Live Encounters Arab Women Poets & Writers June 2026
Two Short Stories by Sheren Fathy.
Translated from Arabic by Dr. Salwa Gouda.
The Dream Foundation
She takes a form from the receptionist. She sits and waits for her turn on one of the tightly lined chairs next to others like her, all seeking a hug. She waits for a hug she’ll receive from a stranger in a closed room for no more than five minutes.
They offer a warm drink for every hour of waiting. Hot chocolate, sometimes tea or French coffee. Soothing music drifts through every room, always.
“No kissing allowed.” That was one of the written conditions on the application form she signs every time.
Why? she asked them once.
Because a kiss is something very personal. It shouldn’t be done without love.
And a hug? she asked.
A hug is a human condition. A right. A desire and a natural need to feel safe.
Even from someone we don’t know?
Yes. Exactly like hugging your pillow before sleep when you’re alone in bed.
Yeah.
She nodded shyly and fell silent. Then she signed her name on the form.
She loves dancing. She thought she might ask for a dance with the hug next time. She doesn’t know what good a hug does, nor does she understand the secret of its strange power—how it helps a fragile body, giving it life with just a simple squeeze. As if the body needs to be pressed just to make sure it exists, that it’s real. Exactly like pinching yourself inside a dream to check whether you’re actually dreaming or not—even though she’s pinched herself plenty of times in dreams and still hasn’t woken up.
Every time she visits the foundation, she feels like thanking all the staff for this place so full of love and tenderness. She doesn’t know how many requests she’s submitted, nor how many hugs she’s received since she first walked through the door. But she’s become a regular. She gets at least one hug a week. She feels she’s finally found a purpose for herself—after all the money she used to mindlessly spend on a handbag or a blouse she never really needed.
Minutes before entering the hug room, the staff places a piece of candy or chocolate in your hands. A bite-sized piece. It brings you straight back to childhood—with tiny frames, short pants, and big, effortless smiles. After the hug, clients are led to private rooms they call “recovery rooms.” No new client is allowed in until the previous one has definitely left. Hug-seekers often burst into sudden tears.
Before she found the foundation, she saw herself as a stiff, massive tree—full of tangled, broken branches, completely bare of leaves. Just a huge pile of deadwood. The weather around her cold and dry, no matter the season. The sun barely ever shines in her world. As if all four seasons conspire into one long winter—a winter that crushes her leaves, drains her water and softness from deep inside the bark and wood.
That image shifted a little after she discovered the foundation. The sun broke through a few times. One or two leaves sprouted among the wreckage of dry branches, even if the massive structure of the tree didn’t change much. In the recovery rooms, she found plenty of paper and pens. Sometimes she wrote down how she felt. Sometimes she drew a bare tree and stuck drops of her silver tears where the leaves should be—and the tree changed a little, for the better.
Clients were not allowed to speak during the hug. No confessing, no storytelling. Maybe that’s why words and sentences translated themselves into tears. Crying is the only thing allowed. In the room, you cry and let only that masked ghost hold you—without even knowing what they look like, or their gender. But she’d started recognizing them by their smells. Each scent has its own kind of hug.
“I always wished this service had existed in the past,” she wrote on a feedback form once, after receiving her hug. So she started thinking about making up for all the hugs she’d missed. She applied for a job at the foundation. They told her they’d call her as soon as they had an opening.
For months she waited. Nothing occupied her mind except getting that job—even if she worked for free.
For months, the phone rang endlessly in her dreams. Until she finally got the job. She hugged hundreds—no, thousands. Her body became real. Touchable, squeezable, alive. She made sure not to wear any recognizable scent so no one would identify her. But she became the most famous employee. Clients asked for her by name: “We want a hug with no smell.”
Despite all the hugs she’d given, her own body craved hugs even more. As if too much water doesn’t quench thirst, it only makes you more aware of it.
She kept her new job. But on her days off, she would line up with the other clients, looking for five minutes of her very own.
Employees Wanted for the Other World
“Employees Wanted for the Other World.”
I don’t know exactly when that sign first appeared—before it started spreading in such a terrifying way. Everywhere I look, I see the sign written in thick, oversized letters on the walls of large buildings, and in small, clear print on little white sheets that boys hand out on the streets.
That was before the other sign started showing up. The other sign was relatively small, similar to those metro signs that suddenly appear on a street to tell you there’s an entire hidden subway station underground. It looked very much like that—except the famous letter M wasn’t written. There were several letters, but they were blurry, never forming a real word. Every time I tried to read them, I came up with a different word, though all of them were ultimately meaningless. But the arrow pointing downward—that was the one clear, consistent thing on every sign. And the narrow opening in the ground, with long stairways sloping down beneath the arrow—that was the same too.
Over time, the number of signs multiplied suspiciously, and the number of boys too. White paper sheets rain down on you by the dozens or hundreds inside a single car. The more you throw them away, the more they attack you. Paper everywhere coming through the car window, the bus window, thrown at you by other passengers if you’re walking. On empty roads, you see it falling from buildings and rooftops, and sometimes straight from the sky.
I tried asking someone once about one of the signs that had suddenly risen out of the ground in front of me. But as soon as I started talking to him, he began dodging me. That was the typical response to my questions here—even before I became a resident of Cairo. That city I never visited except for heavy reasons: getting a new government document or visiting a dying relative. Because Cairo is always the last stop the sick make before passing away. Sometimes families bring their patients here just to prove to themselves and others that they did everything they could. Despite the grim image I had of this city, I was excited when I landed a job here as a newspaper editor.
At the end of each week, I’d go back to my provincial town to visit my mother—who refused to come with me. She didn’t like the city. She had her own bad memories there: my father’s death, the deaths of some relatives and neighbors.
At the end of every holiday, just before I left, my mother would ask the same question: How can you trust a city that puts ads for fenced burial plots at cheap prices at every entrance?
In the beginning, I’d get lost in the streets. Ask many people for directions and never get a straight answer. Either whoever I asked wouldn’t reply at all, or they’d smile falsely and say, “I’m lost too.”
After several times getting lost, I realized most residents of this city are lost. Half don’t know their way; the other half know only their own way. Either way, asking is useless. After a few years, I became just like them. I stopped answering anyone’s questions. I only knew my own route—and often, like them, I didn’t even know that.
The signs and downward openings kept increasing every day. But the ads began to change slightly. New phrases appeared: “No experience required” – “Both sexes” – “All ages.” These additions didn’t clarify no real criteria. It was as if the job was available to everyone.
The paper sheets were no longer just thrown into your car or dropped from the sky. You’d feel invisible hands slipping them into your pockets and then see no one around. When I undressed, I’d find my whole body covered in those small papers and phrases: “Employees Wanted for the Other World.” Sometimes the same phrase would appear on my phone screen and stay there for hours before disappearing.
As more time passed and more ads and signs appeared, the phrase started repeating on my tongue nonstop for no real reason. On Fridays, when my mother came to wake me and said good morning, I’d reply: “Employees wanted for the other world.”
Breakfast is ready. How are you today? Did you sleep well?
None of those questions got any reply except that phrase.
My mother began to get uneasy because I kept repeating it. She’d leave the room or pretend to be busy with housework, or sometimes just ignore me and keep talking about what she’d done during the week while I was away.
Even at work—when I went to my boss, who had decided to dock my pay two days for being late on my assignments—I found myself answering him with the same phrase. He got flustered and dropped the penalty.
But the phrase didn’t save me later when he fired me outright, after confronting me with my latest articles—or so I thought. The pages were all blank except for one phrase in the middle of each page: “Employees wanted for the other world.”
I tried to focus more on the signs and the staircases. I noticed some people on those stairs. Actually, I never saw any of them completely—just the top of a head disappearing, or fingertips waving goodbye. But I never saw a whole person. The stairs and passages swallowed them completely. Strangely, I never saw anyone come back up. As if there were no exits. Or maybe there never were any exits to begin with. That last thought scared me, especially when I remembered my mother’s question: How can you trust a city that swallows almost half its residents every day into underground tunnels?
But none of these thoughts stopped me from trying. On the day I got fired, I decided to give it a shot—especially since I was now jobless. And the ads had started adding more enticing phrases: “Competitive salaries” – “Free meals” – “Housing provided” – “Lifetime health insurance.”
As soon as I put my foot on the first step, my whole body got sucked into a tube that felt as if it had just been emptied of air. I was pulled along with the air as it was vacuumed out.
Inside the tube, I could see the city above me—but upside down, as if the tube’s roof was made of transparent glass. The asphalt was above my head, the car wheels, the feet of pedestrians. I panicked at first, trying to protect my head from being run over, until I realized the glass barrier existed—when I passed under a bridge and didn’t drown as I’d expected.
The tube dumped me into a vast space, like a giant reception hall. Plenty of employees were there to greet me. A huge number of entrances, employees, and even more job seekers. They really were from both sexes and all ages. Everyone except me was wearing an ID badge hanging from their necks, dangling over their chests like medals from past competitions. I saw children in school and sports uniforms, others in regular or home clothes. Elderly men and women, helped along by trainers, guided down paths before disappearing from my sight. I also noticed men in hospital-like uniforms. One was dragging a heart monitor behind him—its beep ringing nonstop, the flat line trailing the man as if to signal total cardiac arrest, yet he walked naturally, even briskly. There was a woman walking with an IV pole rolling behind her on its wheels, medical tubes linking her arm to the stand. Others looked perfectly normal. Others in wheelchairs. I saw every kind of person.
It seemed there was an endless number of entrances and exits. An endless number of employees, trainees, and applicants. The first thought that crossed my mind was: Why on earth do they still insist on plastering those signs everywhere and handing out those little white sheets, if they already have all these masses of people?
One employee led me down a hallway. I tried to tell him I didn’t have an ID like the others, and that I hadn’t brought any papers to apply for the job. I asked him to let me go home and get them. But he smirked and ignored me. As fear started creeping in, I insisted on leaving. Then two more employees came, pinned me down with their heavy hands, and sat me in a chair after dragging me into a room. I saw a sign on the door: Editors.
I sat there, unable to move. But after a while, I regained my mobility. Someone called my name as if he knew me. I told him about the ID and the papers. He said:
Don’t worry. All your papers are with us.
He pulled a folder from a drawer. When I opened it, I found every document related to me—starting from my birth certificate and vaccination records, to all my academic degrees, plus a résumé that included everything I knew and didn’t know about myself.
He asked: Have you regained your senses? Because every time you visit your mother in one of her dreams, you come back to us confused, just like you are now.
The papers lay before me in handwriting that looked oddly familiar. They needed more phrases to add to the sign. I didn’t need to ask which sign they meant. I started writing:
“Employees wanted for the other world. All ages, all nationalities. Good looks not required.”
© 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.