You have only ever bought mombar frozen before, pre-cooked and pre-stuffed and ready to throw into the—blasphemy of blasphemies—air fryer, and this is why: the cleaning alone takes an age.

First, you must carefully scrape the fat away. Then you need to wash its insides, scrub it gently gently so very gently with flour and salt and vinegar both inside and out, which seems like overkill to you? But that’s what the recipes on your phone all say and it’s not like you’d know, really, so … better safe! Then you have to let it soak for … well, one recipe says two hours, but another doesn’t mention soaking at all, so hopefully you can get away with splitting the difference. The chatter seeping under your kitchen door is boisterous and your visiting family is happy to amuse themselves by swapping stories and pinching children’s cheeks, but that won’t last forever.

And the thought occurs to you, of course, that you could ask one of the tantes and khaltos outside for their advice and recipes. Khalto Gigi’s mombar, especially, is legendary. But even if you insisted you could do it all yourself, inevitably one of them would come barreling in, gold bangles clinking on her arms as she rolled up her sleeves, and she’d see—

Everything.

The burnt, crusted food stains you never have the energy to scour from your stovetop. The mess that is your spice rack. The blood drying on the floor, on your hands and the front of your t-shirt, no time yet to mop it up. The five different knives on your counter, discarded one after the other as you figured out which was too dull to use and what blade was best for what cut. The open tube of garlic paste beside them, because you don’t own a mortar and pestle to crush it fresh and you never will. The thawed, pre-chopped onions and the wilted vegetables you rescued from your crisper drawer and are counting on the tomato paste and frying to disguise the sorry state of. The freezer-burned baladi bread you’re waiting to thaw enough so that you can break and toast it in the oven for the fattah.

In your defence, you were not planning on doing anything special for Eid. Your intended lunch of Indomie and frozen vegetables and maybe an egg for protein would have done just fine for you, and you eye the packets of instant noodles in your cupboard with no small amount of yearning. But while you might have enough Indomie for your family, and while you’re pretty sure they would eat it if you put it in front of them, you can’t present them with that. Not ever, and especially not for Eid, when they forewent a decent Eid lunch in the big family house to come spend it with you.

Not that you asked them to come, but … Well, that’s your own fault, isn’t it?

You didn’t so much put your foot down about not coming home for Eid as you tiptoed around it. You’d have loved to, you said, but you can’t. You’d have loved to, but work. But distance. But money. Spun-sugar excuses sweet enough to be accepted and delicate enough, you hoped, you hoped, not to offend. Except you must have laid it on really thick because apparently they were so worried for poor little you, all on your own, working so hard and so far away, that they decided to descend upon your door. Surprise! We love you! Here’s a box of gateaux and several juice varieties! Happy Eid! What’s for lunch!

The worst thing is: you know they didn’t mean to inconvenience you. If you said a word, the tantes and khaltos and ammos would immediately send their gangly sons off to buy this thing or the other and before you’d know it, you’d have a fully-stocked kitchen and everything you needed. They’d cook and they’d clean and they wouldn’t judge you, probably. Not out loud, at least. After all, they haven’t said a word about the mismatched IKEA furniture in your sparse living room, and Ammo Saeed even braved a beanbag once you explained it to him.

It’s tempting to take refuge in perfumed hugs and quietly palmed sweets, given with a wink and a smile. You’re a youngster still. They’d be happy to provide. Happier, even, than they are leaving you alone in here, scrambling to cook. You’re pretty sure you could even get a eideya out of them, and couldn’t you use that money?

Sure, yeah. If the embarrassment alone wouldn’t kill you.

You’re proud of what you’ve managed on your own, you are, you’re proud, you’re proud. You remind yourself of that, a litany under your breath. How hard did you fight to be allowed this freedom? Sure, it isn’t the most glamorous. It isn’t a lot. But it’s yours. Your space, your silence, your life, and even if your family hasn’t said anything out loud, you’ve long had your defences on your tongue.

Your small, unimpressive flat is modern, you’d say, minimalist.

You’re sensible, you’d say, frugal.

But the truth of that modern minimalism, plain for them all to see, is broke fresh grad chic, and you worry that the truth of frugal is cheap, so you eye the mombar soaking in your sink and decide you’d best add more.

You bunch your ruined t-shirt out of the way to reach into your abdomen again and, hand steady now that you know what you’re doing, with the right knife, you slice another careful handspan of intestine. You trim the fat, clean, scrub, and add it to soak with the rest. It’s a small addition, but it’s something, and mombar is the easiest to add to. You only have one stomach, and so the kersha bubbling away in a pot is all you have to offer, and while you do have a second lung for the fesha, you will still be expected to talk at the lunch table and so you need it. Best you could do was crack off two ribs, which you have marinating on the side. Your cousin Omar, who you still think of as little even though he’s joined the ranks of the gangly sons with that little spittle of hair over his upper lip, has always liked ribs best, and you can play it off as only getting enough special for him.

God, but this is such a paltry Eid meal.

Maybe you could add some liver? Some heart? You know Ammo Mounir will ask after kawarea but your feet would make poor replacement for trotters and you need them to serve the guests and, anyway, that would be too noticeable. Luckily, Tante Omaima hates kawarea so you can count on her to support you if you say you can’t stand the stuff.

The real trouble, you know full well, is the lack of proper meat, and you consider it, you do. It’s Eid, after all. Hunks of meat in fattah is the traditional thing, the easy thing, and as Khalto Samah remarked the second she swept through the door, eyeing your middle, you have more than enough to spare, don’t you?

You do. You could probably slice a few chunks from your thighs without anyone noticing. But, in truth, you don’t want to. You’re selfish like that. Some things, like your thighs, like your home, like your life, like your time, you want to keep for yourself.

So, no. No meat, and no stock to make proper fattah with either. Instead, you scrounge some half-forgotten chicken bouillon cubes from the back of your cupboard and toss them into another boiling pot to make broth. That’ll have to do.

You flip through the many recipes on your phone, trying to squint through the dried blood smeared across the screen for your next steps.

You fry your pre-chopped onion in oil until (you … think …?) it smells like it’s supposed to, drain the fesha of water and then toss that with the onions to fry as well. The recipes on your phone don’t say what the fesha’s supposed to smell and look like when it’s done so you just sort of guess, then add the garlic and tomato paste and spices in a bit of water and let it stew.

The kersha also gets fried with onion, but this you bulk up with those wilted vegetables and then, again, smother in tomato and garlic paste.

Only, fuck, this means you don’t have enough tomato paste for the fattah, so, uhhhh, a white fattah then? With just the garlic and vinegar on top? Yeah, they make that in Alexandria, don’t they? White fattah, you’ll say you like it better that way and that’s how you make it under your own roof. That’s the rules, right? Your kitchen, your preferences?

You nod to the baladi bread as you break it—yes, your kitchen, your preferences—and throw it in the oven to toast while you measure out, wash, and cook the white rice on the stove.

By then, you figure that’s been long enough for the mombar to soak and get to stuffing them with the rice-and-herb-and-onion-and-spice mixture, which is when you realise you didn’t cut the mombar evenly and also maybe prepared too much rice? Or are you under-stuffing the mombar? With the warning of cheap in the back of your mind, you decide, yeah, you’re under-stuffing the mombar and promptly fix that.

The fresh-made mombar gets boiled in spiced water briefly, then drained and fried, at which point they decide to inform you that, no, they weren’t under-stuffed before, because they promptly burst open in the hot oil, scattering their rice, and, you know what? That’s fine. That’s still fine. Crunchy rice is delicious.

Shit, the rice.

You rescue that from the stove, rescue the bread from the oven, layer those together in the pan and soak with broth, then while the second batch of mombar is bursting in the oil, you pan-fry the garlic paste and vinegar to pour on top of the fattah.

“Smells good in there!” calls Tante Noura, which you know is less a compliment and more a warning that her kids are about to start gnawing on the walls. “Need any help setting the table? Lina, go set the table.”

You know it’s no use telling Tante to let your cousin be. Such is the fate of children. But God bless small adolescent rebellions, Cousin Lina drags her feet long enough for you to hurriedly wash your hands, put on your seldom-used apron to hide the blood covering your front, before collecting the necessary mismatched plates and spoons and forks for everyone and then thrusting the whole pile out the door.

“Here you go! No need to come in, it’s—”

It’s too hot, you might have said, except that Cousin Lina, who is also now ganglier than you remember, what do they feed these kids, snatches the plate pile and cutlery before you’ve even finished the sentence. She leaves you not a single word in return, her own little selfishness, and as you watch her go in her new, no doubt itchy, Eid dress, which looks too tight and too flowy both somehow, you appreciate that she feels she can show that selfishness to you. Maybe you should keep better contact with the younger generations. See what they’re up to, teach them where they can safely hide their selfishnesses, what they can cut out without drawing too much attention. You know, dispense some of that weird never-there older cousin wisdom.

Maybe.

You fish the next batch of burst mombar out of the bubbling oil and get as much of the fallen rice out as you can, then get started on the next. What’s left, what’s left—fuck, right, the ribs. You should have started those a little earlier but your oven can only fit so much and you were toasting bread, damn it. Anyway, into the oven those go for—you swipe through to the recipe on your phone—a while. It’s fine, you can pull them out mid-meal as a surprise.

The fesha’s done, you think. The kersha’s been done for a hot second already and, do you microwave that? No, maybe put the pan back on the hob for another minute to heat it back up. Fattah’s soaked through and ready, mombar’s still piping hot and hey, the new batch didn’t burst, go you!

You arrange everything in what presentation platters and bowls you have, not as pretty as Khalto Gigi might have but still presentable. You give your face a wash, retie your hair back and, with a bright smile to mask the agony of your empty abdomen and, more importantly, your nerves, you emerge with the first of the dishes. You have no dining table, and even if you did, there wouldn’t be enough room. In the family house, you inevitably spilled over into the living room and onto the floor, so what does it matter if you start in the living room and floor this time?

The coffee table that your cousin Lina half-assedly set has to be un-set just to make room for the food. You hurry back to the kitchen before Khalto Samah can offer to get the rest, waving at them to sit down, sit down, before it gets cold! Ammo Saeed, from the depths of the beanbag he sank into, reminds you of the pickles, and thank God you have enough of those in some forgotten corner of your fridge to make a small bowl—peppers, carrots, cauliflower, olives, beets, even a saffron lemon—and set it before him.

They leave a sliver of space for you to squeeze into between them but you decline, begging off as host. Too much to do, you know? Nothing at all to do with the blood running rivulets from the jagged emptiness left behind by your stomach and lung and cut out length of intestine currently glistening on your family’s plates. Your cute fluffy house slippers can just about absorb what trickles past your trousers and feet, but if you sit there, shoulder pressing to shoulder pressing to shoulder, that blood will puddle and pool beneath you. Worse, beneath them. And then—

Then what? You don’t know. Will they ask? Will they hum concern and tsk and say see, this is why you should come home, you can’t be let out of their sight? Or will they turn a polite blind eye the way they have about the lack of actual meat on your table and no TV to watch the Eid plays and ask you instead about your work and your love life?

You can’t decide which would be worse, and so you run off to bring a jug of cold water for the table. Then you crack open those boxes of juice they brought with them to offer as well, and then go back for glasses and mugs to drink them out of. One of the littlest cousins doesn’t like fattah, it turns out, even the sauceless kind, and you’re looking for more excuses so you whisk to the kitchen to make her some plain white rice, and with it you bring those ribs.

“Bless your hands!” is said over and over in between each coming-and-going, muffled by full mouths. You’re told your stomach is delicious. Your lung is a smidge too chewy but well-seasoned. Khalto Gigi has advice for how to properly stuff your intestines next time and you try not to baulk at the idea of a next time and focus instead on the fact that she also tells you it’s a marvellous first attempt. And although your ribs seem to have been a little tough, a little overdone, Cousin Omar is gnawing on the bones enthusiastically enough that Ammo Saeed laughs and says you dote on that kid so much, no doubt you’ll spoil your own children someday.

You haven’t the lungs to argue that, this time, what with one of them being speared on the edge of his fork, and so you only smile and ask if anyone wants tea.

They do. So you make tea. You make small talk. You remain at the edges, surreptitiously wiping the blood from under your feet, and watch mouthful after mouthful disappear. The empty pain has settled into a dull throb by now, eased by how well they’re eating. You have a brief pang of regret at not frying up some liver after all, when the platters start to empty out, but the loud, performative groaning about how full they are eases that too.

It’s a kindness, even if not a truth. You take it, and when they get up to leave, earlier than they might have if you were all in the family house, conscious of the work you supposedly have tomorrow (you don’t), you press a kiss to each cheek happily and without reservation.

Ammo Saeed reminds you to call more, Khalto Samah reminds you not to overwork yourself, Tante Omaima reminds you to eat well because you look pale, and you smile and lie and say, “I will, I promise,” every time. That they don’t insist and argue is a success all of its own.

You close the door on your family’s goodbyes and sigh, relieved, into the silence they leave behind.

You throw off the apron. And the blood-crusted t-shirt that’s been sticking to your insides. You kick off the slippers, too, ruined now, and just enjoy the cool tile under your bare feet.

Right. Should clean, you suppose, or try to. You begin with the empty plates and platters, carrying them, one at a time, from the living room to your disaster of a kitchen to be washed … you don’t know, eventually, probably. One of the kids’ plates still has half a mombar on it. One of the unburst ones, claimed and abandoned after two bites. You pinch it between two fingers, turn it this way and that. It’s gone cold by now, but the golden-brown sheen does look good. Between your teeth, it yields with just that little bit of resistance, bursting spiced rice into your mouth.

Hm. Your stuffed, fried intestine isn’t half bad. Needed more salt, though.

[Editor’s Note: Publication of this story was made possible by a gift from RhodePVD during our annual Kickstarter.]

Editor: Hebe Stanton

First Reader: Ruan Etsebeth

Copy Editors: Copy Editing Department

Accessibility: Accessibility Editors