She wove rope out of long strands of fiber and mended the holes in old clothes. Her room always smelled of perfumed candles. The back of her hand was also covered with tattoos-a bride, a fish, and a lion. The Guest was a tiny, timid peasant woman with a green tattoo on her chin. ”The Guest is sleeping,” they would say, or “The Guest wants such and such” or “Go bring the buttermilk pan from the Guest’s room.” They called it “the high place.” A woman sat at its door, a woman that they did not call “Grandmother” but rather “the Guest,” though she never once stepped out of the confines of the family home. She would crawl up the hill behind the western balcony right up to the solitary room roofed in wood and clay that looked, for all the world, like a heavenly dome. Her mother often left her to her own devices. She proved that she was a creature capable of surviving and flourishing on the barest necessities of life. She was hard to keep up with as a child, light and thin, teething and crawling and speaking well before any of her brothers did. She remembered how she used to squirm in her grandmother’s lap, an angry child with a bare bottom. She has become more like her grandmother than her mother, Hend thinks to herself.
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