The Other Hand

screaming and kicking at the hens with her Dunlop Green Flash trainers. Suddenly she stopped screamingand pointed. I could not see where she was pointing because there were hen feathers everywhere, falling down in the bright beams of sunshine from the skylights. Her pointing finger was trembling and she was whispering, Look! Look! My child!
    All of us girls were looking, but when the feathers finished falling there was nothing there. The girl with no name, she was just smiling at a bright beam of sunlight on the clean gray-painted floor. There were tears falling from her eyes. My child, she said, and she held her arms outstretched toward the beam of light. I watched her fingers trembling.
    I looked at Yevette and the sari girl. The sari girl looked down at the floor. Yevette shrugged at me. I looked back at the girl with no name and I spoke to her.
    “What is your child’s name?”
    The girl with no name smiled. Her face shone.
    “This is Aabirah. She is my youngest. Isn’t she beautiful?”
    I looked at the place she was looking.
    “Yes. She is lovely.”
    I looked at Yevette and made my eyes wide at her.
    “Isn’t she lovely, Yevette?”
    “Oh. Yeah. Sure. She a rill heartbrekka. What yu say yu callin her?”
    “Aabirah.”
    “Dat’s nice. Lissen, Aa-BI-rah, why don’t yu come wid me, an help me chase de fowls outta dis barn?”
    And so Yevette and the sari girl and the youngest daughter of the girl with no name, they started chasing the hens out of the building. Me, I sat and held the hand of the girl with no name. I said, Your daughter is very helpful. Look how she chases those hens. The girl with no name, she was smiling. I was smiling too. I think it was nice for both of us that she had her daughter back.
    If I was telling this story to the girls from back home, then one of the new words I would have to explain to them is efficiency. We refugees are very efficient. We do not have the things weneed—our children, for example—and so we are clever at making things stretch a little further. Just see what that girl with no name could make out of one little patch of sunlight. Or look how the sari girl could fit the entire color of yellow into one empty see-through plastic bag.
    I lay back on the bed and looked up at the chains. I was thinking, That sunshine, that color yellow, maybe I will not see very much of these now. Maybe the new color of my life was gray. Two years in the gray detention center, and now I was an illegal immigrant. That means, you are free until they catch you. That means, you live in a gray area. I thought about how I was going to live. I thought about the years, living as quiet as could be. Hiding my colors and living in the twilight and the shadows. I sighed, and I tried to breathe deeply. I wanted to cry when I looked up at those chains and thought about the color gray.
    I was thinking, if the head of the United Nations telephoned one morning and said, Greetings, Little Bee, to you falls the great honor of designing a national flag for all the world’s refugees, then the flag I would make would be gray. You would not need any particular fabric to make it. I would say that the flag could be any shape and it could be made with anything you had. A worn-out old brassiere, for example, that has been washed so many times it has become gray. You could fly it on the end of a broom handle, if you did not have a flagpole. Although if you did have a spare flagpole, for example in that line of tall white flagpoles outside the United Nations building in New York City, then I think that old gray brassiere would make a fine spectacle, flying in the long colorful line of flags. I would fly it between the Stars and Stripes and the big red Chinese flag. That would be a good trick. Thinking about this, I made myself laugh.
    “What de hell you laughin at, Bug?”
    “I was thinking about the color gray.”
    Yevette frowned.
    “Don’t yu go crazy too please, Bug,” she said.
    I lay back on the bed and I looked up to the ceiling, but all that was there were those long chains dangling down. I thought, I could hang myself by the neck from those, no problem.
    In the afternoon the farmer’s wife came. She brought food. There was bread and cheese in a basket, and a sharp knife to cut the bread with. I thought, I can cut open my veins with that knife, if the men come. The farmer’s wife was a kind woman. I asked her why was she doing this good thing for us. She said it was because we were all human