by Sara Abbood

Visiting my birth city after eight years away felt like a different kind of claustrophobia. Not the kind you find in a small, dark room, but something heavier sinking in from the sky overhead. Iraq in the summertime does not allow you to forget your body. The heat blankets the city. The streets were tight and winding, unlit at night, and threaded with the small miseries of neglect. Garbage strewn along the edges, puddles of stagnant water, and the fetid reek of sewage were sharp enough to sting my nose. I couldn’t shake the pull of familiarity. I knew these neighborhoods: the crumbling three-story buildings packed together in uneven rows, balconies sagging, and walls the color of dust and exhaust.

My grandparents’ building sat deep in the city—far from anything that could be mistaken for comfort. That location didn’t offer much in the way of luxury. No wide streets, no quiet, no space to breathe. This was not in a country where space itself feels like a rare commodity. People packed into every livable corner of their homes, sometimes with multiple families sharing what should have belonged to one. Neighbors endured it because they had to. My aunts and uncles, and all their young children, visited my grandparents often enough to practically live there, despite their claims to the contrary. They filled the apartment with noise and motion. Their voices bounced off the walls and bodies shifted to make room for more bodies. They were loud, and in that heat, in that crowded building, sound felt just as suffocating as the air.

Grouchy, tired, jet-lagged, and sufficiently irritated by strangers who pinched my cheeks, I clung to my mother’s side. She endured a constant influx of chatter as I had yet to learn how to filter my thoughts coherently.

She brushed sweat-slicked hair off my forehead. In a stroke of genius, she asked, “Have you visited the chickens on the rooftop terrace?”

“No,” I said. “There are chickens?”

“Yes. If you collect some eggs, I can make us a nice big cake.”

The chickens belonged to my grandparents, which were kept in an old wooden hutch in a fenced-in area outside of a heavy doorway accessing the rooftop. Calling it a terrace was generous, but at the time, I didn’t care for the bird-poop-stained concrete and feathery tumbleweeds.

I wanted that cake.

Managing to dodge my well-meaning aunts from enticing me into sewing lessons, I stole a bucket from the second-floor hallway that was catching waterdrops from the ceiling and went to the rooftop. I entered the fenced-in area and found the latches separating me from my eggs. The first nest was empty. In the second, a moody hen clucked at the intrusion. Reaching beneath the bird, I felt around for the eggs and found none. I scowled at her and moved on. In the third nest, a brilliant red hen ruffled her feathers. Without greeting her, I dove beneath her bum and felt around the nest for eggs.

Bingo! (That was what my geology teacher in the States said whenever we correctly differentiated between different types of volcanoes.) Bingo!

The hen had three eggs, all speckled brown. I reached to grab one and PECK!

I squealed and dropped the bucket. The metal rang against the concrete.

The old bird shrieked at me, its beak snagging the soft skin of my knuckle and tearing it open. A thin line of red welled instantly. The sting bloomed into a sharp, throbbing pain that made my eyes burn.

Clutching my hand to my chest, I bolted down the stairs. My shoes slapped against the damp concrete steps, and my breath came out in short bursts. My mother asked what was wrong, and I quickly explained our predicament: those nasty hens were possessive.

“Well,” Mother said, “we don’t need to make a cake.”

Those weren’t the words of affirmation I desired, and her lack of belief in my capabilities astounded me. And yet, I was determined to prove her wrong now as well. As we sat down for dinner over roasted lamb and tomato stew on a bed of rice, I plotted.

By the next day, the fear had curdled into something harder and more deliberate. I slipped into the kitchen while the house was quiet with the air still smelling faintly of last night’s tea and biscuits. I pulled open cabinets and drawers one by one and winced at every creak until I found Grandma’s oven mitts shoved beneath a stack of mismatched towels. They were thick and oversized, faded from years of use, and smelled faintly of cigarette smoke and soap. I shoved my hands into them, flexed my fingers, and was relieved by the padding.

Then I went looking for my uncle’s bat. It was propped in a corner where it didn’t belong, its surface worn smooth and nicked from use. When I lifted it, the weight surprised me—solid wood, no give to it at all. It sat heavy and felt reassuring in my grip.

Fully equipped, I stood at the foot of the concrete stairs. The steps loomed above me, cool and gray, disappearing into shadow. I took a breath, steadied my shaking hands, and set my jaw. I climbed, one step at a time as I marched back into battle. I pushed open the heavy metal door and paused.

The hard edge of the building dissolved into soil the color of baked clay, cracked in delicate veins where the heat had pressed too long. Beyond it, the land unfurled in a familiar sweep—date palms rising in loose groves, their fronds rattling dryly in the wind, casting thin, trembling shadows over the ground. Their trunks were rough and fibrous, some leaned and shaped by years of desert wind.

Between the palms stretched wide plains of yellowed grass and stubborn green reeds clustered near shallow irrigation ditches. The air carried the faint mineral scent of dust and river water, as if the distant memory of the Tigris still threaded beneath the soil. Where neighbors’ homes once stood—flat roofs, satellite dishes, laundry lines—there were now thickets of tamarisk and wild shrubs, their thin branches trembling with insects. Tall grasses bent and whispered against one another, seeded with burrs that clung to cloth and skin.

Dragonflies skimmed low over patches of standing water left from some recent overflow, their wings catching the light. Beetles burrowed into the sand. A pair of bulbuls darted between palm crowns, scolding sharply before vanishing deeper into the grove. The heat stretched distance until the horizon wavered in a mirage shimmer.

Somewhere farther out, where the palms thinned and the land grew more scrubbed and open, came the sharp, wavering yip of a golden jackal. It carried clearly in the dry air, threaded with hunger.

I stood there too long, heart knocking against my ribs, trying to reconcile the rooftop I knew with the wilderness that had replaced it. The city felt very far away, and in its place took the wild foreign world I had expected before the plane landed.

The chicken hutch I visited the day before bled into the overgrowth. Its walls were swallowed by creeping vines, softened by moss and flowering weeds. Leaves clogged the crevices where dust used to gather. Chickens clucked nearby, but their voices were lower and throatier than I remembered.

Then I saw it.

The bird—the one that had pecked me before— rose from the grass on long, sinewy legs, taller and slimmer than any chicken had a right to be. Its body was narrow and taut. Its silhouette is closer to a prehistoric dinosaur than a domestic chicken. Its feathers gleamed dark red in tight, bristling layers. When it turned its head, one glossy, beady eye fixed on me with a focus that felt uncomfortably intelligent.

My grip slipped on the bat, sweat slicking my palm. My jaw dropped, and the sound that tore out of me was half-shriek, half-gasp. The creature tilted its head, considered me, and for a suspended, terrible second, I thought it was amused.

The creature took a step toward me, and that was enough. I tore my eyes away and forced myself to remember why I was here. I picked up my bat again.

Eggs. I needed eggs. The word felt thin and fragile in my head compared to the weight of the world around me, but I clung to it anyway and ducked into the hutch. Inside, the air was warmer and rank with feathers and old straw. The familiar nests—shallow bowls of twigs and husks I remembered from before—were still there, but they were empty, scraped clean down to the dirt. I turned one over with the toe of my shoe, then another, then another, my movements getting faster and sloppier. Nothing. Not a single shell. Just heat, dust, and the low, unhappy muttering of birds.

A few of the chickens crowded in behind me. Their shadows stretched too long across the walls. One lunged, beak snapping, inches from my wrist. Another flared its feathers and hissed.

“No! I’ll fry you!” I threatened and swung the bat in a warning arc.

“BUK-BUK-BUK.”

Panic climbed up my throat. I stumbled back, nearly tripped, and then bolted, bursting out of the hutch and into the overgrowth, branches whipping at my arms and face as I ran.

The vegetation closed around me in layers. Low, stubborn shrubs tore at my clothes. Tall grasses rasped against my legs. Somewhere overhead, date palms rattled softly in the heat, and their fronds clacked together like dry bones. The ground was uneven, a mix of dust and cracked earth and sudden patches of green where water must have lingered once. Reeds crowded the edges of a narrow, sluggish channel. I had to jump and their pale stalks bent when I landed. The air smelled of sap and warm soil and something faintly sweet, already on the edge of rot. The bucket I stole thumped against my thigh and left bruises for later.

I slowed only when my lungs started to burn. That was when I saw them—shapes rising out of a shallow depression in the earth, half-hidden by brush and shadow. Nests, but not like the ones near the hutch. These were bigger, built up with thick branches, packed reeds, and clods of dried mud, arranged in wide, protective rings. I approached one carefully, each step loud in my ears. Inside lay eggs—three of them—enormous and pale, their shells dimpled and faintly mottled, more like stone than anything fragile. They were as long as my forearm, warm to the touch. When I pressed my palm against one, I felt a low thrum, as if something inside was shifting.

“How are we going to cook these?” I muttered.

I knelt beside the nest and slid my arms around the first egg. It was warmer than I expected, its shell rough and faintly gritty against my skin, and it took a moment to lift it free of the reeds and packed mud. I lowered it into the bucket and padded the sides with leafy fronds I gathered from the ground. I went back for the second, and the third, my movements growing quicker, more urgent, as if the forest might change its mind about letting me leave. The bucket tipped under their combined weight, but it held. Relief flooded through me, sudden and dizzying, so strong it almost made me laugh. I had them. That was all that mattered.

The brush behind me shuddered, and the chickens burst through it. The angry red one snapped its beak at the air near my shoulder. Another gave a shrill, echoing cry that set my teeth on edge. I smacked one away with the bat and ran, hauling the eggs in the bucket as it banged against my leg again.

I tore through the grasses and low trees, sending terrified prayers that the eggs wouldn’t crack. Heat burned in my chest. My breath came out in ragged pulls. I veered toward the sound I’d heard earlier, toward the sharp, laughing yips cutting through the air. When the ground opened into a wider, scrubby stretch, I saw them—golden shapes moving low and fast through the brush. The jackals lifted their heads at my approach, ears pricking, eyes bright.

“Dinner!” I called out, but I didn’t stop. I ran straight past them, and the chickens followed. The world exploded into noise behind me—screeching, yipping, the dry snap of branches, the ugly, wet sounds of bodies colliding and bones crunching. It reminded me of home the week before we left, when I saw a coyote tear into a cawing crow, ripping into the bird’s glossy black body. I kept going. I ran and ran with my legs shaking and lungs screaming. With the bucket clenched in both hands, I refused to turn around.

By the time I saw the entrance I had come through, my vision had narrowed to a bright, trembling tunnel. The metal door waited at the edge of the rooftop, dull and ordinary and impossibly beautiful. I slammed into it, fumbled with the handle, and dragged it open. I spilled into the stairwell and pulled it shut behind me with all the strength I had left. The sound of the fighting cut off in an instant, like someone had closed a book.

I stood there for a long moment, bent over the bucket with my heart hammering and sweat running down my back. Then I went down the stairs, still trembling.

Finding my mother with my grandmother in the sitting area, I held out the bucket.

“I got the eggs,” I said.

“Why do you smell like sweat?” Mom asked.

Grandma pushed up her spectacles. “Are those my oven mitts?”

“Have you seen my bat?” Uncle inquired, walking into the room to bear witness to all the commotion.

“Can we make the cake now?” I set the bucket down to throw my arms up.

“Well, I suppose we have to.” Mom peered into the bucket. “Have the eggs always been that big?”

Sara Abbood is an emerging author and a Hopwood Award–winning writer from the University of Michigan, where her work has been recognized for its originality and narrative depth. Her writing was featured in Farewell, Neverland, a literary publication by Sword & Kettle Press. As she continues to develop her voice, she remains committed to crafting stories that resonate with readers and expand the boundaries of fantasy and literary fiction.