Chapter 17 · Untitled Chapter

I was dressed before the house was. Abaya, tarha pinned at the shoulder, the register under my arm, and the pen I had taken out of the desk in the small room where the house keeps its paper. The cup from the night before still stood on the ledge where I had set it down, and the gahwa in it had gone to a skin, and I left it there because I was not going to need it again.

I had spent the dark hours deciding how to write my own name.

Not the borrowed one. Not the one the house had entered in its own hand the season my Ammi brought me through the eastern door and gave me the gallery and the book and told me it would do me good to have work. I had written every guest of that majlis into that book for four months.

I had gone up to the gallery each evening and looked down at them and given them names of my own, because a woman who writes the register learns the shapes of men long before she learns their names, and a shape with no name in it keeps you awake.