The following is a short story from Senaa Ahmad, featured in The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2021. Ahmad’s short fiction also appears in The Paris Review, Pushcart Prize XLVI, Best Canadian Stories 2021, and The Gollancz Book of South Asian Science Fiction Vol. 2. She was a finalist for the National Magazine Award for Fiction and received the 2019 Sunburst Award for Short Fiction. She's working on a short story collection.