The Witch of Khawaneej
by Raja'a Khalid
Kate Molloy, 2024, Untitled (Rain), Installation, oil pastel on canvas with dyed muslin, 18 x 24 cm. Courtesy of the artist.
The Witch of Khawaneej
Raja'a Khalid | APR 2025 | Issue 44
The witch introduces herself as Umm Balqis but you are skeptical about whether the woman standing in front of you could ever have been a mother. A beast, bone thin, taller than most men, with thick black kohl in her eyes and faint green tattoo dots on her chin. No, you are certain, no cry ever erupted from this woman’s loins, no lips sought milk in that hollow chest of hers, no baby fists ever clung to her hair or thobe, which hangs today on her wiry frame and is stained with soot and splatters of brown obvious to you as dried-up blood. Her back has a stoop from her daytime work as a cleaner and her black hair is scant and braided into many thin ropes and after she sits you down she begins to coil them onto her head where she finally wraps the whole mess into a turban of stiff black fabric. Her living quarter—situated on the edge of a farm—is small and lit with the sickly green halo of a single fluorescent tube light around which a pair of moths flutter their dusty wings. A shelf in the corner bears the tools of the trade; stone tablets, patches of jute, bags of rice, bowls of clay, wood and metal, feathers belonging to different birds. Rats squeal in a tiny cage in the corner next to a hot plate and there is also a small mesh pen where pigeons coo. Up on the wall, a mounted fan moves its neck from side to side. Don’t do it, it seems to say, slowly shaking its head.
Umm Balqis holds out her palms and two full moons of orange henna beckon you closer, and it is only when she speaks in her pidgin that you realize she is not from these parts but an import from some place far away. There is a man, she says with a voice deep and husky.
You nod.
And a woman and also…a child.
How can she know about the baby? You nod silently, again wishing to use your own voice as little as possible in this exchange lest it cling to the air and become evidence of this visit. There are already too many witnesses; the street cats outside the gate, the chickens on the path leading in, the dusty Ghaf trees with their sun wrecked leaves.
His name?
Azim, you say, and as your lips utter the word you think of his touch, his fingers walking the peaks and valleys of your body, his tongue on you, keeping its steady rhythm till you break into a million pieces. The two of you had matched almost a year ago and for a little while you’d decided to just chat. Then you agreed to meet at the lobby cafe of the Hyatt Regency, and clutching a glass of orange juice, he’d asked you your real name. Guess, you’d said with a smile, your half smile, with an eyebrow raised, the one that always managed to reel them in and he went through the list and when he landed on Aisha, you laughed. It’s always been my favorite, he said. So beautiful. Then he laid a finger on your wrist and you knew what he meant and you said yes of course. You got a suite where he held you close and whispered inside your ear. What took you so long? To come into my life. You undressed slowly and he found and kissed all the beauty spots on your body. All twelve of them. Even the one behind your right ear, nearly hidden in your hair. After that he made you say words that had never escaped your lips before but now came like a torrent and right afterwards when he told you he was married, you opened the small Chardonnay from the minibar and drank for the very first time. It doesn’t matter, you said, running your fingers through his hair and though you said the words, you weren’t sure if you meant them and as the weeks turned to months, you realized the small fact of the wife did matter. Mattered like a knife matters in a lung. You hadn’t been built for sharing. You stalked the girl, Fatima, found her profile on Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, even Pinterest and Goodreads, switched from yoga to barre so you could see her in person and when you did, two stones collided and lit a fire of envy within you so intense you could hardly breathe. Fatima’s eyes were almond-shaped, her skin shone like the moon and you asked Azim if he’d leave her and all he said was I can try and you believed him then but a year later he was still married and now there was a baby inside Fatima, threatening to come into the world and put up a wall around Azim for good and once the wall was up, it was up and you knew you would never be able to scale its height. Such was the power of the first child. And that too a boy.
Umm Balqis pulls a stone tablet onto her lap and writes on it with her finger dipped in a brown paste. Give me his things.
You take a Ziploc from your bag and in it there are some hairs and a tiny snip from Azim’s nightshirt.
Now hers?
Another Ziploc with hair and small articles. You had picked these up when Fatima was out of town and Azim had invited you over to show you the new pool he was putting in the backyard. You’d made love in the king size bed he shared with his wife and you’d inhaled hard and taken in her scent from the sheets and when Azim stepped in the shower, you took more things. Hair from her brush, snips of her dresses, lipstick, a makeup sponge, a detachable bra strap.
And the baby?
You hand over an ultrasound scan. You’d found a whole bunch of them in the kitchen drawer and guessed nobody would miss just one.
I will make a drum, says Umm Balqis. And when it is played, it will stop the heart.
You feel your own heart begin to race. There is time even now, for you to turn back, to get into your Jeep and drive away from Khawaneej, get away from the sleepy farmhouses and tall date palms that surround this tiny prefab shack, its thin aluminum door and window AC unit, far from the demon that sits in front of you with her smile of broken teeth and that stained thobe with its dubious history. But you can’t. You won’t. You can feel Azim even now, his poison inside your veins, the little bit he puts there every time you are together and you can see it through your skin and for this, for what you feel for him there is really no remedy. You tried to cool off but it didn’t work. He’s left a mark on you, an impression that won’t rub off and now he must be yours. Only yours. No more sharing. Will he be with me? you ask.
Once the wife succumbs to the ocean of grief, he will be yours forever.
You see Azim on his knees in front of you, arms stretched above him like a supplicant next to the brand new pool in his backyard. You’re wearing the holographic sequin Jimmy Choo heels he likes and only those and the sun kisses every inch of your body and light shimmers on the surface of the pool which looks like a sea of diamonds.
You take out cash and press it into Umm Balquis’s palm and the woman places the money in a tin box then pulls a pigeon from the mesh pen and twists off its head. The bird falls limply into a wooden bowl without making a sound, its departure from this world such a quick and silent affair that you hope it can be this way with Fatima too. Quick, easy. But nothing in life has come quick and easy to you. You’ve had a difficult time, your therapist says. The loss of a father so young. It can create a chasm. You had to remind her often that Baba wasn’t dead, that he’d simply walked out, that there had been no period of mourning, only a season of fading to black. You think of him now, of what you can remember of him, the shisha scent clinging to his breath, the big watch on his wrist, his neat fingernails. All this before the other woman, before the second wife.
Azim had had the audacity to ask you if you would be his second wife and in rage you keyed his Camarro. You screamed as you did it, to mask that screech of metal on metal. That was early on and he didn’t mention it again. One and only is what you said to him.
You get up and your eyes sweep around. Umm Balqis is humming, thread in her mouth, stitching a poppet. The pigeons carry on their cooing, ignorant of what is in store for them in the coming hours and the moths too still quiver and flit around the bulb. The fan on the wall continues its whirring reprimand, moving its head from side to side. Don’t do it, girl, don’t do it. I must, you say, and walk out into the night which is quiet and still. You look up to the sky and beg it in your heart to keep this secret.
Raja’a Khalid is a Saudi-born, Dubai-raised (and based) artist and writer with an MFA in Art from Cornell University. She is a Best of the Net and Pushcart Prize nominee (2025) and her stories appear or are forthcoming in Vestoj, Jet Fuel Review, HAD, Maudlin House, SAND Journal and Yalobusha Review.
Kate Molloy (she/her) is a practicing artist and facilitator based in Dublin, Ireland. Her practice engages with painting, clay and installation work and explores the feelings of uncertainty and intuition that develop during the creative process.After graduating from Edinburgh College of Art in 2014, with an MFA in Contemporary Art Practice she was shortlisted for the Beers London Contemporary Visions VI in 2015. Having exhibited work throughout Ireland and the U.K, in 2019 Kate’s first international solo exhibition Controlled Emotion opened at Skinroom, Hamilton, New Zealand. In 2023 received the Arts Council of Ireland Agility Award. Previous member of Engage Art Studios, Galway and Wickham Street Studios, Limerick. Current member of A4 Sounds Studio, Dublin.