The lines at the deep wells were so long, Laila and Mariam would spend hours waiting their turn.
The Kabul River, without its yearly spring floods, had turned bone dry. It was a public toilet now, nothing in it but human waste and rubble.
So they kept swinging the spade and striking, but the sun-blistered ground had hardened like a rock,
the dirt unyielding, compressed, almost petrified.
Mariam was forty now. Her hair, rolled up above her face, had a few stripes of gray in it.
Pouches sagged beneath her eyes, brown and crescent shaped.
She'd lost two front teeth. One fell out, the other Rasheed knocked out when she'd accidentally dropped Zalmai.
Her skin had coarsened, tanned from all the time they were spending in the yard sitting beneath the brazen sun.
They would sit and watch Zalmai chase Aziza. When it was done, when the hole was dug, they stood over it and looked down.
“It should do,” Mariam said. Zalmai was two now. He was a plump little boy with curly hair.
He had small brownish eyes, and a rosy tint to his cheeks, like Rasheed, no matter the weather.
He had his father's hairline too, thick and half-moon shaped, set low on his brow.
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