Another good one in this same Fall 200 issue, by Randa Jarrar. Qamar, a young girl who decides at nine she wants the moon for a neighbor boy who marries another before Qamar is fully grown. She becomes a ballerina, then a tightrope walker and meets Hilal, who loves the moon and rockets and soon, Qamar. But Qamar is promised in marriage to another. On her wedding day, Hilal shows up just before the vows are said and Qamar looks out to the street below to see him standing there with a rocket to take her to the moon.
She stood up and walked toward the balcony.
Her feet reached over the railings. Her family stopped eating, and all eyes were fixed on Qamar. She jumped down to the yellow clotheslines. Hilal saw her then, and a bright smile stretched across his dark face like jet stream in a clear sky.
He started the rocket engine.
She walked the line all the way to the end and jumped onto a lower clothesline. The People in the street looked up at her and heaved a collective "here she goes again." They informed the Bawab and told him to check on her. he was too afraid to climb any clotheslines, so he yelled at her from his post at the front of the building. "What’s with you, Qamar?"
"I want the moon," she yelled back. The People began to say something, but Qamar did a back flip onto another clothesline dotted with a fat woman’s underwear, and told them, "And I don’t need your advice this time." (p. 105)
The image of a young woman flying through the air between buildings, balancing on the clotheslines, the freedom and grace revealed in her ballet of rebellion and reaching out for true love, the "clothesline dotted with a fat woman’s underwear" — very, very nice. Especially now that I’m intrigued by magical realism and the inclusion of a little nonsense that one desperately wants to, therefore believes. Because daily reality holds a lot of big nonsense; only not of the delightful kind such as this.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology