Illustration by Andy Paciorek
. . . Trust That!
HONORABLE MENTION, Fall 2023
The Ghost Story Supernatural Fiction Award
BY A. GRIFA ISMAILI
On the day we got shellacked by Coach Roderick’s team at the YMCA, I learned my parents were jinn. Before we even got to the gymnasium, despite it being mid-January, the heat was sizzling off the parking lot and into my new Adidas high tops. During the game, I could feel the hotness of Mama’s eyes from the bleachers, second row, the only woman in a full skirt and flowery hijab, hollering with her arms wild, directing the whole team because Coach Mufflin was “nice but slow” and “not aggressive enough.”
I knew we were playing badly because she never once raised her phone to take a photo or a video. That, and Number 2, who was only about four feet tall with tight caramel-colored braids, wrestled the ball away from our no-name team time and again before charging down the court in his squeaky sneakers to shoot . . . SCORE! He sank his shots 13 times to my once. We lost by a crushing 26-2.
I didn’t cry even though Mama would have let me. “Cry, if you need to,” she said in the safety of her dented Volkswagen grumbling down Old Hammond Highway. Thankfully, my dad and brother weren’t around to poke me in the shoulders, telling me to stop being so soft. At eight years old, I was already accustomed to losing games. First soccer, then basketball.
“But don’t let anyone else see you crying,” Mama said between a few clicks of her blinker. In the rearview mirror, a tic rippled from her eye to her forehead.
At home, my brother Yaseen with his slick teenager hair and chunky braces was waiting in the kitchen. We had lost the last two weekends, so he was banking on us losing again. Looking back, I wonder if he had willed it so, somehow hit our team with his eyes. He was strong like that.
My dad was cutting onions to make a chermoula for the company coming to dinner that night. “How was the game?” he asked without looking up.
“They lost.” My brother cackled and popped a grape into his mouth.
“Majid played well.” Mama defended me as always. She was like the Statue of Liberty, standing with her chin up against a tidal wave in one of those apocalyptic movies. “He’s the fastest on the team and scored the only points.”
Yaseen rolled his eyes and turned on his heel, his wide, floppy feet slapping the cool floor tiles as he left the kitchen.
My dad yelped over a fistful of cilantro, and Mama immediately appeared at his side. It had happened so fast, I had to blink. I hadn’t even seen her move.
“Did you cut yourself?” she asked.
He nodded, and the two of them held his hand where he had sliced off a piece of his index finger. I looked over, expecting to see blood spurting all over the cutting board, but there was nothing. My dad caressed one brown hand over the other, and the raw, pink gash in his finger vanished and returned to his natural skin. Mama turned to me with a wonderous smile of sharp pointed teeth, her eyes a fiery golden-orange like a California sunset, and a split second later, it was all gone—her smile typically closemouthed and her eyes again regular, plain brown.
“What . . . was that?” I stumbled backward and fell onto my behind. My parents’ faces twisted with concern. “Majid,” my dad said.
“You . . . .you just cut yourself . . . bad,” I said, pointing and scrambling to my feet. “I saw it.”
“Majid,” Mama said.
I took off running, their voices trailing me as I raced to my brother’s room. A giant Pelé Forever poster, halfway taped and hanging off-kilter, guarded his door. I burst through it.
“What the hell?” he snapped. His laptop gaped open on his bed, and boxy Retro Bowl players trotted across the screen—our parents refused to buy us a gaming system, so this was the best we were ever going to get. A girl’s voice rambled from his cell phone, propped up on his pillow.
“Dad . . . he cut his hands,” I stammered, “and Mama . . . she had fangs!”
Sucking his teeth and sighing hard, Yaseen paused the computer game and picked up his phone. “Kennedy—I gotta call you back.” He clicked off.
“What’re you talking about?”
“Mama’s eyes were on fire!”
My brother covered his entire face with his palms, and with his voice muffled, he said, “Gosh, could you be any more stupid?”
When he pulled his hands away, he grinned at me, the metal gash in his face suddenly menacing fangs, and he, too, had eyes burning like a molten sun.
A deep and balmy violet curtained over me. My screams crushed my ears, going and going until my chest burned. They echoed what seemed like hundreds of times until they finally dissipated, and my vision focused.
Holding hands, my parents, much taller than their usual selves and luminous, floated gently over a smokey landscape of willows. The atmosphere flashed in plums, magentas, and coppers. A dark storm of snakes writhed across the sky. Hot fear churning within me, I cowered down in the breezy reeds. I curled myself into a tight ball and sobbed when, in between my gasps for air, from faraway, I recognized a quiet but powerful voice. It was the adhan, the call to prayer, drifting across the tumult. I inhaled deeply and found the courage to open my eyes again.
First, my dad’s face rose in front of mine, his eyes fiery gold. His features were the same, but the contours were sharper and had taken on the bluish glow of moonlight. His dark beard was thin around his chin, expertly trimmed. “What is here is elsewhere,” he said. His voice sounded stronger than I’d ever heard, like the sound of flourishing trumpets. “What is not here is nowhere.”
Not understanding, I kept crying.
Then, Mama, her eyes aflame, floated behind my dad. With the back of her sturdy hand, she reached forward and stroked my cheek. I felt a burst of warmth like an autumn sun cutting through crisp leaves. “Remember—you are not a beetle. You are my life. You are my gazelle.”
Jolting upright, I found myself in my own bed, my Spider-man covers twisted into a fat braid. The evening sky had softened, and voices lilted from the other room. I heard laughter and the clinking of silverware on the plates we used for company. I smelled Mama’s baked chicken and tfaya, a sauce of onions, golden raisins, almonds, zaffron, and turmeric. Omar and his parents must have arrived for dinner. Our families knew each other through 10 years of playing soccer, and even though Omar was my brother’s age, he was much nicer.
With great care, I crept toward the dining room, listening to the murmurs of dinner conversation. Everyone’s bodies and faces appeared normal, and I thought maybe I had hallucinated the whole day. Mama, spooning up rice, was in the middle of a story about her students in the university.
“A-ha!” My father interrupted her. “He wakes.”
When everyone turned their faces toward me, their eyes smoldered with fire. Mama, Daddy, Yaseen, Omar, his father and mother, even Omar’s little sister Noura—the same light as if shared only by the hot stars above, illuminated their faces. Omar smiled at me, and Noura waved her little hand. My brother rolled his fiery eyes and continued dismantling a chicken wing.
I turned to run, but Mama was suddenly there. I hadn’t seen her move. She clutched my shoulder as I squirmed to get away.
“No, no, no,” she said. “Come get a plate.”
Hot tears again streamed down my cheeks.
Instead of steering me toward the table, she brought me to the bathroom, recently cleaned for company. A jasmine-scented candle flickered from the sinktop, masking the acidic smell of Windex.
I cringed in fear of the mirror. I was afraid to see her, afraid to see anything. “Look.” Mama directed me with a sharp squeeze. “See yourself.”
“I can’t do it,” I cried.
“You can do it, my gazelle.”
I remembered the word gazelle from my dream, and I stopped squirming. I turned toward this monstrous version of my mother, but somehow, kindness still steeped the sharp angles of her face. She gave me another reassuring squeeze.
Cautiously, I peeked up into the wide mirror behind the sink, and there I was, my eyes glowing back at me.
My mouth dropped open, and I saw that sharp, chiseled fangs had replaced my teeth. I patted my face. My hair had become the darkest ebony, and my cheeks sparkled with luminescence. Radiating heat, it was all me.
“Mama . . .” I whispered.
She thumbed away my tears. “We are not from clay and dust. We are born of fire, and we are radiant—most especially you.” She tapped my nose.
“Are we good or bad jinn?”
Mama sucked her teeth and turned me fully toward the mirror. We studied ourselves. “What do you think?”
That night I lay in my bed and stared up at the glow-in-the-dark stars Mama had pasted to the ceiling a few years ago when we had first moved into our house. I had been afraid to have a room all my own, but my brother argued that I snored—which was not true—and he was big enough to have his own room. Their plastic glow brightened, and the ceiling parted to the infinite heavens with a billion stars above like I’d never seen in Baton Rouge.
I recalled a time when I thought I had been left alone at the house. I’d been playing with SWAT toys on our lumpy sofa, an intense game of Cops and Robbers with all the best machine-gun noises, cries, and shouts as the officers somersaulted off pillows and wrestled the likes of the Joker and Zombie Barbie—a toy my cousin had left behind after a visit and we’d colored her squishy face green. I didn’t know how long I’d been playing, but when I emerged from my game, I found myself alone. Panic set in as I circled the house, checking every room again and again, whimpering, calling out for my brother and parents. After a time, I started to fumble with the deadbolt on the door to try to go outside to look for help. My four-year-old fingers flubbed at the lock, but I stood on my tippy toes, feeling myself stretch taller, so I could grip it more tightly.
Just as I managed to turn it, my father’s warm hand fell upon mine, and I yelped in surprise.
“Are you going out?” he had asked, and I felt myself shrinking to what must have been my human size.
“I looked everywhere for you,” I’d said.
“I’m here,” my dad had responded. “You just didn’t feel me.”
Around my bed grew tall the whispering willows, and I sat up to see strange creatures of the night with their glistening eyes and luminance speckling their fur and scales.
More memories emerged: Myself, a toddler, stooping to pet a cat in the middle of the street and flinching into the grill of an oversized truck, but before I could scream, I was back on the stubbly grass in front of our house, Mama beside me, her hands folded neatly upon her full skirt. The truck had screeched to a halt, and a young, muscular man with a sleeveless shirt and a cowboy hat had jumped out.
He looked back and forth from the truck to the sidewalk to my mother. “Ma’am?” was all he could muster, his face knitted with confusion, before the cars lining up behind him started to honk their horns.
Still, there was more: Toys that had gone missing and nearly forgotten only to reappear again like magic on our bedspreads. Mardi Gras beads hurdling toward me as I sat in a stroller at a Spanish Town parade, and Mama catching them in one solid hand, millimeters from my face. Occasional nightmares as a child, shocking me from my sleep, and each time I slipped into my parents’ bedroom, Mama was awake, seemingly waiting for me the whole time.
My thoughts turned to Yaseen, who had dislocated his collarbone in a soccer game, and my father carried him off the field to the bed of his pickup truck. Minutes later, much to the coach’s astonishment, they reappeared. He put Yaseen back in the game, and in a rush of emotion, he bicycle-kicked the winning goal.
Piecing together these fragments, Yaseen lingered in my mind. I remembered a neighborhood bully, snatching his football and calling him the N-word, and when my brother slinked back home, his face hot with tears, my parents flashed at him in stern coordination and roared: “GO GET YOUR BALL BACK.”
We had been working in the garden, and the smell of manure fertilizer was ripe in my nose. I looked up to see the bully sprinting across the square-cut lawns in the opposite direction, and a string of neighborhood kids were pointing in all different directions while Yaseen trotted back home with his football tucked securely under his arm.
As these memories, questions, and answers connected like a cosmic jigsaw puzzle, a warm breeze parted the willows surrounding my bed, and the perfume of wildflowers charged the air. Small, sparkling creatures zigzagged and looped through the violet darkness. I settled back down on my pillow and rested beneath the brilliant expanse of the universe.
A few months earlier, when I had said I wanted to play basketball, Mama wasted no time in learning the game. Until that point, we had been a soccer—football, fútbol, kurat alqadm—family. During the World Cup, we rooted for Team USA and all the African teams. For club teams, Mama rooted for Real Madrid because she admired Luka Modric. She said she found wisdom and heartbreak in his eyes. My dad followed any club team with Moroccan players on it, which meant Paris Saint-Germaine, Toulouse, and Chelsea. Basketball, however, was a new thing for all of us, so Mama spent hours watching NBA highlights from the 1970s till today. She listened to the LSU game broadcasts on Eagle 98.1 while she ran errands and Kim Mulkey’s post-game pressers while she cooked. She studied YouTube videos of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Jason Williams, Kobe Bryant, and more. She read their books and memorized their inspirational quotes.
“See . . . watch ‘im right here.” One afternoon while resting on her bed, I had curled into the tight crook in her arm. She pointed to the small TV perched high on the wardrobe. “Watch ‘im pass the ball ‘round his back and hit it with his elbow in the opposite direction.”
Her arms shot up in a victory V as if she had made the pass herself among those gargantuan men. “Amazing!” She had peered down at me and caressed my cheek before nudging me off the bed. “It’s not for free, though. That takes hours and hours of practice. Now, go to the middle school and don’t come back until you sink 50 shots.”
So, I practiced—at the big net at Southeast Middle School on weekends and in the afternoons once everyone had left. Other days, I practiced barefoot in our driveway, sometimes the neighbor kids coming by. Coach Mufflin had practice on Tuesdays at seven, and then we lost our games on Saturday mornings.
“Can jinn play basketball?” I asked Yaseen in the driveway a few days after the dinner party. I lined myself in front of our net, which was either a hair higher or lower than the YMCA net—we couldn’t quite get it right. Scrolling through Google Earth on his phone, Yaseen was perched on the toolbox in the bed of our dad’s truck.
“Why do you ask such dumb questions?” he said. “When I was little like you, I didn’t ask so many dumb questions.”
“How many of us are there?”
“Not many,” he said.
“Is it cheating, if you are a jinn who plays basketball?” I could sink the ball any which way in our driveway and at the middle school—even three-pointers—but during the games I couldn’t get the pacing right. I had the quickness running down the court, but I couldn’t line up the shots.
“You know where I wanna go?” Yaseen asked me. His voice sounded far off and dreamy. I stopped and turned to him because it had been so long since he’d actually said something to me that wasn’t filled with distain.
A brisk winter breeze swirled the tree leaves upside down, but now that I knew I was a jinn, I never felt cold.
“I’d go to see the Kawah Ijen volcano.”
“Where’s that?”
“Faraway. In Java, Indonesia. It erupts glowing blue lava, like runny, molten turquoise, like the sheen on Mama and Daddy—on us, when we’re in our true forms.” He glanced at his wiry forearms.
“Oh.” I started bouncing the ball again, wondering why he was telling me this. I sank a basket. “Why don’t you go then?”
“I will,” Yaseen said, refocusing on his phone. “We can do anything as long as God wills it.”
Mama said that good jinn only use their powers for goodness, never to harm or trick people. I mulled it over, feeling alone in this enormous world, even though my parents tried to assure me there were others like us. I rested on Mama’s bed, scrolling through YouTube on her TV, watching NBA highlights, trying to see what she saw, trying to see what it would take to beat a player like Number 2 on Coach Roderick’s team.
And, that’s when I spotted it.
In a blurry seven-minute video of the Bulls versus the Golden State Warriors, 1997, blond-headed Dennis Rodman in all his expansiveness flew completely horizontal through the air to save a ball from going out of bounds. The sportscasters howled in awe. I reversed the video to view it again.
And again.
“Dennis Rodman highlights,” I whispered into the audio search button and streamed through a whole catalog of videos. With his big earrings, sweeping tattoos, and “graffiti-colored hair” as the sportscasters called it, Rodman catapulted over the court and crashed to the ground, each time to save the ball and pass it to Jordan. He frustrated the other teams’ players, stood up to giants—even bigger than him—laughing and smiling the whole time. I climbed onto a chair to get closer to the TV and examined the pixels as closely as I could. It was almost nothing— singular specks of color on a flat screen. Then, in Game Two of the 1996 Finals, the Bulls versus the Sonics, I saw the flash in his eyes—a minuscule splash of fiery gold.
“Mama . . .?” I jumped down and took off running. “MAMAAAA!”
In the wee hours while everyone else was resting, I snuck out to the living room to watch more magic in the NBA. The players vaulted and seemed to suspend themselves in the air, behind-the-back passes, spin turns, through the legs, and SCORE! With the volume muted, I reversed the videos and stood centimeters from the screen in search of flashes of fire in their eyes, and there they were. The Lakers, The Nuggets, the 76ers, the Grizzlies, the Bucks, the Suns—not all the players, but some.
Still, I noticed more. It wasn’t just super acrobatics and athletics. I saw the players with their faces damp with tears after tough losses, their hopes dashed. Seconds after heated arguments on the court, they pulled one another up off the ground with their long arms, patted one another’s backs. They gave their shirts and shoes away to emotional fans, offered piggybacks and slam-dunks to small children, hugged old men, and danced alongside old women. For hours, I witnessed their contentment, honor, and good deeds. All the while, hot tears steamed off my own cheeks.
There weren’t many teams at the Y, so we had to play all the teams twice. On Saturday morning, Coach Mufflin had me sitting out during the second quarter to give all the kids a turn. We were playing Coach Roderick’s team again, and it was going as expected. None of us had scored, but Number 2 was on fire, having already racked up six points. He never got subbed despite a long line of players warming Coach Roderick’s bench. His short, stocky frame glided through the air. He was an expert stealer, and he seemed to score a basket every time he tried.
A line of parents in their Saturday sweatpants clapped and cheered from the metal bleachers, instructing us kids as we raced up and down the court. I glanced back at Mama and realized she was being unusually quiet. When I caught her eye, she smiled at me in her closemouthed way. She winked and tipped her head toward Number 2 as he again barreled down the court.
As I watched him, time seemed to slow down, and Coach Roderick’s shouts became rubbery, likes sounds moving underwater. The screeching sneakers muted. I leaned in close as Number 2 launched himself for another basket. It was there—a minute flash in his eyes. A nanosecond of intergalactic fire.
I bolted up. “Put me in, Coach,” I said in a voice that hardly sounded like mine. It must have surprised him because he turned around with his eyebrows high on his forehead.
“Everybody’s gonna play,” he said, pumping his hands as if to tell me to be patient. “You gonna have another chance.”
“Put me in, Coach,” I repeated.
He stared at me for a moment, and I could feel the heavy breaths coming from his chest. He was Mateo’s grandpa, much older than the other coaches. Gray tufts of hair sprouted from behind his ears while the rest of his head was as smooth as a marble. He slowly brought his hands to a T. “Time out, Ref,” he called, his eyes still on me. “Substitution.”
He waved out Brayden, who looked tired and weepy anyway—we were losing badly again—and the ref nodded for me to go in.
At the whistle, tall Number 13 bounded his way toward our goal. I looped my arm right through his and snatched the ball like I’d watched Gerald Henderson and Jrue Holiday do. He didn’t even see me, but our side of the bleachers roared. I pivoted down the court, lobbed the ball to Bao, who was only seven years old, but played like a thunderstorm. He passed to Joy who even with her skinny arms hurled the ball across the court back to me. Number 2 was hot on me, trying to steal. I lofted myself into the air. I felt myself flying, scissored my legs in the stuffy gym of the Pennington YMCA, soaring toward the hoop, just like they all taught me—Aljinn Iverson, Jinn Morant, Jinnkola Jokić, Giajinn Antetokounmpo, KeJinn Chamberlain, and more.
A.Grifa Ismaili is a Jersey-born writer whose work has appeared in Fiction International, Baltimore Review, and Press 53’s Everywhere Stories, among others. A Pushcart Prize nominee, she has been a winner of the Faulkner-Wisdom Competition and a finalist in the Nashville Film Festival. She currently resides in the great boot of Louisiana, where she tests the considerable patience of her family.