Just One More Kilometre

Fatima packed her small sackbag and left on a Tuesday when the rice was green and the mud still smelled of rain.

My heart was heavy as she stood at the edge of our compound with her sackbag, her chin lifted the way Mama’s does when she refuses to cry. “I will make you proud,” she said, pressing my hands together between hers, and smiling at my two elder brothers and parents. “All of you.”

I was seventeen, one year too young for the Emperor's summons and I have never hated a number so much. I wished I was eighteen too so Fatima and I could go to the palace together.

Every morning since, I walk the long path to the paddies with our farm implements in a basket on my head. It is the same path my sister and I walked for years, racing each other sometimes past the baobab, singing off-key to scare the birds from the grain.

Now the path is quiet. I count my steps to keep from thinking and when my legs ache and the sun sits heavy on my neck, I tell myself the same thing she used to tell me: just one more kilometre, Aisha. Just one more kilometresss. Then I laugh because she always says it wrong on purpose and we chase each other for a while.

The news came two months later with the harvest. Fatima had been chosen as the Prince's bride.

The whole village gathered in our yard and Mama wailed with joy. Baba sat down heavily on the stool and covered his eyes as the elders clapped him on the back as though he had won a war. I smiled until my cheeks hurt.

That night I lay on our shared mat and the empty half of it felt as wide as the river. I wished she didn't have to go. Did that make me a bad sister?

A year passed but Fatima never came home. Instead a palace messenger arrived every three months on a horse finer than anything our village had seen bearing sacks of rice, oil, salt, dried fish and fruits to ease our village’s poverty.

Baba mended the roof and Mama bought a second goat. Neighbours who once looked past us now greet us first. With every parcel, I search for a note or letter from her to me and find nothing.

The stories travel faster than the messengers. Traders at the market whisper that the future empress has grown cold and proud, that she wears silk so heavy she cannot run and no longer speaks of the village. The palace changes people, they say and they shake their heads like they know.

I wipe angry tears away from my face at night when the crickets go quiet. I do not believe these stories yet a small cruel voice asks: What if it's true? What if the girl who braided my hair, laughed and cried with me was changed?

Yesterday I reached the baobab and stopped. Her name was still scratched into the bark beside mine, the letters crooked, made when we were ten. I pressed my palm over them and felt the rough tree warm from the sun.

I do not know whether I will ever see my sister again. I do not know if she will arrive in a golden carriage, a stranger in silk or if some day I will look up from the paddy and see her running down the path with her wrapper hitched to her knees, laughing.

But if she comes back changed, I will love whoever she has become. And if she never comes at all, I will keep sending her my thoughts on the wind, over every field and hill between us.

The sun was climbing higher and the rice was waiting. Just one more kilometre, I whispered to the tree, to Fatima and to myself.

And I walked on.

[TO BE CONTINUED]

I hope you enjoyed reading this short piece. It's inspired by the Freewrite #dailyprompt phrase "just one more kilometre”.

Thank you for visiting my blog.

^{_{Image by Sasin Tipchai from Pixabay}}