THE GIRL WHO FELL FOR A GOAT HERDER IN THE ATLAS MOUNTAINS
THE GIRL WHO FELL FOR A GOAT HERDER IN THE ATLAS MOUNTAINS.
**********
The first time I saw him, I was holding a copper basin full of sheep’s milk and trying not to cry.
My name, though no one remembers it anymore, was Yamina. I was the daughter of a man who had once traded dates to the Moors and figs to the French. But now our orchard was dry, our father mostly silent, and our mother long buried. We lived in a Berber village tucked inside the folds of the Middle Atlas Mountains. The year was 1724, though we didn't say years that way. We counted the passage of time in olives—how many presses we could do before the rains came—and in love potions.
Yes, we made love potions. Or at least, we believed we did.
It was my grandmother, Leila, who gave me the jar. It was small, with a blue stopper and something that looked like burnt sage tied around its neck. She had whispered that it contained a blend of saffron, orange peel, salt from the Dead Sea, and dried bee stingers—though I think that last part was just a warning, not a recipe.
“Drink this,” she said, “only if your heart is tired of waiting.”
I didn't drink it for three years.
Instead, I spent those years waking before dawn to carry wool to the river, brushing the coats of our two remaining goats, and heating clay pots of barley for a father who no longer sang. The French had built new roads in the distance, and some of the men left the village to look for work. We stayed. Always we stayed.
And then came *him*. Idris.
He arrived one morning with the sheep. Not ours. His own. Thin, clever-eyed animals with long, tangled coats and feet that barely touched the earth. He was not from our village. His accent carried the smooth vowels of the southern valleys, and his hands were too clean for someone who spent time with livestock.
“They say he comes from a village that burned,” my cousin whispered.
“They say he never speaks unless he’s counting,” said another.
“They say he’s married to the moon,” said a third, and we all laughed because that was something our grandmother might say when she was feeling poetic.
But I saw him. Every morning, near the edge of the watering stones. He stood with his arms crossed, never looking at me, but always close enough to hear the splash of water as I cleaned the bowls. I tried not to care. I tried to make my face dull like the broken clay ovens, like the flat bread I baked without joy.
And still—he appeared. Always there. Watching. Quiet. Goat herder.
I began to wonder if he came only when I was at the river.
One day, I dropped the basin. It broke into six jagged pieces, and the milk splashed onto my legs. I swore under my breath, words that would’ve earned me a slap from my aunt. And then—he was there.
He didn’t speak. Just knelt and picked up the biggest shard. I saw then how long his eyelashes were. Ridiculous, how something so small could unsettle me.
“Your goats are getting fat,” I said, because it was easier than saying thank you.
He smiled. Just once. And handed me the broken piece.
After that, he began to speak. One sentence a day, never more. “The grass is better near the upper terrace.” “Your oven is smoking.” “Your brother walks like a camel.” The last one made me laugh, and he looked pleased.
It was like catching falling rain in a basket. I wanted more, always more. And I was tired of waiting.
So I drank it.
The potion.
I sat on the flat stone where our mothers used to braid each other's hair and uncorked the blue bottle. It smelled of cloves and honey, which surprised me. I tipped it into my mouth and felt nothing at first—then a faint burning. Like dried chili rubbed against my tongue.
Nothing happened.
No thunder. No sudden romantic declarations. No Idris appearing out of nowhere to confess that he had watched me for months and dreamed of marrying me beside the cedar trees.
But that night, I dreamed of sheep. And a boy holding one in his arms, singing softly in a language I didn’t know. He turned to look at me. His eyes were burning gold.
In the days that followed, Idris began to speak more. He told me that he’d once seen a man freeze to death on the mountain trail because he mistook a wolf for a friend. That he preferred goats because “they don’t pretend to love you if they don’t.”
He said I should stop walking barefoot because “some thorns don’t forgive.”
I asked him once why he never returned to the south. He looked away and said only: “The air smells like fire there.”
We walked together, now and then, pretending to look for lost kids. I began to see the way his hands moved when he was nervous—fidgeting with the threads of his tunic. I noticed the scar behind his right ear and how he never used his left hand to write.
We never kissed. Not then. Not even when he touched my wrist once, lightly, to brush off a seed pod.
I never asked if the potion had worked. And yet, I began to think it had.
But love, as my grandmother once said, is not something you summon. It arrives like weather. And sometimes, like weather, it disappears before you’re ready.
Because one day, Idris didn’t come.
And the next, I learned why.
He was already married.
To someone else.
In a village not far from mine.
A woman with hair the color of night and a mouth that knew how to pray better than I ever could.
She was carrying his child.
And that... that was when the potion only truly been to burn.
Comments
Post a Comment