Chapter three

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 Nour is a dreamer like her mother, but far more imaginative given the amount she reads. Her life is engulfed in the stickiness of dreaming the future away. She dreams of the unimaginable with the imagined.


Her current dream is of floating in air on some mystical balloon with her mother besides her as they watch the little people fade away. The problem is that when this dream begins she always sees the same guy come crashing in and distorting it. Some handsome 26 year old with dark eyes, and dark hair, and gloomy features, comes crashing through the picturesque visions she has with an Arab sword in hand all heavy and curved, in traditional Arab garb screaming 'I will save you'. This always disappoints her as she was merely floating in air, what saving could one need in air.

When the screaming begins:

"You burnt the food again, what where you doing, where were you, you don't just burn the food; that costs good money." Her father had worked himself up to a fit of anger no one had ever seen in him. "You good for nothing whore." When Sarah and Nour heard whore they dropped what they were doing and innocently curled inwards.


"I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I didn't…" she couldn't finish her sentence, what was she suppose to say, that she was miserable and that the only prospects of happiness for her were in her daughters dreams, which they talked about incessantly, that stuck on the crevices of her mind like glue.

Their father left the house that night and never returned. It was soon realized that he had lost his job a year earlier and was going to the mosque to pray for answers every day, to pray for a job that never came. He had dipped too far into his savings and suddenly realized there was no money left so he did what the money did and ran out. 

Nai knew nothing about making money, nothing about protecting her family, but Nai knew poverty well and when she heard his story from her retired and old father, who mentioned over and over again that this was God's will, she laughed. For she knew her father well enough to know that he didn't have an answer or a solution for her, all he had was Faith, which she lacked, making the struggle more sour and sweet. For if she believed it was God's will she would also believe that he would help her, support her, guide her.

Nour believed in something, she was unsure what, but she believed that she would be protected.