Live Encounters Arab Women Poets & Writers June 2025
Paper Days, story by Sheren Fathy.
Translated from Arabic by Dr. Salwa Gouda.
Paper Days
The days passed by with unbearable slowness and loneliness. She didn’t even realize when she became entangled in that strange habit. She would tear a sheet from the exam results plastered on the wall and chew it in her mouth. As her saliva mixed with the taste of starch and the ink of that cheap paper, she felt a strange comfort, a beautiful numbness spreading through her limbs.
She had learned this habit as a child, whenever her father punished her for a mistake she had made—a misspelled word, a stained or torn dress she hadn’t noticed. She always felt the punishment was unjust, so she searched for a way to erase the bad memories from her mind. She learned to eat the days when she was punished, whether by beating or by having her allowance withheld. She would eat the past days, sometimes adding two extra, just to make sure everything related to that memory was completely wiped away.
Her parents noticed the missing exam papers, but they paid no attention, assuming some child was making paper boats or toy guns to play with.
On her fortieth birthday, things were different. She felt no satisfaction toward the years that had passed, especially after returning from her ill-fated trip to Alexandria… where she had failed to meet the love she had waited for so many years to return from abroad. He had come back, but not into her arms as she had hoped. She began to resent all her past years. She realized that all the paper she had eaten tasted the same. The flavor didn’t change from Saturday to Tuesday, or from March to October—even if the years printed on the exam results in bold numbers were different.
Time had passed her by without fulfilling her dreams or even remembering her. As a child, during hide-and-seek, she often wished she would never come out of hiding. The idea tempted her greatly—when she pressed her face against the wall, closed her eyes, and counted to a hundred, giving the others time to hide. How she wished she could just turn away from the world forever, disappear into the wall, merge with it, and never return to finish the game. But she hated blind man’s bluff, where someone tied a scarf over her eyes. That game hid her from the world but didn’t isolate her from it. There was no wall to cling to; everyone didn’t hide from her—she could feel them, hear them, their hands reaching out, their voices suddenly closing in from all directions without warning, impossible to stop.
She thought of building a high wall. She would hide behind it from the world… She would carve a hollow inside it to slip her arm through and walk embracing it. It would be flexible, bending with her, adjusting in height and width according to her needs and the streets she passed through. She would make small holes to peek at the world when she wanted to look closely. The holes would let her see without being forced to endure the stares and scrutiny of others. She would watch them like a god, unseen. She would widen the holes if she needed to reveal a part of herself to someone… but most of the time, she would keep them closed. And she wouldn’t remove the wall until the world’s noise had completely faded.
She had finished her studies, spent years in language courses, then her master’s, then her Ph.D. Yet even after all that, she never got the job she wanted, nor the life partner she had waited for.
On her fortieth birthday, she didn’t blow out the candle. She let it burn until it extinguished on its own. She rubbed her hands together vigorously in front of the burnt-out candle, grinding them against each other. She heard the sound of her finger bones grating. She lifted her palms to her nose, searching for old scents clinging to them—hazy memories, the remnants of an old love story, the medicines she used to sort for her parents before they passed, the ink of late-night study sessions, the tension of exams. She looked for gentler smells but found none.
She returned to her habit. She devoured the past week, but it wasn’t enough. She consumed the entire month. Before she knew it, she was swallowing the entire exam results sheet on the wall… She didn’t just suck the paper’s juices or spit out the crumbs as usual—she forced herself to swallow it whole. She felt the days and months seeping into her body. Time mixed with her saliva before sinking into her stomach, carried by her blood through her veins, flowing to every part of her.
One year wasn’t enough. She opened her closet, stuffed to the brim with untouched exam results—years she had kept imprisoned for sudden bouts of hunger. She devoured decades without feeling full.
She felt time gnawing at her bones, thinning them. She didn’t need a mirror to notice the massive amounts of white hair invading her forehead within minutes, nor the deep, thick lines carving arcs under her eyes and around the corners of her mouth.
She traced all the changes that had come over her, and before she knew it, she was stuffing more paper, more years into her mouth… She kept chewing and swallowing until she had consumed all her remaining years in one go.
© Sheren Fathy
Dr Salwa Gouda is an accomplished Egyptian literary translator, critic, and academic affiliated with the English Language and Literature Department at Ain Shams University. Holding a PhD in English literature and criticism, Dr. Gouda pursued her education at both Ain Shams University and California State University, San Bernardino. She has authored several academic works, including Lectures in English Poetry and Introduction to Modern Literary Criticism, among others. Dr. Gouda also played a significant role in translating The Arab Encyclopedia for Pioneers, a comprehensive project featuring poets, philosophers, historians, and literary figures, conducted under the auspices of UNESCO. Recently, her poetry translations have been featured in a poetry anthology published by Alien Buddha Press in Arizona, USA. Her work has also appeared in numerous international literary magazines, further solidifying her contributions to the field of literary translation and criticism.
Sheren Fathy is an Egyptian writer, born in November 1982. She graduated from the Faculty of Pharmacy and has published eight literary works, including novels and short stories. She won the 2023 State Encouragement Award for her novel Leila’s Threads and the Sawiris Cultural Award for her short story collection The Heroine Doesn’t Have to Be Fat.