Barakah

- Sinking Sand

3/03/2024.

You guys should please check out, "However it Goes, It Ends In Pain" by Nafisahs_words 
I'm sure you'll find her book way more entertaining than mine and she's quite consistent too.

The instrumental is for the send part of the chapter.
.........

Jalal

Jalal could most of the time tell immediately when his mind stayed. It was a discipline drilled into him by Attahir. Whenever he began to behave in a noticeable pattern—construct a habit—that did not sit well with his father, Attahir would become the disruption. The pause until it was all strange to Jalal again. Attahir did not like a person to wander in his own head for long, he called it a sickness. So Jalal was to be attentive most of times even as a boy.

So it was very ironic that he truly could not distinguish between his reality and the pretend in his head when it came to Amal. His absence of mind bleeding into his physical reality. Like how presently, he watched her from across the table in her brown toned Abaya, their two year old daughter on his right thigh aggressively mauling a carpel of tangerine and five year old son beside her. Occupied with his tablet instead of all the food on the table.

He found so much amusement in their age gap. How the first marvels of humanity are always so primal and unrehearsed. Like his daughter with her fruit, utterly fascinated with food at the moment. While his son's mind had evolved beyond that, starting to grasp society now and decorum.

His wife's whole attention and care was fixed painfully on Munah and the mess she was making all over. Then again, most of the times, Amal's attention naturally stirred towards either of the two children before anything or anyone else. Including himself. He never doubted that if they were to have more children, he would continue to drop on her list of priorities.

Amal muttered something about how she couldn't wait until Munah outgrew the phase of getting herself messy quicker than she could blink her eyes. And his mother-in-law laughed vengefully, reminding Amal that she was the messiest cub from the den. But all Jalal could really think about was the very flimsy dress underneath the Abaya that stirred his blood. One she had purposefully allowed him to notice she was wearing when she piled it on top the Abaya on his bed before she went into the shower.

And then again when she refused to button the rest of her Abaya in front of the mirror until he barged in with a fussing Munah, almost throwing her into her mother's arms because no one told him daughters got under skins quicker than sons. It was then she slowly fixed the remaining buttons. His eyes searing at the plunge of the neckline.

His wife was maddeningly provocative. Brilliantly provocative. And these days, she was mostly interested in edging him and acting none the wiser. Running around circles until they had a pattern of whorls. Throwing him crumbs and finding amusement in his struggle for self control. Every glance her way, was a slip and fall into his head. They would be at that moment back in his room, he would be gawking at the plunge of a neckline before it would be concealed. In his head, Munah isn't there. In his head, they don't leave his room.

"Your phone's ringing." Yahya squeezes his left shoulder to alert him. He's exuding amusement at having caught Jalal's prolonged gawking. Maybe they weren't the same kind of brother, because Jalal would never find amusement at the thought of anything regarding his sister and her husband.

"Can you—" Jalal began to form the question but his daughter was  already vaulting towards her uncle with a loud squeal.

"Just like her mother that one. Even if she looks nothing like her." Ameenah's guarded indifference reaches him from somewhere around the table. Mostly, he loved to snub her and her ill concealed dislike of him. She was the shew—the unpleasant, testy woman—in the family for him.