Nekropolis by Maureen F. McHugh

courtyard. I make a list of all the repairs that need to be done. I take the mistress’s news printouts and bundle them. She saves them; she subscribes to several news services and she feels that they might be useful. My old mistress would have quite a lot to say about someone who would save news printouts. The mistress goes out to shop and I clean everything in her storage. She has clothes she should throw out, things fifteen years old and hopelessly out of date. (I remember when I wore my hair white. And before when we used to wrap our hair in our veils, the points trailing to the backs of our knees, We looked foolish, affected. How did I get to be so old when I’m not even thirty?)
    I put aside all the things I should mend, but I don’t want to sit yet. I run the cleaning machine, an old clumsy thing even stupider than the one at Mbarek’s. I push myself all day, a whirlwind. There is not enough in this house to do, even if I clean the cleaning machine, so I clean some rooms twice.
    Still, when it is time to go to sleep, I can’t. I sit in my room making a funeral wreath of carnations and tiny, half-open roses. The white roses gleam under my desklight like satin.
    I wake up on my free day, tired and stiff. In the mirror I look ghastly, my hair tangled and my eyes puffy. Just as well the harni never saw me like this, I think. But I won’t think of Akhmim anymore. That part of my life is over, and I have laid a flower at its death house. Today I will take my funeral wreaths around and see if I can find a shop that will buy them. They are good work, surely someone will be interested. It would just be pocket money.
    I take the train all the way to the Nekropolis, carefully protecting my wreaths from the other commuters. All day I walk through the Nekropolis, talking to stallkeepers, stopping sometimes for tea. When I have sold the wreaths, I sit for a while to watch the people and let my tired mind empty.
    I’m at peace, now I can go back to my mistress.
    The Second Koran tells us that the darkness in ourselves is a sinister thing. It waits until we relax, it waits until we reach the most vulnerable moments, and then it snares us. I want to be dutiful, I want to do what I should. But when I go back to the train, I think of where I’m going; to that small house and my empty room. What will I do tonight? Make more paper flowers, more wreaths. I’m sick of them. Sick of the Nekropolis.
    I can take the train to my mistress’s house or I can go by the street where Mbarek’s house is. I’m tired, I’m ready to go to my little room and relax. O Holy One, I dread the empty evening. Maybe I should go by Mbarek’s street just to fill up time. I have all this empty time ahead. Tonight and tomorrow and this week and next month and down through the years, unmarried, empty, until I’m an old dried-up woman Evenings folding paper. Days cleaning someone else’s house. Free afternoons spent shopping a bit, stopping in tea shops because my feet hurt. That is what lives are, aren’t they? Attempts to fill our time with activity designed to prevent us from realizing that there is no meaning? I sit at a tiny table the size of a serving platter and watch the boys hum by on their scooters, girls sitting behind them, clutching their boyfriends’ waists with one hand, holding their veils with the other, while the ends stream and snap behind them, glittering with the shimmer of gold (this year’s fashion).
    So I get off the train and walk to the street where Mbarek lives. And I walk up the street past the house. I stop and look at it. The walls are pale yellow stone. I’m wearing rose and sky blue, but I have gone out without ribbons on my wrists.
    “Hariba,” Akhmim says, leaning on the windowsill, “you’re still sad.”
    He looks familiar and it is easy, as if we do this every evening. “I live a sad life,” I say, my voice even. But my heart is pounding. To see him! To talk to him!
    “I found your token,” he says.
    “My