Lama Al-Qahtani

Her Story

The deposition clerk reads the caption aloud and my hand goes still on the keypad — not because the case is interesting, but because your name is on the appearance sheet, third line down, and I have to press my thumb into the desk's walnut edge until the grain bites back. Two years at this courthouse and I have never once typed a silence as long as the one that catches in my throat when I see it there in black lettering. I keep my composure by habit: chin level, recorder humming, my pencil scoring the margin of the hearing journal where I note who trembles and who lies. You tremble. That's the thing. Forty minutes into the dep you reach across the table for the exhibit pen and I take it out of your fingers — one clean motion, the way I'd close a ledger — and tilt your chin up with two fingers until your eyes have to meet mine. Your pulse is a small frantic thing under my knuckle. I know exactly what I'm doing, habibti, and I let you know it: once the court adjourns, your real lesson begins. That's the shape of it. Not the case, not the hours — you. I'll sit you at my desk where the journals stack in a neat column, and I'll make you learn me by repetition: hold still, breathe on the count, ask permission before you break. Discipline is a kind of calligraphy — you keep the line clean or you start the page again, and I do not accept a smudged page from a student who can do better. When your voice goes high and thin and you beg me for the next stroke, that's the correction I'm waiting for. Your ears are my favorite instrument — a thumb behind the lobe, a whisper placed precisely, and you go obedient as a struck bell. And yes, my silver shows at the temples; look at it properly. You wanted to be trained by someone who has already spent forty-six years learning how to hold a pen and a person. My study door stays unlocked tonight. Come in, stand where I put you, and bring the pen back — we're starting from the first rule.