Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights

Eight hundred and more years later, more than three and a half thousand miles away, and now more than one thousand years ago, a storm fell upon our ancestors’ city like a bomb.

These qualities are broadly accepted: that they are whimsical, capricious, wanton; that they can move at high speed, alter their size and form, and grant many of the wishes of mortal men and women should they so choose, or if by coercion they are obliged to do so; and that their sense of time differs radically from that of human beings.

In the two years, eight months and twenty-eight days and nights that followed, she was pregnant three times and on each occasion brought forth a multiplicity of children, at least seven on each occasion, it would appear, and on one occasion eleven, or possibly nineteen, though the records are vague and inexact.

Just as we are created anew by what we love, so we are reduced and unmade by what we hate.

maybe that’s why she felt nameless, unnamed, unnameable, Lebanonymous.

miracle,” said Ibn Rushd, “is just God changing the rules by which he chooses to play,