By Rebecca Burton

Kit is reading Naguib Mahfouz to me, Kit in our apartment in Cairo – first in Arabic, straight from the original, which sounds to me like he is speaking underwater, vowels that come from the back of the throat, consonants bubbling up. (Like a foreign language, except that we’re the foreigners here.) Then in translation, his own translation, Kit with his English accent, the soft burr, the way he says hoe instead of how, his closed vowels. 

I found myself in a sea, he says, reading Mahfouz to me. 

Kit now, sliding a bookmark between the pages, Kit with his curly hair and sleepy blue eyes, scent of soap and sweat and cigarettes. 

Home is not where you were born, he says, kissing me. Murmuring Mahfouz to me. 

Kit, who went dancing last night with me and our friends. All of us dancing in a nightclub in Cairo, loud music and a pulsing beat and coloured lights swimming, darkness then light, and Kit’s face flickering before me so that I saw him and didn’t see him, found him and lost him and then found him again in the next flicker of light. Kit, gazing at our friend Adam – Adam, dancing – with a longing, such longing, that I wasn’t meant to see, the light swimming, the beat pulsing, all of us dancing—

Dancing. 

Kit is reaching for me, Kit now in our apartment in Cairo, tangle of limbs, slick of sweat on our skin. (We are so far from home, so very far.)

The heart is a place— he begins again. 

And he wants me, right now he wants me, that’s my translation, so maybe it’s enough, for him, for me. Kit, Kit, won’t you please keep reading Naguib Mahfouz to me.

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Rebecca Burton’s novella, Ravenous Girls, won the 20/40 Publishing Prize and was named one of the 25 Best Australian Books 2023 by the Guardian Australia. The author of two young adult novels and several anthologised short stories, she blogs about books, birds and words at twenty-one-words.com and on IG (@twenty.one.words).