Abubaker Zahoor 9/30/26 Abubaker Zahoor 9/30/26

Gallows Gallows

Truly Allah alone has the knowledge of the hour he sends down the rain… knows what’s in the wombs… -The Qur’an

Actually, Ayub did sleep, and dreamt nice dreams—a tanga with arabesque flanks drawn by a stringy pony; a turtledove pecking a moist aspidistra—and awoke to the dawn chorus of gallows birds. Their cell—some of the inmates called it a darbar, king’s court, a place of worship—was to his left, a few forlorn rooms down. He had shared with them two years of clock-time, an eon of soultime. The first three of the seven solitary nights in his black cell, where he had been brought to be kept under extra security and care, he had missed his birds, their surreal ritual of rising from the deathbeds with a newborn’s spirit. ii Earlier he had prayed, though he was a little unsure about his wudu. There was a bowl and a lota at a healthy arm’s length from his quilted mat, but a nocturnal thirst he couldn’t now remember had left little water in both. With a scrunched up nose he dismissed the notion that the same spout had habitually threatened to collide with his genitals had been in his mouth. He caressed his elbows and feet with symbolic water. He couldn’t gesture prostration either: the floor rose to meet his forehead. Then, buttressed against the warty cement wall, he breathed into the scented shawl of his daughter, which his wife had given him during their farewell meeting forty hours ago to fight the odors. His catheter was heavy with urine. The humidity was bitter. A creased picture rested on his pillow. It was taken by a travelling photographer who visited—what a colorful bicycle he had—their town in the summer. He had captured them well before he grew disloyal to her. Floral background: a bedsheet spread on a vertical charpoy. Lubna was wearing a blue starburst linen dress, Ayub gray slacks and a brown oxford shirt. Lubna’s eyes, he couldn’t look away, looked filmically intense, cruelly committed. He thought of the life that was begging to be lived. Thought of their twins who saw nothing of this world but their mother insisted they had, had smiled— “just a little.” And when, eventually, she had reconciled her rift with God, she would say: “It was his smile.” Thought most and longest of his only living child, Ayesha, his daughter, born two years before the crime of passion, the passionate murder. In about two hours he would be wheeled to the gallows. He was not delirious or apathetic. He wanted to sit in a tree bough and see white horses and pebbled water. He had not submitted to death “long before the hour of departure,” as the warden had said, the same person who prophesied sleep wouldn’t come to Ayub and if it did it’d bring him necrophiliac fevers or Azrael’s infinite-winged silhouette. Ayub’s Birds had said other things, also wring. Meaning: in those hours, with his death no longer a theorem, no longer a looming prospect, but a clocked certainty, he didn’t quite know how to be. So he breathed and sunbeams tongued his windowsill and footfalls came near, nearer, receded, came nearer again.

END

–Abubaker Zahoor

Abubaker Zahoor is a Pakistani writer with a PhD in English from the University of Southern Mississippi and an MFA in Fiction from Miami University. His first book, Evening Rides with My Guru (creative nonfiction), was published in 2017.

Kenneth Schultz 9/30/26 Kenneth Schultz 9/30/26

Tío Ramón

–Kenneth Schultz

Kenneth Máximo Schultz is a Mexican-American writer from Altadena, California, currently living in Brooklyn. His work has appeared in Apricity Magazine and the Columbia Daily Spectator. He studied English at Columbia University and is currently pursuing an MFA in fiction as a Truman Capote Fellow at Brooklyn College.

Staff picks are short book or movie reviews written by our editors. Interviews are conversations with authors, artists, editors, and publishers.

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