March 8, 2024: مائة و أربعة و خمسون by Rayya Liebich
9,000 women killed. Nine. Thousand. Women. Killed. I don’t know what to do with the horror of this tally. 37 mothers killed each day. These are not numbers — these are women, mothers, girls. 50,000 pregnant women in Gaza. I open my agenda desperate to interrupt this math. 690,000 women are bleeding with little or no menstrual supplies. UNWRA numbers hurl at me and propel me to count backwards from today — International Women’s Day.
Wahad. Tnen. Tleteh. Arba’a. Khamseh. Sitteh. Sab’a. Tmeneh. Tis’a. Ashra. The numbers in Arabic stream from unknown memory cells until ten. I pause. Hesitate. Onze, douze, treize, quatorze, quinze, seize, dix-sept, dix-huit, dix-neuf. Vingt.
I tap each box in my day planner snaking from the bottom of the month up, past the highlighted reminders for dentist appointments, grant deadlines, Zoom calls. My carefully noted business glares at me in unimportance. I pick up the pace. Get me to the finish line in English. 37 days by February 1. Turn the page. 68 days by January 1. My agenda stops. This was my New Year. I switch to my phone app. Numbers shrink. The panic of miscalculation escalates. Tip of eraser tapping each minuscule black number. 99 days by December 1. Tap tap. 129 November 1. Tap tap tap. One hundred and thirty, one hundred and thirty-one, one hundred and thirty- two. I stop staying 100. Carry it in my mind like a long division equation and race to madness of the final box. Tap tap tap tap tap. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. Tap tap tap tap tap tap tap. Breathless I arrive at my destination. Cent-cinquante-quatre. One hundred and fifty-four days.
October 7. It was a Saturday.
April 2024 Creative Corner prompt response, published with the author's permission. Copyright © 2024 story by Rayya Liebich. Sign up for our newsletter for a chance to be featured on our blog, Pensieri.
Rayya Liebich (she/her) is a Canadian writer and educator of Lebanese and Polish descent. She is the author of the award-winning chapbook Tell Me Everything (Beret Day Press) and full-length poetry collection Min Hayati (Inanna Publications). Passionate about writing as a tool for transformation and changing the discourse on grief, she is currently obsessed with nonlinear forms of CNF and completing a hybrid memoir on her simultaneous experience of motherhood/mother-loss. She finds joy in teaching creative writing in beautiful Nelson, BC.