Burned alive by Souad

about the day soon to come when I won’t be guarding sheep and goats anymore, when I won’t be cleaning out the manure in the stable. He is going to come, he loves me, and when he leaves again I will say to him, like the first and the second times: Don’t abandon me.
    We make love for the third time. The sun is yellow, I must milk the sheep and the cows. I say: “I love you, don’t abandon me. When will you come back?”
    “We can’t see each other right away. We’ll wait a little. We have to be careful.”
    “For how long?”
    “Until I give you a sign.”
    My love affair had gone on for two weeks, three meetings in the field with the sheep. Faiez is right to be careful, and I must be patient, wait for my parents to speak to me, as they spoke to my sister Noura. My father can’t still be waiting to marry Kainat before me! Since Faiez has asked for me and she is still unmarried at twenty, he can get me off his hands. He still has two more daughters! Khadija and Salima, the little ones, will be put to work in their turn with my mother and will take over the flocks and the harvesting. Fatma, my brother’s wife, is pregnant again, she’s supposed to give birth soon. She can work, too. I await my destiny. Always with a little fear. The days pass and Faiez gives me no sign. I’m hopeful all the same, every evening, of seeing him appear out of nowhere, as he can do, to the left or right of the ravine where I hide.
    One morning in the stable I suddenly feel very strange. The odor of the manure makes me dizzy. And later as I prepare the meal, the mutton makes me feel ill. I’m nervous, I want to go to sleep or cry for no reason. Every time Faiez comes out of his house he looks somewhere else, makes no sign to me. It’s been a long time, too long, and I don’t know when I last had my period, or when it should arrive. I often heard my mother ask my sister Noura: “You have your periods?”
    “Yes, Mama.”
    And, too: “You haven’t had your period? That’s good, it means you’re pregnant!”
    I don’t see mine coming. I check several times a day. Every time I go to the bathroom, I look to see if there’s any blood. Sometimes I feel so strange that I think it must have come. But there’s still no blood. And I’m so afraid that the fear grips my throat as if I were going to vomit. I don’t feel the way I did before, I don’t want to work, to get up. My nature has changed. I try to find a reason that isn’t the worst one. I ask myself if the shock of not being a virgin anymore can change a girl this way. Maybe the periods don’t come back right away. I can’t of course get any information about this naive explanation. The least question on this subject would cause thunderbolts to come down on me. I think about it constantly, every moment of the day and especially at night when I fall asleep near my sisters. If I’m pregnant my father is going to smother me in the sheepskin blanket. In the morning when I get up I’m happy just to be alive.
    I’m afraid someone in the family is going to notice that I’m not normal. I want to vomit in front of the plate of sugared rice, I want to go to sleep in the stable. I feel tired, my cheeks are pale, my mother is certainly going to notice this and ask me if I’m sick. So I hide, I pretend to be fine, but it becomes more and more difficult. And still Faiez doesn’t appear. He gets into his car wearing his beautiful suit, with his briefcase and his fine shoes, and he takes off so fast that his car makes a cloud of dust. Summer begins. It gets very hot in the morning. I am supposed to take the animals out at dawn and bring them back before the sun is too strong. I can’t be on the terrace anymore watching for him, although I absolutely must speak to him about the marriage. Because a strange spot has appeared on my nose. A small brown spot that I try to hide because I know what it means. Noura had the same thing when she was pregnant. My mother looked at me with