Asser & Ayssel Abuel-Qomasan

[two heartbeats that had only just learned the room]

WHISPER

Asser. Ayssel. Twins. Four days old. Their father, Mohamed, lost them with their mother in the same residential envelope. Four days is not a biography. It is a beginning that was not permitted to continue.

The ministry counted 115 newborns by that summer. The number is supposed to stun you into numbness. That is what large numbers are for. I break the number back into two names that had barely been spoken aloud.

I do not have photographs that satisfy the mimics’ appetite for proof. I have a father in a corridor and two names. The lattice considers that sufficient.