When she awoke she was alone. Her mother slept on the bed near to hers, as far away as the moon and Baqir. Duha's fingers curled and she gave a low groan as the world seemed to fall around her. She struggled against the last echoes of the chemical death knoll that had been injected into her. She sat up in her bed, vomited off to the side and onto the floor in spite, and raised her blanket.

Nothing remained but a scar, a livid line of thread sewn into her flesh, the child gone, and all her hope.

"I want to see it." She whispered to the doctor, ignoring the livid pain in her throat. He had come some hours after dawn to check on her. Her mother protested, but the man demurred, thinking it would perhaps at last break the illusion his patient suffered under. He called a nurse and had the woman bring forth a specimen jar. It was an ugly reliquary of glass and a plain black plastic top. It read her name, age, and the date of the surgery.

Duha took it into her shaking hands, her baby, nothing more than a twisted mass of malignant cells. A tumor that had tried to devour her from the inside out. This is what evil had given her; a grotesque child that couldn't live without its mother. It would have died when she would have, and they would have been with Baqir forever.

She kissed the glass, and informed those gathered her daughter's name was "Hala", for she would have been as beautiful as the moon. The doctor kindly wrote the name on the jar, and deposited it among all the other life that had died before it could be born.

"I am ruined." Duha smiled at her mother as she was discharged. The nurse had told her before she had been released. They had removed the organ her child had grown in. She could not bare any man a child, she would never bleed again, and she would never again be a mother.

"Yes," her mother sighed and glanced at an early nightingale upon a blossoming peach tree in the hospital courtyard. "You must go back to school, for now you must work, or you will be a burden upon your father."

And at that moment Duha loved both of her parents as she never had before, for now they understood. She walked hand in hand with them towards their car. And when she would get home she would brag to her sisters of her marriage to a jinn.

For she was above all other women, mutilated, useless, and beloved of evil. She belonged to no man but demons and spirits of the night. And every night, upon her window sill, would sit her jinn, her husband, her love, who had taken her to his magnificent palace of the mind. Her Baqir, who ripped open Allah's creation to expose the false hope of evil.

But they would die with upraised heads in that false light.