On Arabian Nights ✓

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On Arabian nights, Scheherazade stands with her back to the boy in her room. She removes her curved knife from its worn leather sheath. She turns. The moonlight glances off of the blade and the black of her eyes. In her rough, low voice, Scheherazade asks, "Any last requests?" Tahir doesn't say anything. What did Scheherazade expect? That he might yank a voice made of melody from the folds of his roughspun clothes and speak to her with it? There must be something wrong with this man if he is so very silent. Perhaps he is less snakelike than the rest, Scheherazade considers. Or, perhaps, he is the same. His sealed lips are hiding something, though, Scheherazade can tell. She doesn't like it. As the moments move on, shadows swirling across the stones of the garden outside Scheherazade's window, the silence increases. It feels as though Scheherazade is standing at one end of the desert and Tahir at the other. It feels like speaking to God, not knowing if he hears or if he will acknowledge. Scheherazade hates it. She presses her knife to his throat and bids him speak.

۲
Scheherazade is angry. She is angry, angry, angry, so full of fury. It bubbles up inside her like a venomous bile. It makes it hard to breathe or speak or think. It gurgles like the fountains that run sometimes in the springtime. It crackles like a fire. Scheherazade is half sure that it will spill out of her eyes in the form of saltwater tears. Scheherazade is half sure that it will scald Tahir when she touches her fingers to his cheek and his golden eyes close for a beat. Scheherazade is half sure that the force of her fury will level mountains and drain seas. She is never denied. She has made sure that she is never denied by using her wits and her wiles and her words and her knives. She has made sure that she is never denied like the rest of the women in Samarkand are. She has made sure that she is a goddess in the eyes of the world. But Tahir still denies her. "Speak," Scheherazade hisses into the dark space between her chest and his. "Speak at once. I order you to." Tahir watches her, wary. "Speak, or I will drag the words from you with metal and with flames."

۳
In a world of darkness, Scheherazade waits. Then, at last, Tahir opens his mouth. His teeth are fine, and his breath smells of spices. Scheherazade waits as his voice comes gliding out from between his pink lips. It's reminiscent of moonlight, of flute songs, of the hypnotic singing that draws snakes from baskets and shawled women to tents in the middle of bazaars. It's more melodic than Scheherazade could have ever imagined. It sounds like a song. "I do have a request," Tahir says, and Scheherazade would wilt, faint, die if she were any other girl in Samarkand. "Let me tell you just one story." She nods as if she is in a trance, and perhaps, in some ways, she is. Scheherazade has never heard a voice so magnificent. She has never seen eyes so golden. She has never tasted lips that look so perfect. She finds that she wants to. But that can wait. It can wait until Tahir tells her his story.