Flash Fiction Winner: ‘A Slender Thorn Digs into My Foot’
Editor’s note: This story won the ArabLit/Komet Kashakeel 2024 Arabic Flash Fiction Prize and is featured in our new collection, Slender Thorns, which you can buy as a print or ebook. You can also hear this story read by professional voice actor Houda Echouafni, in Arabic and English, at our YouTube channel.
A Slender Thorn Digs into My Foot
By Karima Ahdad
Translated by Katherine Van de Vate
My father adores the seaside. So I decided to take him there on Saturday.
I postponed the meeting I’d scheduled with the lawyer to finalize my divorce. I went to the market on Friday and bought my father some blue shorts and a new hat. I knew how he loved the colour blue, and I was afraid it might be our last trip together to the shore.
When I took his hand—so thin and cold and wrinkled—a shiver ran through me. As we stepped slowly toward the door, he seemed like a stranger. The hand that had guided me to the sea in my childhood had been full and rough. How had that firm warm grip turned into trembling skin and bones and veins? How had his body shrunk and his brain eroded, along with his powerful presence and the memory of his long life? How had life gradually trickled out of him? The last time I had seen him look like himself was on my wedding day, when he had shaved and put on an elegant suit and red tie. He looked at me that day with bitter disapproval, as he always did, though I never knew why.
Though my father hadn’t been burly or athletic, he was a tough and sturdy man. He walked for miles and swam often; he ate fish and enjoyed a beer. He would take me to the seaside, hoisting me into the air before placing me on his shoulders, my small legs dangling. But he had never bought me an ice cream, an ear of corn, or even a piece of cheap gum, and he never congratulated me on my high marks in school. He didn’t know I loved to read and play the guitar or that I was afraid of heights, insects, and being alone. He had no idea that I had panic attacks from brooding over the oblivion that awaits us after death or that I wanted to be a radio broadcaster, not an engineer. He never asked why I chewed my nails or struggled with my weight. He didn’t even know when I got my first period.
Still, I didn’t hate him—I loved him, loved him with everything I had. Sometimes all it takes to adore our fathers is for them to put us on their shoulders. After all, love is a complicated thing, and never logical. I loved his honey-coloured eyes, his swarthy complexion, his rough hands, and his dusty, cement-spattered clothing. I cherished him as if he were my child, even feeling guilt when he suffered, as if I were the one who’d brought him into this harsh, unforgiving world. And when he smiled, I felt like I would be forever safe.
I spread a multicoloured towel out on the sand and helped my father sit down. Putting an Umm Kulthum song on my phone, I began talking to him about my childhood. I always do this, and he always forgets; it’s just white spaces in his brain. Now, his mind is as light as a cloud, liberated from the hurts of the past and fears for the future. He gazed at me, bewildered, sometimes smiling with his toothless mouth and other times chortling like a happy baby trying to speak.
Today, I asked him why he hadn’t bought me a piece of cake and a soda for the party celebrating the end of first grade, but merely dropped me off at school empty-handed to face the other children, as if I had no father at all. He looked at me with terrified eyes, as if I were speaking about someone else, before he crumpled up like an unhappy, fearful child. He said nothing.
“Look how clear and sparkly the water is, Baba! Do you still love the sea?”
His vacant eyes started to follow the waves. I wanted to ask why he hadn’t let my mother come to the seashore with us, why he had made fun of my childish walk, why he hadn’t removed the slender thorn that pierced my foot as we strolled down the beach, why he hadn’t picked me up when the blazing sand had scorched my feet one long-ago summer. But it was pointless. My father recalls nothing of his old life; he won’t remember what’s happening right now or what comes next.
……………Umm Kulthum sang: “You want us to be the way we were…
……………………………………………Tell time to go back, go back…”
I covered his head with the new hat. He gazed around him with the wonderment of a child discovering the world for the first time. A cart selling corn passed nearby.
“Would you like some corn, Baba?”
“Corn,” he mumbled after me.
I flagged down the vendor.
“What kind do you want, Baba?”
He didn’t answer, so I bought him an ear of boiled corn. That was how I liked it when I was small.
My father developed Alzheimer’s two years ago. When I separated from my husband a year and a half ago, I decided to move in with my father. My mother had left him long before that, because they couldn’t stand each other, and she went to live with my sister. But they never officially separated and she didn’t file for divorce, not because she loved him and couldn’t forget him, but because she no longer cared about such feminine things. Her body had long ago gone slack, and her breasts now reached her knees. I can’t recall her ever being young, only perpetually exhausted and sick. She was a mother, nothing more.
My father grasped the ear of corn and attacked it with gusto. He had forgotten everything—his past troubles and the youthful heroics he had been so proud of. By heroics, I mean the joints he used to roll when he was young and proudly puff in front of everyone, the brawls he won when drunk, his flings with women, how he left school to open a business and make money. He had forgotten his defeats, too—the fact that his business had failed or that it had even existed at all.
He looked toward the sea again, his gaze lost there. I watched him with affection and a deep sense of nostalgia for my childhood. I didn’t know if I was missing something in particular, or if I was just sad that it was over. I wiped my father’s lips. He stared at me wide-eyed, as if he did not recognize me. I adjusted his hat and smiled at him as Umm Kulthum’s voice rose:
“Find me a heart that’s never known love, that’s never been torn apart…”
For ten years, my husband had expected me to cook his daily meals, knead the dough for his mother, check on his sister, visit his aunt, answer WhatsApp messages from his uncle’s wife, and keep the house spotless. On top of all that, he wanted me to look beautiful at every moment. He reeked unbearably of sweat and never cleaned the turmeric off his hands after meals, while all I wanted was to understand the writings of Roland Barthes. When I told my father years ago that I wanted a divorce, he hadn’t understood and brushed me off, saying he’d always known I was crazy and wouldn’t be able to keep a man.
My father forgets everything. Sometimes he imagines he’s still a child, running with his lambs through the pastures of the village where he grew up. When he rests his head on my chest, I forget I am his daughter and he is my father. But I forgot he was my father a long time ago, even before he forgot I was his child.
My father leaned his head on my shoulder, and together, we looked out at the sea. He was still sucking on the empty corncob. I told him the time was up and we had to go. I still loved my father, even after his mind had gone, but I could not forget the tiny thorn lodged in my foot that had kept me from walking down the beach.
Karima Ahdad is a Moroccan author based in Istanbul. She has been working in journalism and digital-content production since 2014, and she has published three novels: Cactus Girls, published by Dar Al-Fennec in 2018; A Turkish Dream, published by the Arab Cultural Center in 2021; and The Other Woman, published by Al-Mutawassit Publications in 2024. She won the Moroccan Writers Union Award for Young Writers in the Short Story category, and her novel Cactus Girls won a Mohamed Zafzaf Award in 2020.
Katherine Van de Vate is a former diplomat and librarian who translates Arabic fiction into English. Her translations have appeared in ArabLit Quarterly, Words without Borders, and Asymptote.