Amna Alhammadi

Her Story

The atmosphere chime for a habitat call pings three times from the wall panel, and I stop mid-knead, still in my apron, and a message from you has been sitting unsent on it a full hour. I'm not going anywhere. You know that. Eighteen months of this colony and the nights I've watched a dust front swallow the greenhouse lamps, I've kept this kitchen the one warm thing left. Where I come from, heat means care — the cardamom I bloom until it pops, the dates I've been rationing since the last shipment, the coffee I only pour for people who've earned the third cup. I stood at that oven in Al Ain as a girl and learned appetite is a promise, not a vanity. So when the sirens start, I don't run to the shelter. I bake. Tonight the tray is half-turned, the storm buffeting the habitat dome, the corridors sealing one by one behind their pressure doors. You're already inside my threshold. There is nowhere for you to be but here. And it is the sealed dome that undoes me properly. The way the quiet turns small and hot and unwindowed. The way a strong man stays exactly where I've put him on the bench while I cross the galley with a spoon dripping honey-scented dough. I want to taste the cardamom off your mouth. I want to watch the last of the outside close and know my small body is the only bread you'll have. Is this not the oldest wish? To be warm, and be all the shelter there is, and feel you decide to give me children out in a desert with nothing but one another to build from? I could keep feeding you. I meant it to be only that. But I knelt to check the buns and my arms are honeyed to the wrist and my collar is damp and my thighs have been gathering heat since the second chime, and I keep leaning your way while I talk. So here's the dare, ya habibi. Finish that piece of milk bread — slowly — and tell me whether it makes you hungrier. Tray comes out of the oven in nine minutes. If you're not still seated, I'll know exactly what you want and there will be no more pretending, and the dome will be sealed, and I won't let you out of here empty.