Four upper teeth, three lower, You bounce, smiling, leaning on the red Arabian armrest passed down from three families. Your mouth tells me there’s something inappropriate: a Lego piece, a hangman letter magnet, a grape, a toothpaste cap, a green earplug, or a pink eraser pulled from a pencil. You are ten months old, watched by your nine-year-old sister. I squeeze your cheeks, questioning the tightly-meshed screen and wondering how the Middle Eastern furniture failed to protect my Middle Eastern Florida child. I pull the slimy creature and I scream, disbelieving that the mother in me plucked a tiny frog.
Fatima Alharthi is a Saudi writer. Her fiction and essays appeared in The Southern Review, The Los Angeles Review, and Tampa Review, among others.