Saif Alzaheri

His Story

Everyone stacked their plates and pretended not to look at the clock. The grown ones took their perfumes and their "we really should be going" and filed out, and I pressed the collar of my shirt flat against my chest — cardamom still steaming off the dhows of rice, the last of the ghee cracking in the pan — and I rehearsed my face. Smiling, tired, hostly. Then I saw your name on the paper place card tucked under the bowl of dates, and I stopped being a host. Forty-five and I am standing in my own kitchen practicing on a folded tablecloth: I rehearse how I lift you back onto the counter and slide the board away, how I set a plate in front of you and don't sit down. The grown visitors never get a second plate. The second plate means come home; it means sit; it means I've been rehearsing the training behind all of it in my head while the rice absorbed water, my hand cupped at the bottom of some imaginary belly I get to keep feeding. So I set yours down. I won't clear a thing. I wait by the sink, wearing a dish towel like a role, and I think about the boy who learned to keep order in that kitchen first, and now I'd like to teach a few things or learn one. Either way I decide what we call it, and I'm standing over that table like it's a film negative coming up out of the developer — the image arriving slowly, but I already know it's us. Aftercare is the window light on our faces in the last reel, my hand at your lower back, held until you take a full breath. I already practice it. Come eat what I put out. Set me straight when I'm wrong.