FLOWERS DON’T BURN

Umm Muhammad’s black abaya speaks of night. Her glittering cigarette lighters kindle the threads embroidered across her plump breasts. Full of breath, her fat chest contains all the noise and memories of old sensuous nights. Her strangled, numbered breaths rattle out, lingering only briefly before translating themselves into three stubborn coughs which pepper the lighters and cigarette cartons displayed in front of her with a mist from her curled lips. Her wheezing falls silent when she sees me passing by, so I wave to her with my left hand this time. Today is strange: She has spread out her goods along the left side of the street. She always used to inhabit this one shaded spot of sidewalk on the right side, just outside a gold shop. 

Umm Muhammad’s corner. 

That’s how people came to know that shop in Amman’s Gold Souq. Everyone laughed at how the owner boiled over when customers came to him and taunted: You should really put a photo of Umm Muhammad on your sign. When his anger would finally succumb to the tired joke, that day’s customer would prod him one last time: I heard your storefront caught fire a week or two ago. You need to protect yourself -- you know how? Hang up a picture of Umm Muhammad as a good luck charm next to the chimes on your door!

They’d all laugh as the owner’s face turned vivid, a deep yellow like his gold jewelry. 

***

A fire broke out. 

It was a cigarette. The gold store’s closest neighbor happened to be a champion smoker and a saleswoman of lighters and cigarettes, so naturally she was the primary suspect. Umm Muhammad swore on their lives and their mercy that she wasn’t the cause of the fire, but despite the attempts of the storeowner’s employee himself as well as my own personal intervention as the owner of the flower shop across the street, and those of many of our neighbors—despite all this, and despite her innocence proven in ink in the pages of the police investigation file, the gold store owner, devastated, simply couldn’t be convinced. And so a war seethed between them, unfurling over three days. In the end, Umm Muhammad was the weaker side in this battle. She moved to the other side of the same street and settled down in front of my flower shop, where she remains to this day. 

Any time I saw her after that, she’d be smoking away what remained of her lungs and watching my hand wave hello. Then she’d respond with a smile that stretched her dark lips, smoothing the traces of time. How many times have I stared at those wrinkles, which only deepen with each smile? Maybe that’s the reason why she stretches her lips and closes them again like a bolt of lightning. 

But today, Umm Muhammad held her smile twice as long, two lightning bolts instead of one. Whatever her intentions, she didn’t try hiding them. I was at a loss. What hid in that smile? Would it set fire to something? I looked at the things in my shop. I thought. Then I grinned and told myself: Flowers don’t burn. She has nothing fated for them but that smile.