Whoever lives in the house becomes one of its people. The house pigeon does not disappear, and the house snake does not betray. This is what Basira told me two years ago from that day. My father's grandmother, or perhaps his grandmother's grandmother, I don't know, for she is very old, eternal, dwelling in the corner of the old Arab house's hall, wrapped in her blackness under the stairs.

Why under the stairs? I never asked myself about the places of things I had grown accustomed to since my birth, in an Arab house whose narrow rooms overlook an unroofed inner courtyard, the courtyard of Basira, whom I never saw open her eyes, as if her eyelids had been stitched with her lashes since eternity.

• Author: Saud Alsanousi
• Publisher: Arab Scientific Publishers-Beirut
• Year of Publication: 2017
• Pages: 182
• Parts: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• ISBN: 978-6140123779