Codes of Selfishness and Embers of Silence

The dilapidated devices in their house in the Old Countryside emitted an intermittent hum, and the injustice the Paternal Uncles had practiced after the Father's absence had caused energy and security supplies to be blocked from them, making migration toward Saudi Arabia — specifically to the developed and fortified Najd Oasis — their only option to remain alive.

In the dimly lit living room, Larin the mother sat wiping the forehead of her elder daughter Talin with the small handheld cooling device, while Talin complained with excessive affectation: "Mother! I cannot bear this atmosphere, the dust from loading the vehicle is suffocating me! And my velvet wardrobe capsule has not been programmed yet! Where is Dilan? Why does she not come to arrange my belongings?"

Larin the mother did not glance toward the corner of the small laboratory in the room, where Dilan stood deliberately, her hands exhausted and the skin of her fingers bearing faint traces of burns from having reprogrammed the engines of the bags and heavy luggage alone since dawn to ensure the safety of the journey. Larin the mother shouted in a sharp tone: "Dilan! Leave what is in your hands at once and come arrange what your sister Talin needs, you are accustomed to effort and hardship, while your sister is delicate and cannot endure the fatigue of preparation!"

Dilan suppressed her anguish, and her poetic sensibility stepped back a pace to let her singular rationality lead her. She was the reader who navigates the ancient and modern volumes of the universe, aware that to complain to any but God is humiliation. She bore her pain and began to arrange her sister's things in silence.

In the meantime, the younger and spoiled brother Abdulaziz entered, carrying Dilan's personal reading tablet, on which she records her poems and private codes, and he was waving it carelessly: "Mother, I will take this tablet with me on the way to clear its space and load my games and entertainment media onto it, we do not need Dilan's poems and her fictional writings on our journey, for data stores are tight and my things have greater claim to them!"

Dilan looked at her tablet — her sole companion and the notebook of her cosmic poems — as it was taken from her before her eyes, whereupon the elder brother Bashar intervened and shot her a dry and decisive look: "Abdulaziz is right, put aside your delusions of reading and poetry, Dilan, focus all your mental and physical energy on securing the vehicle and our luggage. Your mother and your sister and your little brother are our responsibility, and you must be tough as the brave men of the desert, for exile across dimensions does not spare weaklings!"

Dilan submitted to the order, and let her tablet be taken from between her hands. She hid her weary palms behind her back, and drew upon her lips a smile of Bedouin pride that shook the corners of the place. She did not weep, nor did she reproach her family who gathered for their own comfort and left to her the toil and the miraculous responsibility. She looked through the window toward the distant horizon, toward Najd lofty in its pride, and said within herself in a silent voice:

I have no homeland in Najd but hers,

though dwellings and their people be harsh to us

Dilan was fully aware that she was walking toward a new well and another fire kindled by the selfishness of her kin... yet she chose, with the pride of the poet and the mind of the scholar "beneath the shadows," to be the steadfast support who would lead this family toward safety.