It was after he got his raisin that Khaled gave me the prostitute’s number.
I imagined a multiple-orgasm lolita dressed to extract hard currency. Sixteen, he said she was. Brace yourself for the three thousandth-degree burns of hellfire. He’s big and hairy, Khaled. When you know him the bulging looks less like flesh than alluvial semen.
Repentance or no, I felt I could trust him.
Raisins grow on the foreheads of the pious, evidencing decades of contact with the ground. You can cheat one into being by intensifying friction. Which is how Khaled got his in a month. He botched it, too – it was higher than it should be, there were extra bits on the nose – but it worked. Since his flat burned down he had been praying too hard, not smoking or drinking, watching out for charred apparitions of his family.
This was my first ever prostitute and she was sixteen all right. But she seemed like one of a million – hijab, small voice and facial acne. It was the bright red swimsuit that eventually summoned an erection. Except, being marriage matter, she taught me how to brush. You skim the surface, drenching pubic hair. Hymens remain intact.
And devoutly kissing the hundred-pound note, she passed it on the spot where Khaled’s raisin was. It disappeared in the swimsuit.
I was grateful she would be out of the house now. Then thinking of Khaled, spent, I felt a sudden compulsion to start working on a raisin of my own.