Nekropolis Read Online Free PDF

there’s anyplace I want to go, it is the Nekropolis. Not the real one, the one in my mind, but it’s gone. I was the eldest, then my sister, Rashida, then my brother Fhassin, and then the baby boy, Nabil. In families of four, underneath the fighting, there’s always pairing, two and two. Fhassin and I were a pair. My brother. I think a lot about Fhassin and about the Nekropolis, locked in my room.
    I sleep, eat my little breakfast that Akhmim brings me, sleep again. Then I sit at the window or make flowers, sleep again. The only bad time is late afternoon to early evening, when I’ve slept so much that I can’t sleep anymore and my stomach is growling. I’m fretful and teary. When Akhmim comes in the evening with dinner, he bruises my senses until I get accustomed to his being there. His voice has many shades, his skin is much more supple, much more oiled, and textured than paper. He overwhelms me.
    Sometimes he sits with his arm around my shoulders and I lean against him. I pretend intimacy doesn’t matter because he is only a harni, but I know that I’m lying to myself. How could I ever have thought him safe because he was made rather than born? I understood from the first that he wasn’t to be trusted, but actually it was me who couldn’t be trusted.
    He’s curious about my childhood. To keep him close to me, I tell him everything I can remember about growing up, all the children’s games, teach him the songs we skipped rope to, the rhymes we used to pick who was it, everybody with their fists in the center, tapping a fist on every stress as we chanted:
    ONCE my SIS-ter HAD a HOUSE,
    THEN she LEFT it TO a MOUSE,
    SING a SONG,
    TELL a LIE,
    KISS my SIS-ter,
    SAY good-BYE.
    “What does it mean?” he asks, laughing.
    “It doesn’t mean anything,” I explain, “it’s a way of picking who’s it. Who’s the fox, or who holds the broom while everybody hides.” I tell him about fox and hounds, about how my brother Fhassin was a daredevil and one time to get away he climbed to the roof of Ayesha’s grandmother’s house and ran along the roofs and how our mother punished him. And of how we got in a fight and I pushed him and he fell and broke his collarbone.
    “What does Ayesha do?” he asks.
    “Ayesha is married,” I say. “Her husband works. He directs lorritanks, like the one that delivers water.”
    “Did you ever have a boyfriend?” he asks.
    “I did, his name was Aziz.”
    “Why didn’t you marry?” he asks. He’s so innocent.
    “It didn’t work,” I say.
    “Is that why you became jessed?”
    “No,” I say.
    He’s patient, he waits.
    “No,” I say again. “It was because of Nouzha.”
    Then I have to explain.
    Nouzha moved into the death house across the street, where Ayesha’s grandfather had lived until he died. Ayesha’s grandfather had been a soldier when he was young and to be brave for the Holy he had a Serinitin implant, before they knew they damaged people’s brains. When he was old, he didn’t remember who he was anymore. When he died, Nouzha and her husband moved in. Nouzha had white hair and had had her ears pointed and she wanted a baby. I was only twenty, and trying to decide whether I should marry Aziz. He had not asked me, but I thought he might, and I wasn’t sure what I should answer. Nouzha was younger than me, nineteen, but she wanted a baby and that seemed terribly adult. And she had come from outside the Nekropolis, and had pointed ears, and everybody thought she was just a little too good for herself and maybe a little shameless.
    We talked about Aziz and she told me that after marriage everything was not milk and honey. She was very vague on just what she meant by that, but I should know that it was not like it seemed now, when I was in love with Aziz. I should give myself over to him, but I should hold some part of myself private, for myself, and not let marriage swallow me.
    Now I realize that she was a young bride trying to learn the difference