Cities of the stranger

The sadness bit me like a wolf and I felt as if it had bitten a piece of my small heart. My tongue trembled and heavy. And I don't know why his laugh and the other Ashkenazi doctor who came to look at my back stuck in my mind. I said nothing. My mother and I remained silent for the rest of the way, neither of us looking at the other. We were content to look at the dirty world behind the bus glass. And I felt the heaviness of my back, the back of the monkey, which I was unaware of. And I kept looking at the dirty world behind the bus glass. *** Ibtisam Azzam is a Palestinian writer and journalist. Among her works are "The Thief of Sleep: Strange Haifa Resident" (2011), and "The Journey of Disappearance," which is a novel translated into several languages, and its English translation reached the longlist for the 2025 International Booker Prize. She currently lives and works in New York.