The long supper 

Featured in

  • Published 20221101
  • ISBN: 978-1-922212-74-0
  • Extent: 264pp
  • Paperback (234 x 153mm), eBook

MY SISTER INSPIRED hunger a breath from anguish. Mother fell unconscious the minute she gave birth to her, and our grandmother snatched the red baby close and said, Oh…I could eat this girl up alive. Nadia was the name they chose: the one who calls. At fourteen, she put on the hijab. Schoolboys took this as a blow, like she was wrapping a caramel candy. When first the man who would become her husband saw her at a community dinner, he grimaced and turned his face down to his plate. To his father beside him, I heard him say, God, am I starved. I saw his grip on the cutlery whiten and his brow develop a sheen. He kept looking between my sister and the meat on his dish, blinking and sweating, like they had brought him the wrong piece of steak.

Something in her made men and women alike want to grab a handful, take a bite. It might have been a sweetness. It might have been the air of something ripe. It had little to do with beauty; we were both amply supplied in that arena. It had little to do with weight; her cheeks suggested the consistency of a bao bun, but so did mine.

Already a subscriber? Sign in here

If you are an educator or student wishing to access content for study purposes please contact us at griffithreview@griffith.edu.au

Share article

More from author

Killing the poets 

GR OnlineWhen asked in an interview what he feared most during this war, Palestinian writer Khalil Abu Yahia responded, ‘I fear that I will die without achieving my dreams. I want to complete my PhD. I want to rebuild my family’s house… And [my] biggest dream – to meet my [international] friends in person, to shake hands, to hug them. It sounds very simple, but colonialism disconnects people from the rest of the world.’

More from this edition

The party for Crabs

FictionAs she lists the night’s specials, Claire attempts to figure out the party’s dynamic. Shared complexions make the elegant woman the little girl’s mother, surely. It’s the women’s relationship she can’t figure out. University friends? Distant cousins? Their conversation seems too polite for either. Unnatural.

The fight for the white stuff

EssayAlthough non-dairy milks are hardly unique to the US, there seemed something distinctly ‘American’ about the consumerist techno-utopianism of engineered nutrition. In its seductive promises and dazzling abundance, in its massification and drive for profit, and its bold-yet-arrogant ambition, the world of plant milks became a metonym for everything I loved and loathed about US culture. Give me a carton of Blue Diamond Almond Breeze and you have given me America.

Easter cakes

MemoirI find I cannot cry on the day of the funeral or for many nights after the news of Ellen’s death and it is as if I am stunned by this loss, as if I am too close to this absence for it to mean anything yet, until two weeks later when I take the handle of the mould in my hands and lay the flat back of it against my cheek, and I cry and I cry.

Stay up to date with the latest, news, articles and special offers from Griffith Review.