Read Online The Girl Who Fell to Earth by Sophia Al-Maria - Free Book Online Page A

Dima answered, and the lobby fell silent with surprise.
    Despite the fact that he had helped to midwife twelve of his own babies into the world, our grandfather Jabir couldn’t seem to figure out how to hold Dima while she carried on chattering to him in English, speaking more to him than she had ever spoken at all.
    That night Ma called Puyallup, and we listened in close. “How was company?” Gramma asked.
    â€œIt looks like a hurricane hit in here—when they landed I didn’t know what was going on. There’s nothing left in the house. It’s all broken or eaten or just gone.” Gramma laughed on the other end, and Ma continued, “I feel like I’m just this white woman living on the outskirts of the reservation raising a couple of kids that belong to the tribe.” She paused for Gramma’s reply, but if she said anything it was lost in the switchback byways of AT&T’s pinched veins. “I keep thinking this is how it must be for astronauts. All cooped up for months on end, not knowing which way is up.”
    Gramma’s voice came through, but it was shredded and unintelligible. Ma rattled the receiver and hit it against her palm like a plugged saltshaker, as though the static could be knocked out. “Mom?” she asked softly. “Are you still there?” When no answer came she kept the phone to her ear for a long time, listening to the dial tone, before she hung up with a sigh.

7
    OMICRON 2 ERIDANI  •  THE BROKEN EGGSHELLS  •   
    We remained in a sort of suspended animation while waiting for Baba to come back from the rig. When Baba wasn’t with us it was as though time ceased, we ceased, and every day in the apartment was just a dream in his periphery. Despite visits from the family, calls to Gramma, and the company of the telescope, Ma was lonely. She tried making friends with a Pakistani guard and a Filipino seamstress and once even lurched at a blue-eyed woman in a niqab at the fish market in hopes she might speak English. But she soon found that these people were as foreign as she was in this improbable city. Every week there was a new road, more dust cresting off the construction sites, and higher floors added to the grove of young skyscrapers shooting up around us. It made me dizzy to look up at them from our thirteenth-floor window. I began to fear heights and had dreams of falling: first of plummeting to the ground, then of plunging up into the sky.
    Other than trips to the vegetable market and our morning swimming lessons in the tower’s pool, we rarely ventured out. Bored senseless like a caged animal, I laid tracks in the carpet by scooting from one end of the window to the other in an office chair. I imagined myself as an astronaut floating along an observation deck. When I wasn’t doing this, I sprawled on the floor basking in front of the TV until the carpet had matted into my shape like a nuclear shadow cast by cathode ray.
    Around this time I began to lose my baby teeth, and ripping milk molars out became a hobby of Ma’s. Unlike many other perks of motherhood (the hunting of lice or the popping of zits, for example), the pulling of teeth allowed her to assert herself culturally . “If there’s one thing I’m going to give my girls it’s a mouth full of healthy American teeth!”
    She developed an array of baroque extraction techniques: for example, she’d tie an offending tooth to a doorknob, back me up the appropriate distance, calculate the force required, and slam the door, leaving me blubbering in a puddle of drool and tears. When Baba did visit, his method was much more halal . He would set me down in front of a cartoon on TV and vise my neck in his hand so I sat up straight like a doll in a display stand. This gave me a false sense of security. Then he’d wait ten or fifteen minutes until Princess Sapphire had fenced off the bad guys, by which time I’d forget I even