Live Encounters Arab Women Poets & Writers June 2026
The girl who stole her brother’s height, stories by Safaa Elnagar.
Translated from Arabic by Dr. Salwa Gouda.
The girl who stole her brother’s height
What the grandmother said to the King of the Jinn, who visited her as she prayed the afternoon prayer:
My hands have grown weary from guarding these walls. My back is bent; my eyelashes have fallen out from sleepless vigils. On his deathbed, he made me swear to protect his legacy. I obeyed my father, married my cousin, settled for half a husband and half a son, and waited for my grandchildren. The first came, a boy, and I rejoiced, my longing for the second growing. But then she came, and no other grandchild followed. The cursed one blocked their way and stole their souls. Thievery has become her disease. She steals my stories and tells them to strangers. My ancestors’ legacy. Hurry, oh King. My hands are tired… I am tired… so tired.
What the mother said, not even daring to whisper to herself:
Her eyes urged me to stand by her, to speak up, to defend her. I cannot. Silence is the language I have mastered. In the few moments I do speak, the fires of rage from others’ faces scorch me. When her father came a week after she was born, he asked, and I answered, “A girl.” His face darkened, and he never smiled at me after that. And when her brother, who is a year older, was getting ready to submit his papers for high school, and she insisted the photographer take a picture of her with him, I stared hard at the photo and wondered, “Is there a girl taller than her brother?” The grandmother placed her in the dock, leaving the cage door ajar. Every so often, she would push me toward it, turn her face away, and mutter, “Turn the pot upside down on its mouth.”
What the brother said, sealing his large envelope, satisfied:
My grandmother holds my hand, a candle in her other hand, and parades me around the house. She points to the walls, their cracks gone wild, and promises me apricots if I fix them. Everything you fix, it’s yours. My shadow stretches across the walls, covering them, my head touching the ceiling. When I saw the picture, my shadow shrank. I retreated back into my lamp, my mother’s voice echoing, huge in my ears. “Is there a boy shorter than his sister?”
What the narrator said to her short daughter:
The day was set to distribute the paltry inheritance left by her father. She had no clear idea of what to expect. Her brother’s wife opened the door for her. Like a stranger, she sat in the farthest corner of the guest room, her two little girls huddled close – one in her lap, the other pressed against her right arm. The minutes dragged by. The house seemed ancient, surrendered to the tread of years. The new furniture only accentuated her estrangement.
Her mother entered, followed by the grandmother, and behind them, her brother. The scant light filtering through the window cast cold shadows on their faces. As always, her spirit withdrew, leaving her stranded in the arena, unsupported. Her brother asked her to sign some papers. She started to object. He shouted, “You’ve taken too much… more than you deserve.” With his fingernail, he picked at the dead scab of an everlasting wound. She searched her mother’s face for a reaction. Her mother, who hadn’t noticed she’d grown taller, that her summer clothes had become too short. Until the day she took that picture with her brother. The mother stared at the photo, then suddenly beat her chest and screamed, looking straight at her, “Where did you get this height?”
Confused, she looked at her grandmother, busy with her amber prayer beads. She remembered her own father, the ‘Chief of Guards,’ a man of towering stature. The grandmother threw in her two cents, blinking her lashless eyelids, “She must have stolen her brother’s height while he was asleep.”
Her brother tore the picture. She was startled. She knew from her grandmother—who saved her stories for her but fed her brother apricots—that every sin has its punishment. And so she recalled every sin she had ever committed: the piece of sweets she ate fifteen minutes before the cannon, the times she slept without saying the night prayer. But this sin… she tried to remember when she had committed it. How? She couldn’t remember. She couldn’t even go near his ruler or notebooks.
Her guilt multiplied when her mother had to sew her a new school uniform. A week before school opened, her mother sighed, “And of course, you’ll need shoes.” She surrendered to her guilt, accepted it as truth, and began to await her punishment. The grandmother slipped away to pray the afternoon prayer. Her brother ran out of patience, the papers trembling in her hand. “I don’t have time.”
Silence choked the room. The scowling faces were not the first punishment. The head PE teacher pointed at her from her spot on the balcony: “You. Go to the back of the line. Yes, you. The tall girl. Tallest girl in school. Back of the line.” All eyes focused on her. Life froze in her veins. Everyone knew her secret now. The teacher repeated the order, and a younger teacher moved to enforce it, ordering her to take her bag and follow her to the last row in the line.
The teacher looked up at her disapprovingly. “What is this? They turn out girls on a lathe now and they come out this tall?” That first lineup, and every lineup after, was a punishment session. “Tall girl, your hand up. Don’t look down. Louder. Higher. HIGHER.” Better to come late, she decided. She would lean her back against the school wall, endure the rhythmic cane strikes alternating on her hands, and enter the classroom to her seat in the last row.
The strange thing was her face-as the women who sympathized with her told it—was always calm. They forgot her extraordinary height; that wasn’t the source of their wonder. It was her total surrender. To the cane strikes. To the lower grades. To the result, landed her in a middling commercial trade school. Only once did she nearly lose her composure, when she read in a fashion magazine that the supermodel Naomi Campbell was over 180cm tall, taller than her. And her picture radiated happiness and pride. But before equilibrium could seep back into her soul, a sheikh on the microbus shouted in her ear, “A Muslim woman must not imitate the naked infidel.”
Her wound became deep. Whenever a dead scab formed, someone was there to pick it off. Her husband, who left her and their two little girls to go search for a son for them. Her grandmother, who marveled at the audacity of girls these days. Her silent mother. Her brother, who constantly reminded her she had taken what she didn’t deserve. She signed the papers. Renounced what was hers. And withdrew quietly, her two little girls behind her.
Broken needle
Alone, she carries her fear in her gut. Her security shaken, the veil she spent her life patching up torn apart. Her sense of responsibility pushes her head into a sea of worries. Black waves toss her toward islands of isolation and ghosts. Like a woman in the wrong, she tries every remedy. She beats her stomach. Jumps off the bed. But it defies her, clinging tighter. Desperate, she persists, but it overcomes her. So, she sits on the damp tiles of her room, dries her sweat with her housecoat sleeve, leans her back against the wardrobe, and stretches her legs over the rag rug woven from fabric scraps.
Scraps she learned to collect from under the sewing machines at the nearby workshop. Her mother would take the bulging bag and return with a long, thin rug. Its fabrics, like her days, are different colors and textures, but overall, they are faded.
Several winters have passed. From cold to rain, she earns her diploma from the middling commercial school. The workshop becomes a factory; she sits at one of its machines. Among the suitors who propose, her mother points one out: “Your cousin. You support him, he supports you.”
Joy cloaks the walls of the house she was born in. Her old bed is taken out, and a full bedroom set—bed, wardrobe, dresser—is brought in. Her fiancé paid 500 pounds as a down payment. Every evening, he returns, rubs his head on her chest, and places his meager daily wage in her hand. She smiles at him and says, “Don’t you worry. I don’t know where my own salary disappears to, anyway.”
The pressure on the motor (the industrial sewing machine) increases. She looks at the supervisor, coveting her beige lab coat and her commands: “Get moving, girls! The order must be finished today!” Thousands of dresses go in and out, stitched with bent backs and sharp eyes. Dresses that women strut in, and dresses that other women gaze at from behind the display windows.
She asked a scholar from Al-Azhar, after wrapping the question in “a friend of mine,” and the man was decisive, though a thread of pity showed in his eyes after her fervor and protruding upper body tore through the veil of “a friend of mine,” and her tense face and flustered hands screamed out: “What do I do?”
Before, she had continued working into her ninth month. Her belly pressed on her, she pressed harder on the machine. A needle breaks; she quickly replaces it. The bobbin keeps spinning. The supervisor asks her, as if she didn’t know the situation, “Aren’t you going to rest at home, already?” Her due date came, but labor was late. Her worry about losing a full month’s pay kept the little one in its hiding place. A coworker sympathized with her, “She deserves every day of it.” But once the wires of the C-section were undone, she left her baby in her mother’s lap and stuck her head out the factory door… but no one was waiting. Another girl was clinging to her machine. She begs the manager. He agrees, “This is the last time you leave work. This is a live machine.”
Bent over, gathering scraps, or standing straight, carrying bolts of cloth, she gazes at her old machine. Sometimes she touches it. At the end of the day, she might wipe it down with scraps… until her new secret took her by surprise.
She coils into herself, terrified someone might smell its trace. Whenever she glimpsed the machine, she turned her face the other way. And from behind the high glass windows, her depression mingled with the autumn clouds, heavy with postponed tears.
© Safaa Elnagar
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.
Safaa Elnagar (b. 1973) is an Egyptian writer and scholar with a PhD in Media (Radio and Television) from Cairo University. Her notable literary works include the short story collection The Girl Who Stole Her Brother’s Height (Merit Publishing, 2004), the novel The Resignation of the Angel of Death (Sharqiyat Publishing, 2005), and the short story collection The Maidens Shell Peas (Rawafed Publishing). Her academic and creative writings explore social and political themes in Egyptian society.