposed to come before my own. How could I marry first? That’s not how it works in the Bible. Jacob had to marry Leah before he married Rachel, never mind her weak eyes. Leah turned out to be the fertile one, but Rachel had a slave, and her slave did okay, and Leah’s slave did pretty well, too, and Jacob did best of all. 

 

Isn’t that always how it goes? 

 

There weren’t many options in those days. Jacob had to travel for miles in search of a wife, and he still ended up with his cousins. Nowadays, all you’ve got to do is fire up your browser, apply a few filters, and you’ll find yourself a man. He can have blue eyes, green eyes, brown eyes, camel or Cadillac, turban or no turban—whatever your heart desires. The catch is that you’ve got to trust him. If you don’t trust him, none of those filters are going to do you any good. 

 

That’s one nice thing about marrying your cousin: you know exactly who you’re dealing with. No last-minute face-with-open-mouth emojis. No what’s-that-you’ve-got-up-your-sleeves? Marry your cousin, fuck your cousin, marry your other cousin, fuck your other cousin, fuck your cousin’s slave, fuck your other cousin’s slave, steal your uncle’s sexiest sheep, and boom, you’re good to go. If you’re Jacob. 

 

If you’re the girl engaged to Jacob, the girl lucky enough to be engaged to a man whose name literally means “He deceives,” things might get a little dicey. Too bad. Don’t say you weren’t forewarned. 

 

That’s another nice thing about the ancient world: you could learn a lot from names. All Jacob’s sons had names that told you who and what they were, starting with Reuben, which means, “See, a son!” Jacob even gave names like that to his wells. He called one of them “dispute,” another “opposition,” because that’s exactly what they got him from the people whose land he was digging on. Compare that to nowadays, when you can find someone named Mohamed, and he really does look like a Mohamed—not the Mohamed, mind you, just a Mohamed—and he talks like a Mohamed, or types like one, anyway, and probably walks like a Mohamed, whatever that means, and maybe he even quacks like a Mohamed, although “quack” is not a term commonly associated with men named Mohamed, and is, in fact, more commonly associated with doctors who aren’t really doctors, which is what my father is, but all this is to say that on the internet, in this day and age, names, like many other things, can be deceiving. 

 

That’s why trust is so important. 

 

It’s not easy to trust someone when you know for a fact that he shouldn’t trust you, but it gets a little easier when you confirm that you’re the one holding the whip hand. For the record, I never had any intention of pulling the rug out from under poor Mohamed, who’d been through enough already, losing his wife the way he had, unless, by “pulling the rug out from under him,” you mean revealing to him, at the last possible moment, that the girl he’d been courting online—to whom, by that time, he would be engaged—was feeble in body as well as in mind, too feeble to bear children; but that’s not the same thing, not like revealing, at the last possible moment, that you are, in fact, that pious little Afghan girl’s sister, blonde and blue-eyed and not really American, but not really Afghan, either. That would be a real doozy. By contrast, revealing that your hips are like balsawood, and your legs are like bamboo, and your fingers and toes are like little twigs waiting to fall off falls into roughly the same bucket as revealing that your profile picture is fifteen years out of date, or that even though you are a woman, you also have a dick. Business as usual, baby. Standard online fare. Using the internet to search for a mate is a lot like marrying a guy whose name means “He deceives.” You can be disgruntled, but don’t say you weren’t forewarned. 

 

I may not be American, I may not be Afghan, but I am a digital native. I can speak with authority on digital things. 

 

Poor Mohamed wasn’t a digital native by any means, and he wasn’t a Florida native, either, but there he was anyway, trawling for love on the internet and bopping around Miami, trying to get his PhD. He missed his country, he told me, which is to say, he told my sister. He missed the music, the narrow streets, the calls to prayer, the children’s screams, the redolent smoke, the toffee vendors, the coffee houses, the mangy strays. He missed his family. Especially his wife. She’d died a few years ago, during a certain chaotic withdrawal. “You know,” he said, “how Americans are.” 

 

No matter what happened, his faith wouldn’t be shaken. He was a pious man. Why else would he be on that particular dating site, looking for that particular sort of woman? 

 

There was no one to ask for my sister’s hand, of course: no father, no brothers, no uncles, no sons. Just her American parents—and they would never let me marry such a man. “You know,” I typed, “how Americans are.” 

 

“This is a secret,” I said to my sister that evening, kneeling by her wheelchair. “If you tell anyone, you’ll never get married.” I gave her hand a squeeze—not too hard, not hard enough to break her bones, just enough to let her know that I was there. “I’m taking care of everything. He’s going to get the ticket, and I’ll get you on the plane.”

 

Every day for the next few weeks, whenever my parents were out, or once they’d gone to bed, I would smuggle a few articles of my sister’s clothing out to my car. Some, I stashed under the seats, in the glovebox, or in the rear compartment where the spare tire should’ve been, but wasn’t. Once those nooks and crannies were full, I started replacing my clutter with hers. My flip-flops and backpacks and hoodies and tees made their way discreetly into the house in ones and twos, but the net total of garbage in my car remained unchanged. It was like that old story, the Ship of Theseus, an oar replaced here, a bit of rigging there, and the next thing you know, voila! It's a whole new ship you’re sailing on. 

 

The night of her red-eye’s departure, as the television flickered from beneath my parents’ door, I crept up to my sister’s room and carried her four empty suitcases out to the car. She came hobbling gamely behind. We drove a few blocks to an empty lot illuminated by sodium vapor floodlights. There, I set to work packing her bags. 

 

As I was working on her second suitcase, she announced that she wanted French fries. I didn’t have any money for French fries, and I said so, and she said I was lying, and I said I wasn’t lying, and she said I was an American, that meant I was rich, and I said she ought to be grateful to be marrying an Afghan man who could afford to get his PhD here in America, and he would get her all the fries she wanted if she would just be patient for a few more hours, and she said I was being stingy, and just then a car with security decals came around the corner of what I’d thought was an abandoned building, and I decided it was a good time to hightail it out of there before we got charged with something, and the only place I could find to park and finish packing her suitcases was by a MacDonalds, so she ended up getting her French fries. 

 

The last service that I ever rendered to my sister was to hoist her suitcases over the curb in front of the departures terminal and point her in the direction of the personal assistants, who were standing around by the sliding doors, stifling yawns. 

 

That was almost three weeks ago. Since that night, I’ve called in sick five times, which, if my calculations are correct, comes to four hundred thirty-one dollars before tax: that is, more than the plane ticket. I’ve also put on fifteen pounds. I’ve been eating too much. I’ve been sleeping too little. Every night, it’s the same thing: nightmares, nightmares, nightmares. Every morning, I’ve been forgetting them, but that small, insidious part of me hasn’t been forgetting. 

 

The good news is that my misery seems to be deflecting suspicion. The bad news is that if I’d wanted to feel miserable, I could’ve spared myself and everyone else a lot of trouble by leaving well enough alone. 

 

It’s not that I’m concerned about my sister getting back in touch with my parents and telling them everything. Before I put her on the plane, I deleted their contacts and blocked their numbers from her phone. For good measure, I also deleted her Facebook, WhatsApp, X, and Instagram. 

 

It’s also not that I’ve been feeling guilty. The nice thing about growing up in a household like mine is that you spend so much of your childhood being told that you’re steeped in original sin, and that there’s nothing you can do about it, that you eventually forget how to care. At least that’s what happened to me. 

 

That’s evidently not what happened to my parents, whom I’ve never seen so distraught in their lives, not even the time when I wandered off to play with my friend Rahim in what turned out to be an old minefield, and his body was thrown fifteen meters, and I had to stand very, very, very still for three and a half hours until the grownups agreed that the best way to rescue me would be to have me retrace my steps—to rescue myself, basically—only by that time, the wind had picked up, and my footprints were gone, and retracing my steps involved a lot of guessing. My parents have always been able to handle situations like that because they place their trust in God. This time around, however, it was God—or, rather, the church, presumably acting on God’s behalf—who’d placed their trust in my parents, and my parents had dropped the ball. 

 

Losing my sister is just about the worst thing they could’ve done. Everyone seems to be in agreement about that, including the church elders, who’ve been in and out of our house every afternoon since it happened. Technically, the problem isn’t that they lost my sister, but that they lost her before she became a Christian. The whole point of rescuing her from Afghanistan, as it turns out, was to turn her into a missionary and send her back to Kandahar so that she could go around converting people right up until the instant that someone beheaded her, making her a martyr at last. 

 

In addition to their guilt, which the elders made a point of reinforcing every afternoon, my parents had an even bigger problem to contend with: namely, the sudden drying-up of their income. Evidently, they’d been raking in a tidy sum in my sister’s name, more than enough to feed and clothe and shelter her, which explains why my mother has no idea how difficult it is to get paid more than $11.50 an hour in 2025. 

 

The first thing they did in response to this sudden reversal of fortune was to raise my rent to eight fifty a month, which I’m pretty sure is illegal because they gave me zero notice and didn’t bother to improve any amenities. The upside is that I was asked to help my mother update her resume, which, if I’m being honest, is worth a lot more to me than three hundred dollars. 

 

But if it’s not the guilt, you may well ask, and if it’s not the fear—discovery, at this point, seems pretty unlikely—and if it’s not the financial precarity, which was there all along, and at least now my parents are in the same boat as me, then what is it? What’s got me arrhythmic and dry-mouthed and sand-paper-eyed, checking my phone all day, every day, every hour, every ten minutes, every five, every three, every one? Why the misery? What’s changed? 

 

That is, what hasn’t changed?

 

What is it about our last words to each other, and everything that’s happened since, that’s left me feeling so very, very, very much the same? 

 

I don’t mean when we said goodbye in the drop-off zone outside the departures terminal, she clutching her largest suitcase as if it were a walker, I shivering and hugging my goose-pimpled arms. 

 

No. 

 

I mean when she called me a few hours later.

 

She hasn’t called me since then. And she hasn’t been answering, either. Come to think of it, deleting all those outgoing calls may not have been the cleverest thing I’ve ever done, and may in fact require some explanation now that her phone is in the hands of the authorities, who’ll be able to compare my log to hers, but I’m not worried. I can always tell them that I hated looking at her name, hated that relentless reminder of loss. That’s partly true. 

 

I never deleted my number from her end. I never blocked her from mine. There is no reason—there is no technological reason—for her not to answer or return my calls. 

 

But there is a reason. 

 

That reason is not named Mohamed. 

 

“Look!” she cried, the phone much too close to her face, as always, shaking in her flimsy hands so that the video leapt and lagged. “I’m married! I’m here with my husband!” 

 

The airport behind her was dazzling, a kaleidoscope of glass and steel lit up by morning sun. He must’ve leaned down and planted a kiss on her salty, greasy, puckered little mouth when he’d met her at baggage claim, or maybe on her salty, greasy, withered little hand. Kissing was marriage, as far as she was concerned. 

 

“He’s handsome, isn’t he!” she exclaimed, her voice Mickey Mouse-like as always, squeaky and vocal-fried. The phone took my gaze with it, leaping sickeningly sideways, aiming past her shoulder, and for a fraction of a second—long enough—I caught a glimpse of him.  

 

Mohamed. 

 

Except that reasons named Mohamed don’t have faces like that one. 

 

Reasons named Mohamed don’t have sandy hair. Blue eyes. Brown freckles. 

 

Well, well, well, I thought. You sly bastard. 

 

Then a hand closed over the camera and ended the call. 

 

* * *

 

Four girls found dead. 

 

Four girls found dead in a warehouse in Florida. 

 

Four girls found rotting near the mold-slickened pallets, empty shelving units, rusty barrels—whatever it is they leave lying around in Floridian warehouses—beneath the salt-corroded beams. 

 

Four girls found dead, slaughtered by a Florida Man whose name was not Mohamed, whose name probably wasn’t even Jacob, though it could’ve been Jacob, because names do not seem to mean anything anymore. Knowing his name is like knowing that a well was called “dispute” or “opposition” a thousand years after it runs dry. 

 

Four girls. Each of them slit down the middle, relieved of her organs. 

 

Four medical martyrs, and here come the headlines, the grieving, the breast-beating, hair-pulling, teeth-gnashing paroxysms; and here come the funerals, and how lavish the funerals, and how long the obits, and how heartfelt the eulogies will be! 

 

How grateful the recipients of those pilfered organs, whether or not they know they were ill-gotten. Whether or not they realize that my sister died so they could live. How grateful they will be. 

 

Four girls. Four martyrs. 

 

None of them me.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Itto and Mekiya Outini write about America, Morocco, and all those caught in between. They’ve published fiction and nonfiction in The North American Review, Modern Literature, Fourth Genre, The Good River Review, MQR, Chautauqua, The Stonecoast Review, Mount Hope, Jewish Life, Eunoia Review, New Contrast, DarkWinter, Lotus-Eater, Gargoyle Magazine, and elsewhere. Their work has received support from the MacDowell Foundation, the Steinbeck Fellowship Program, the Edward F. Albee Foundation, and the Fulbright Program. They’re collaborating on several books, running The DateKeepers, an author support platform, and co-hosting a podcast and the YouTube channel, Let’s Have a Renaissance.