Cartoon of the Week: Fatima

Fatima pours more detergent in the bucket. The powder collects on the sheets like drifts of snow on mountain peaks and in valleys. Some of it slowly disappears in the water or the parts of the bedding that are already wet. From snow to curdled milk and then it’s gone, leaving only a thin film. She watches it happen so slowly, she doesn’t move. She can’t see, feel, or hear anything but the soap that will clean these sheets. Her heartbeat moves her body, a back bent over like an archway after all these years. Of course she looks old than she is. Pain will ravage the body like that.
“Fatima!” she hears and is startled in a way that feels like waking up from a nightmare. “Fatima!” the little boys yells again. She looks up. Youssef is barreling towards her. “Wash this too,” he says and throws a red football jersey into the bucket, covering the snow and curdled milk. When she looks up again he is gone. Through the cloudy din of cotton and wool through which she listens, she hears him fighting with his older brother Driss. Or maybe he’s laughing now. Or crying. It’s hard to tell. He makes noise constantly. Fatima considers her near deafness a blessing in a house like this.
She takes the jersey off the top off the bucket and sets it on the tiles next to her stool. She’s washing sheets right now. Not clothes. She will get to that later.