Leakage By Mona Kareem Jimena arrived in Los Angeles in the early '90s. Near America’s door, she hid behind a cactus, waiting for the guard to step out for his break so that she could leak into the land, carrying the entire world in her suitcase. At first, she lived near the beach, and picked up jobs in touristy restaurants. It is difficult for America to build doors facing the pacific ocean; practically a submerged quagmire, it gnaws at the land, the waves eroding its feet. She spent the '90s without a trace. Some thought she was a folk legend, a ghost or apparition, or perhaps a mermaid, afraid crossing too deep into the city would kill her. Whenever she leased an apartment, she made sure it had a yard. And even before settling in, unloading the boxes, and raising the curtains, Jimena would drag her suitcase to the yard, and start planting cacti of different sizes and ages—some with heads larger than their bodies—arranged in concentric circles. She would sing: Open up, flower. Shut your eyes, flower. Her garden would stop passersby in their tracks; even those who claim to abhor nature. Whenever she had to move, she would take an ax out to the garden, and the neighbors would assume she was on the brink of a massacre. If the cacti were small, she would yank them out by the soles of their feet, or else cut off a taller one's leg, or the arm of a more chubby one. With the care and tenderness of an exemplary mother, Jimena artfully plucked the limbs of her young, and the roots of her friends. She packed the remains in dirt bags, and carried them, along with her other belongings, to a new destination, where the flowers will open and shut again. This is how she took home with her wherever she went, and how she keeps the world leaking inside of her. Lot’s Wife By Mona Kareem Lot's wife stands near the entrance, deformed more radically by the artist than she had ever been by the Lord. The artist didn’t preserve her salty body; instead, he restored her in bronze, crafting a prisoner of eternity. She can’t visit the neighbors to gossip about her new visitors; she can’t even cross the gallery's threshold. Mummified and silent, she overhears fleeting conversations, surveils countenances with incurious eyes. People of various races—jinn, humans, angels, and prophets—walk past her daily. In a previous life, she squirmed when she had to carry strangers’ stories in her belly—so she wandered the neighborhood, disgorging one tale after the other. She is no longer a threat to secrets. Now, Lot’s wife pays the price for her fleeting nostalgia, her passion for the past, which compelled her to take one last look at Sodom. Looking back, she barely managed to archive the colors of her life, barely captured the morning’s scent before it went missing, together with geography. She barely swallowed the language whose extinction would render her dreams obsolete. At the border checkpoint, a migrant is not allowed to occupy herself with anything but the present moment. They said that in turning back, she had compromised the identity of the Lord. Or that in her gut, she believed Sodom innocent, wrongly battered to dust. Perhaps if she had waited until she reached the cave before letting nostalgia overwhelm her, the plot of cosmology would have gone in an entirely different direction. In fact, it might have ended in that cave, and left us in peace. Why wouldn’t the Lord understand that all she wanted was to write a poem about ruins? Is it because men have a sole claim to ruin? She looks tiny on the plinth; her head like a newborn with no talent for wailing. The artist has stripped Lot’s wife of her limbs. Perhaps he feared she would escape the gallery, and travel back to the underworld. 10