What will we do now, Ginate Barker? [short story]

By Spun Counterguy on February 28, 2025

Southern Indiana, 1982

Mesham Kissell and Anson Cannon sat on the edge of a three-foot high encloser composed of bricks that contained several tropical plants. It was a Saturday night and the two teenaged boys were at the Westland shopping mall in Evansville, Indiana. While Mesham scoped out the various flocks of girls that passed by them, Anson’s head was down engrossed in an unfolded j-card of a cassette he had just purchased at the mall’s music store.

“Hello!”, Mesham said out loud, his cue for his friend to look up and check out the eye candy floating close by.

A perpetual nerd who hid his fear of being rejected by others- especially pretty girls- by appearing disinterested, Anson kept his eyes safely on the technical credits of whatever new wave band’s music was contained within the magnetic tape of the cassette.

Mesham shook his head at his friend. “Mit, dude! You’re missing out on all the goddesses!”

Anson finally raised his head but it was only to face his friend. “Come on Mesham, you know you’re just frustrating yourself. Beautiful women don’t give the time of day to boys like us: unattractive and unwealthy.”

Pushing out a gust of air in a display of being insulted, Mesham countered, “Speak for yourself, buddy!

“Besides”, the not Tiger-Beat cover worthy but also not ugly Mesham continued, “what women are really attracted to is confidence. Handsome and rich men are confident because of what they have, hence that’s the real reason beautiful women want them.”

Anson made a scoffing noise. “I have yet to see a self-assured ugly poor guy strutting around this mall with a Bo Derek on his arms.”

Mesham twisted his mouth in thought before countering, “But what about Dutty Carptree? His mouth only has every other of his original teeth and he repairs air condition units for a living. But every night he goes home to his single-wide trailer where his smoking-hot wife Kianna is waiting to tear his clothes off.”

With such an unpleasant picture painted in his mind, Anson made a face of one who had just put a piece of food in his mouth with hair growing out of it. The face was not made at the mental image of Kianna Carptree- who indeed was one of those beauties that somehow had blossomed in a ratty trailer park- but at the thought of Dutty pawing on his perfectly put-together wife. “Maybe she married him for the air conditioning”, the nerdy boy offered, his own family not yet having such technology.

Anson went back to studying the cassette while Mesham continued to scan the sea of mall walkers. For a split-second the latter considered the point of former, that perhaps that he was just wasting his time gazing upon beauties he could never get near, like treasures behind glass in a museum. Mesham reminded himself that Anson had been forever scarred by one specific incident which had occurred about six months before. The awkward boy had become smitten by one of the cheerleaders at their high school, who on the surface was fairly cordial to everyone no matter their social status. Being a fairly decent pianist, Anson composed a song for the girl titled after the girl’s namesake “Bella” and slipped a cassette recording of the piece into the said girl’s hand in one of the school hallways. From there Anson kept attempting to talk to the cheerleader which began to embarrass her in front of her friends. Finally, a group of football players manhandled Anson, forced his hand onto a restroom doorframe and slammed the unusually heavy door on his fingers. One of the jocks ended the encounter by adding, “Quit bothering Bella!” In spite of his two broken fingers, Anson insisted on keeping his commitment to perform at a piano recital. His chosen piece was the theme of the science fiction film, “The Black Hole”, which was perfect given its ominous tone and at times droning melodic patterns. Yet, after the fifth or sixth flubbed note, Anson began pounding the piano keys with his fists. Mesham had been in attendance and in an attempt to help alleviate his friend’s embarrassment, blurted out loud, “That last movement represented when everything got sucked into the black hole!” Some people laughed, others applauded. Still, Anson from that day onward wrote off all beautiful females as variations on Jezebel, Gertrude Baniszewski or Medussa one.

As Mesham himself continued to search for beautiful females to admire, his eyes fell upon a pair of brown eyes that had been locked onto his for a few moments already. Mesham’s irises were the color of – as he often described them- “dishwater green”, which no one had ever found notable, much less something to study for more than a second. It was only when the owner of the brown eyes’ neck became too painful from attempting to stay facing Mesham as she walked by did the female that held the visual organs turn away. Mesham was then able to take in the rest of the girl- blonde hair with dark roots, slender arms and legs slightly tanned and a small frame inside a buttoned up blouse and pleated skirt. She was one of a handful of teenagers walking together, chatting and laughing while also checking out the other youthful humans inside the retail facility.

Mesham wanted to exclaim any number of phrases of astonishments but he was left speechless. The boy’s awe was such that even the usually oblivious Anson looked up from his reading material and asked his friend whose hands were shaking slightly, “You ok, man?”

Still without ability to speak, Mesham kept his eyes from blinking until they began to sting from mall’s air conditioning blowing air upon them from somewhere up above.

“Mesham?”, Anson tried again while attempting to locate what his friend’s eyes were locked onto.

“Oh my gaa…”, Mesham finally halfway got out before shifting to what he was attempting to articulate. “We’ve got to follow that girl!”

Sensing that then was not the time to repeat his earlier well-argued points on the viciousness of attractive females, Anson stood up while folding up the j-card and putting it back into its plastic case. That done, the nerdy boy motioned that he was ready to support his friend, regardless of what a fool’s errand it probably would turn out to be.

The boys kept a good enough distance behind so as to not seem like creeps but close enough to not loose the girl and to also observe her companions. There was a mix of males and females. Given their donning of name-brand clothes, it seemed likely to Mesham that they all came from at least upper middle-class backgrounds. The other constant was that they all had jet black hair and dusty ever-so-slightly brown skin, save the blonde girl of course.

Mesham’s mind was racing to try and find a pretext to start a conversation with the girl but the only ideas he could come up with were corny and probably lifted from some popular movie plots. One thought was to grab a flower growing amongst the mall plants and present it to the blonde girl, but that seemed so cliché in addition to being out of character for Mesham. Just as the boy was about to burst out in tears from desperation, the blonde girl turned her head to look back behind her. Where Mesham was walking, she could not have seen him. He quickly moved to the other side of Anson. When the girl went to look back again, Mesham was there and ready to seize the opportunity. He smiled as again their eyes connected. The girl returned the cheerful look and seemed to laugh lightly to herself. This got the attention of her friends who all started to search around to find out what was so funny.

When the blonde turned to share an additional moment with Mesham, he raised his hands and with both index fingers pointed towards one of the offshoot hallways in the mall that contained more shops. The girl nodded and without any announcement to any of their friends, Mesham and the blonde went towards the agreed meeting point. The spot was next to a jewelry store. When the two had placed themselves in front of each other just a mere two feet or so space between them, one of the blonde’s friends called out something that sounded like a foreign language. The blonde girl shook her hand, waving away whatever was being said to her. She then said something in the same strange language, before exhaling and returning her eyes to Mesham’s.

At a totally loss for words yet feeling as if it wouldn’t matter what was said between the two, Mesham asked, “Are you hungry?”

The girl’s face lit up. “Yes, oh yes!”

Motioning with his head in the direction of the mall’s food court, Mesham said, “Let’s eat then!”

Ten minutes later the two were sat down at one of the food court tables that was cemented into the floor, the girl devouring a Greek gyro as if she hadn’t eaten in days. While Mesham slowly brought a lettuce leaf and an olive impaled together on a fork into his own mouth, he couldn’t help but smile in fascination at watching the girl eat. She might’ve been as pretty and delicate-looking as a super model, but she wasn’t afraid to chow down on a first date, which was how Mesham was regarding their encounter.

“I am…”, the girl started while trying to swallow a piece of mutton, “…so unpolite. Yet…I have been so…hungry!” While the girl’s speaking was broken up from her chewing and swallowing the food, it might’ve also been hampered by her clearly being from another country. “You see my friend…Aisha…she is on a diet…and has been trying…to become trim. We exercised earlier…today at the…arrow…air…um…how do you say…this?” The blonde became waving both arms in sync even while one hand was holding a French fry.

Mesham nodded once he got what the girl was getting at. “Aerobics?”

The blonde girl nodded vigorously. “Oh yes! That is correct.”

While the two continued to eat, other than small bits of verbal exchange, Mesham and the girl mostly kept glancing into each other’s eyes, grinning and then laughing. For Mesham it was as if they had finally found each other, even though they still didn’t know each other’s names.

After all the food was gone, the two got up, Mesham quickly putting their trays in the slots above some trash cans.

“How is my face?”, the girl asked before they returned to the flow of mall walkers.

Mesham wanted to report to her that it was beautiful and perfect but that’s not what she was asking. Noticing a spot of mutton grease near her mouth, Mesham instinctively wiped it away with the sleeve of his button shirt. The girl smiled in gratitude before looking Mesham over. She finding some imperfection in the boy’s hair, the blonde girl let her fingers dance upon his head until she was satisfied. Their gestures- albeit seemingly trivial- felt to Mesham at least as if they had the kind of familiarity with each other only couples having been married for several years possessed.

“So, where are you from”, Mesham queried as the two moved back into the flow of mall foot traffic, finally getting to the most obvious question.

“I…am from Egypt”, the girl explained, she watching the boy’s face for what reaction this information might produce.

Mesham couldn’t help but make a perplexed face, he wondering if the girl was making a joke, he not aware of Egyptians able to produce blonde hair.

The girl caught the look but didn’t know how to ask what the boy was confused about.

“Well…”, Mesham returned, “…I…am from Indiana.”

This made the girl laugh heartily, her body jerking some which caused a tuft of what was apparently the rare phenomenon of blonde Egyptian hair to kick up into the air before fluttering down.

“My name is Mesham Kissell”, the boy went on, extending his hand.

The girl lightly shook the offered hand, which sent a tingling sensation into every point of Mesham’s body. “Mee-sham…Kiss-uhl”, she repeated aloud, as if practicing. “My name is…Ginate Barker”, the girl reported, her eyes searching Mesham’s face again to catch his reaction.

Clearly this was not the girl’s birth name, Mesham thought to himself. Perhaps it was the Egyptian girl’s chosen English name while out of her home country. There had been a Chinese exchange student at Mesham and Anson’s high school who initially reported that his name was “Tom And Jerry”. When the Chinese national was pressed to explain his strange, un-Chinese name, he explained that he had chosen it for himself to better blend into the America culture. In time, Tom And Jerry began to speak and understand English better, enough to begin shortening his name to just Tom.

“This…”, the girl continued, “…is not my…first name. But you could perhaps…not say my Egypt name.”

“Can I hear your Egyptian name?”, Mesham pressed.

“Oh yes!”, the girl responded, excited that this American boy was wanting to know her true identity. The girl gave the name, which rolled in the air in beautiful and exotic tones, yet also immediately slid off of Mesham’s brain.

“I love your name.”, Mesham reported, before adding, “but you’re right: I am going to have to practice pronouncing it.”

The girl nodded, her eyes locking with Mesham’s again, it setting off a frenzy of pin pricks in both of their bodies. The two teenager’s faces flushed red before the they looked away from each other and took in the various other visuals in the mall, ranging from neon store signs to other mall-goers wearing their most current fashionable clothes.

“What do you know…much…about my country?”, the girl asked while realizing she had used incorrect English grammar.

As if on cue, Mesham’s eyes first landed on a television screen displayed in the window of an electronic appliance store playing the strange pyramid-heavy music video to Steve Winwood’s “While you see a chance” before passing onto a marquee advertising that Raiders of the Lost Ark was still playing at the movie theater at the opposite end of the mall. Mesham grinned and shrugged. “A little”, he reported to the girl, who given the expression on her face was inviting the boy to display his knowledge. Truth was he mostly only knew what most American kids knew about Egypt: King Tut, mummies, the pyramids, jackals and so on. Mesham had had a black female co-worker at a hobby store job the year before who wore a necklace with the image of a woman and some writing in hieroglyphics. When Mesham asked the girl about what the necklace was all about, she explained to him that the woman was Queen Nefertiti and that the hieroglyphics were how one wrote her name. The co-worker also went on to inform Mesham, “In Africa, all black people were kings and queens”. Mesham found the girl’s assertion confusing and asked, “If everybody was royalty, who were the king and queens’ servants and slaves?” The co-worker became irritated at what she perceived to be some evidence of racism lurking in Mesham’s genetic makeup and so gave Mesham the cold shoulder for their remaining time together at the shop.

All to say, the young man with great humility admitted his limited pop culture understanding of Egyptian civilization to this Ginate Barker. The blond girl nodded with a smile indicated that this revelation was no surprise. “Yes, everyone knows these things…about my country. But our last Pharoah…died a few years before…Jesus the Christ was born. We have had…mmmm…2000 more years of…history that we are not famous for.”

Mesham sighed before broaching a subject he feared he might regret. “Well, I do remember Anwar Sadat.”

The girl’s face lit up some, conveying that she was impressed but then the look dropped to that of sadness. “Yes, it is so terrible…what they did to him.”

Anwar Sadat had been the president of Egypt until he was assassinated by anti-Semitic radicals in his own army on October of the previous year.

With a great desire to scare off the foul mood which now hung in the air, Mesham’s mind raced for something to say or do. Suddenly he suggested, “Would you like to go bowling, Ginate Barker?”

The girl looked at Mesham with a half-smile as she clarified, “That is where you…roll the ball and hit the…dice?” The girl could see the pins in her mind but didn’t know the English word for them.

“Yes, that’s the game”, Mesham nodded, being sensitive not to show too much of a smile, least the girl think that he was laughing at her struggle with the English language. He had no room to find amusement in her struggle, he himself having taken two semesters of Spanish and yet still couldn’t make any meaningful conversation with any of the Hispanic staff at the local Mexican restaurants.

“I have always…dreamed on rolling the bowling ball and hitting the…” The girl stopped herself from repeating the incorrect term.

“Pins”, Mesham assisted.

The girl’s brow furled, she visualizing inks pens or sewing pins. Perhaps they were talking about two different games. No matter, the girl thought. She would just enjoy playing any game with this boy who had awakened something unknown inside of her.

Mesham and Ginate found their respective friends at different points in the mall and informed them all that they were going to walk to the nearby bowling alley and that they were all free to go on with their evening without them. Anson asked aloud how his friend was going to get himself home given that he had no vehicle and their hometown was about a 30-minute drive. The answer given by the lovestruck Mesham was a simple shrug.

The excursion to the bowling alley was full of fun and wonder for the foreign girl, she taking in all the cacophony of rolling balls and pins being smashed, far off pinball machines’ bleeps and dings, pop music blaring from mounted speakers and of course the bleats of happy humans winning and moans of those losing. Ginate caught on fast to the skill the game required and after a few rolls she began to cease throwing gutter balls. Every spare and strike earned Mesham a loose embrace from the girl’s wispy frame. The unidentifiable scent which was in the girl’s blonde hair Mesham imagined to himself to be the fragrance of some rare Egyptian desert flower.

A song came over the speakers that entranced Ginate enough that she began to let her hips move back and forth lightly as she picked up the returning ball. Perhaps it was the bowling shoes but Mesham observed a slightly off-kilter manner in her swaying. To the smitten boy, it was adorable.

The song playing was After the Fire’s “Whose gonna love you?”, the lyrics asking with the subtly of a cement truck, “Whose gonna love you when you’re old and fat and ugly?” The message of the song caused Mesham to laugh out loud, which immediately caused Ginate to cease her dancing, her face assuming that the boy had found her swaying more amusing than pleasing.

“No, no!”, Mesham insisted. “I’m not laughing at you, I promise! It’s this song!”

The girl was suspicious until the third verse came around and repeated the initial query, to which Mesham sang along so that she could decipher the lyrics clearly. A smile broke across Ginate’s face when she understood both the song’s meaning and that Mesham had been telling the truth regarding the catalyst for his laughter. The boy wanted to answer the singer’s question out loud with, “Me! I will love Ginate Barker when she’s old and fat and ugly!” but instead looked down at the remaining pins still standing and reminded the girl that she had another roll to go.

After they played two more games, Mesham realized that even though he wished to never part from the girl for as long as they lived, he needed to be a responsible gentleman and see that Ginate got home. He didn’t have enough money for a taxi and so suggested that they walk to her house.

“It is very far…”, the girl explained, “…perhaps…um, 10 kilometers.”

“I don’t mind”, the boy replied while shaking his head, “if you don’t.”

The girl gave another one of her adoring looks. “I do not mind, Mee-sham Kiss-uhl.”

About a mile into the trek, Mesham asked if the girl knew any traditional Egyptian dances, he expecting something involving plenty of hip shaking and requiring finger symbols.

“Oh yes!”, Ginate explained. “I study dance…for since I was a small girl!”

The girl began a kind of prancing while twisting her hips some but it was far from the salacious jiggles that Arab harem women were seen doing in Hollywood movies. Mesham began clapping out a beat, which got the girl to blaring out a kind of celebratory chant.

“You”, Mesham got out after the dance was completed, “are just a perfect specimen of a human being. If they ever are able to populate planets in the future, I nominate you to be the genetic matriarch of them all.”

Ginate smiled as her brain processed what she thought Mesham was saying before vigorously shaking her blonde hair in disagreement. “No, no. I am no perfect.” The girl then kicked off her shoes and let her arms fall straight down perpendicular with her legs. “You see?”

Mesham slowly shook his head, he certainly noticing that something was off but not being able to put his finger on it.

“My legs…are not the same”, the girl explained. “This leg”, Ginate said patting her left leg, “is taller than the…this one.” The blonde girl then walked around a bit which betrayed that indeed she had a slight limp. “I was born with…different tall legs. I have these to help.” The girl reached for her right shoe and pulled out an object that Mesham guessed helped offset the length difference.

The boy shrugged and laughed lightly. “Well, if that’s all that’s wrong with you, that ain’t too bad.”

Ginate nodded. “Yes, some other people have many…not perfect problems.”

A van pulled up to a stop near where Mesham and Ginate were about to cross a street. Looking up, the blond girl twisted her face as if she had just found an earthworm in her ice cream. Mesham followed her gaze, which was on the van side that displayed an airbrushed reproduction of the album cover of Journey’s Captured.

“These are…”, the girl pointed at the images within some circles, “…pests in my homeland.”

At first Mesham thought she was talking about the band Journey themselves, as if five American rockers had somehow offended the nation of Egypt. But then it dawned on the boy that Ginate was referring to the bugs on the album cover- scarab beetles to be specific. Mesham laughed to himself, he amused at yet another instance of some aspect of Egyptian culture being referenced in America’s popular culture.

“Your Egyptian name”, Mesham queired as they moved on, “do you write it in hieroglyphs?”

By the look on the girl’s face, she didn’t understand the boy’s meaning. Seeing that they were passing by the dusty front window of a business proclaiming itself to be Micky Williams’ Machine Repair Shop, Mesham attempted to imitate what he remembered the ancient Egyptian writing system looking like. He drew an eyeball, a perched bird, an ankh, a tic-tac-toe symbol and finally a sun with a smiling face. When the blonde girl realized what the boy was trying to write, she burst out laughing, especially at the sight of the grinning sun.

“Well…we don’t write like this…anymore”, the girl explained as she stepped up to the window with her longest finger beginning to make some markings. “But…I can write…the sounds of my name.” The result to Mesham was as if the girl had written the secret name of God on the dirty plate-glass.

A few blocks later Ginate was in the middle of explaining that her mother had died so long ago that she had no memory of the woman. The blonde girl paused as a large flatbed truck rumbled by loaded down with enormous slabs of limestone. Once the noise drifted away, Ginate resumed by relaying some additional information about her father. Next she revealed that she had shared the space in her mother’s womb with a twin sister but for reasons unknown it was born dead.

There was another interruption, this time by the sight of a group of maybe five or six people gathered around a tree in someone’s front yard, all heads looking up at something a couple of flashlight beams were aimed at. From where they were on the sidewalk, Ginate and Mesham could not see what the commotion was about. A twenty-something man in a wife beater shirt glanced over from under the tree and using a hand with a cigarette fitted between his fingers motioned for the couple to come have a look. When the boy and girl got under the tree they became just as amazed as those already gathered around. There was some kind of furry creature with large eyes and twisted antelope-like horns pulling butterflies out of a hole in the tree and eating them as if they were candy. All of the faces below appeared to intrigue the animal but not enough to for it to stop eating the insects.

“What is…it’s name”, Ginate asked aloud.

Everyone present either shook their heads or shrugged. The man with the cigarette explained, “We don’t know what it is but we see it every once in a while, usually at night. The zoo is a few miles from here so it might’ve escaped from there.”

The big-eyed creature began rubbing its eyes, perhaps from the irritation the lights shinning into them brought.

“My name’s Nathan”, the man with the cigarette said to Ginate, holding out a hand that wasn’t clouded in smoke.

Ginate pulled her gaze down from the animal and nodded at the man, only shaking the offered hand with a limp touch. “I am Ginate and this is Mesham”, the girl replied while intertwining her hands and arms around one of Mesham’s.

Looking straight at the girl’s gesture, Nathan held up his hands as if pleading he not be shot, while returning, “I get the message!” Then extending his hand to Mesham, the cigarette man commended, “Nice goin’, bud! She’s a keeper!”

Mesham grinned wide, nodding in wholehearted agreement.

Ginate and Mesham finally ended their trek halfway down an upper middle class suburban block in front of a solid black metal gate set at the middle of a brick wall that along with the vines that rode along its surface obscured whatever kind of home that lay on the other side.

Turning to look up at the boy, Ginate bit her lip while her eyes searched Mesham’s, her expression shifting between awe and despair. “What…will we do now, Mee-sham Kiss-uhl?”, the girl asked, obviously not about that present moment but in regards to the rest of their lives.

Mesham wanted to blurt out that they should find a holy man and get married at that very moment. But after taking in a good honeysuckle-scented breath, the boy began processing what the best next move should be. “We just agree to meet again. How about next week at the same mall at the same time? Then after that, we agree to another date, and then another and another until we set a time to get married, and then we’ll try to set a time to make a baby, which will probably be followed by more babies and then…” Mesham’s faced flushed hot at realizing what he’d just gushed out to the beautiful near-stranger. He shrugged and then gave Ginate a look that conveyed that he did not regret any of what he had just said.

“That…”, the girl responded in between more laughter that kicked up her blonde angel-like hair, “…is a good plan. I agree with it. I love…your plan, Mee-sham…Kiss-uhl.”

With that, the girl embraced the boy snuggly but briefly and then used a key to unlock a door next to the gate. Before passing through the doorway, Ginate Barker gave one last look of starry-eyed adoration for Mesham. It was an image that would become burned into his memory for many years to come.

Mesham began the long walk home, feeling happier than he’d ever felt in his entire young life, in spite of the fact that he perhaps would not reach his home until the morning. When a man in a pickup truck stopped to offer Mesham a ride, the boy thought that God- whoever or whatever He was- was truly smiling upon him.

The driver of the truck shook his head and chuckled some after a mile shared with Mesham. “The only thing I can figure that can make a man look as stupid as you look right now is a woman!”, the man assessed. Then holding up his hand offering a high-five, “Congratulations, son! Cherish it before it all turns into a torture chamber.”

Mesham slapped that man’s hand and smiled appreciatively, in spite of the cynical tag-on comment. Adults were always saying jaded stuff like that to anyone who would listen. Mesham promised himself that he would not be that kind of adult when the time came.

The week until their next date couldn’t come quick enough but finally Mesham placed himself at the at the agreed meeting spot, about 15 minutes till the agreed upon time. Every face with long blonde hair that passed by, the boy searched to see if it was Ginate’s. Yet none were. In time his watch read 6:10. Ginate obviously was running late, but didn’t most girls, especially if they were wanting to look their best? Yes, that was probably it. Anson was always talking about how his sisters would pull out every piece of their clothing from their closets before a Saturday night and debate as to what was the optimum combination, as if they were making sure they had all the right equipment to get themselves to the moon.

When 6:30 rolled around, Mesham began to wonder if something terrible had happened to the girl. He had heard that parents from traditionally Muslim countries were very strict and so considered that they may’ve put the kibosh on Ginate going out with an infidel. But then again, the two never talked religion during their one evening together. She very well could’ve been a Christian, an atheist or even a worshiper of the ancient Egyptian god Ra. Mesham himself had not sided with any of the major deities and so thought that he could adapt to whatever the girl’s beliefs were, if need be.

The wondering on whether the two young people’s differing religion or culture would either turn out to be an obstacle or an adventure in their relationship helped eat up time for a few moments but when Mesham’s watch read 6:45, a deep sadness began to set in. Maybe the girl hadn’t been as interested in him as she had expressed the week before or perhaps she had worried about trying to maintain a long distance relationship, especially if she still spent part of her time in Egypt.

Then Mesham considered the possibility that the girl had misunderstood the meeting time. He didn’t know what the time was in Egypt but maybe they were an hour behind. Or ahead, which would’ve made Mesham the late one. No, that was dumb, the teenager realized. While he had never been out of the country, he assumed that surely the time in Egypt was more off than an hour this way or that.

Nonetheless, Mesham decided that 7:00 would probably be the time when he would have to accept on whether the girl was coming or not.

7:00 arrived, which was followed by 7:01, then 7:02, then 7:05, then 7:10. At 7:20 Mesham accepted that he had misjudged both the girl who called herself Ginate Barker and the deep connection they had appeared to have had. He felt like such a fool. Anson had been right all along- girls like Ginate just didn’t have a real interest in guys like Mesham. Thus, the boy sadly made his way towards the mall entrance nearest where he had parked his parents’ Lincoln Town Car. Still, on the three-minute walk, Mesham’s eyes homed in on every female head that held blonde hair, in the faint hope that Ginate’s face would ultimately materialize. At one point the boy thought he heard a female call out his name but when he turned back to look, found it was just a laughing brunette calling a male friend an obscene name.

Mesham left the mall and intended to head straight to the house that he had dropped Ginate off at the week before. But locating the home was a challenge given that terrain appears much differently when one is walking and in love when compared to when one is driving and feeling panicked. Yet after an hour, Mesham found the spot, which was 345 Brooks Avenue. It was difficult to see with the brick wall and gate cradling the home but it seemed that all the lights of the house were out. Oh, the boy thought, something must have came up for Ginate and her family. Why he didn’t give the girl his phone number on the first night of their meeting Mesham could only explain away as a symptom of being gobsmacked. It was not a fatal mistake, the boy trusting that the connection that the two both admitted to feeling would put them back together soon. He quickly found a discarded fast-food receipt laying on the floorboard of his parent’s car and jotted down a note reading, “For Ginate. Call me when you can. M.K. (812)555-7021” The boy almost drew a heart or a flower but thought better of the gesture, in case an overprotective father or brother found the note first.

His own writing fresh in his mind, Mesham next drove around desperately looking for the machine shop- whose name he couldn’t rememver- with the dirty window that both he and Ginate had written on with their fingers. Once he spied the home where the butterfly-eating animal had been up in the tree, the teenager located the shop. By the looks of it someone had finally gotten around to wiping off the glass, the surface looking pristine, free from smudges and hieroglyphics both.

All the same, Mesham made his way home, trusting that in the next few days everything would get cleared up.

Days passed and no phone calls came in from Ginate Barker. Mesham wore out his family at his asking every day after school whether there had been any messages for him. On the Thursday of that week, Mesham decided that he would go to the mall that coming Saturday and wait in the same spot at the same time. Anson insisted on coming along, “So I can tell this girl off for treating you like dirt!” After Mesham made his nerdy friend promise not to become confrontational should Ginate show herself, Anson promised to behave. It all made no difference, since the girl did not show up on that night either. Anson insisted they explore the mall and roads where all the teenagers in the city cruised in their cars, the angry friend hoping to catch the girl in the process of leading some other boy on so that he could tell her off. But Ginate Barker was nowhere to found.

From that time on, Mesham ceased talking about the girl to Anson. While internally the boy was trying to understand what had happened and what all of it meant, outwardly Mesham acted as if all he needed was a little time to forget the girl. Yet whenever Mesham was in the city he both stopped by the mall and drove past the house on Brooks Avenue, neither gesture ever bearing any fruit. Instinctively Mesham decided to begin writing down everything he could remember about Ginate Barker, as if he was creating a file. Her physical description, facts about her life that she had relayed, the address of her house and so on. The boy had been in such awe of the girl on that evening that he hadn’t properly heard everything she had said to him or observed every detail that might’ve helped locate her if say the police were to ever ask for help in finding her. But Mesham’s subconscious must have paid better attention because the more that he wrote, the more he remembered. She had been born in Saudia Arabia. Her father was an oil consultant for various governments and companies. She had worked for a modeling agency, which mostly got her work posing in sportswear for department store newspaper ad inserts. Once the agency sent her in a jumpsuit covered in patches to pass out samples of fried chicken at a racetrack. She had been in the hospital for a minor surgery and the drugs made her think that turtles with wings were flying above her bed. She had a dog in Egypt that on one occasion followed her to school, ended up on the roof of the school building and injured its leg when it tried to jump down. The fall had also apparently affected its barking so that from then on out the dog sounded like it was saying, “Mark mark!” Her brother died of what Ginate described as a “medicine problem” in Daytona Beach, Florida.

One day Mesham drove by the house on Brooks Avenue only to discover that there were moving trucks in the driveway. After he got parked and made out as if he was on a purposeless walk, the boy found that a family was moving in. Sensing an opportunity, Mesham approached one of the men hauling some boxes out of a truck and introduced himself, as if he lived in the neighborhood. The man was polite and visibly warmed by the teenaged boy’s greeting, he putting down the boxes so to shake Mesham’s hand. The two chatted for a moment, Mesham learning that the family had come from Virginia, while the man learned from the boy about some of the fun things to do in Evansville. Mesham then offered to help with carrying in the contents of the truck, which the man did not turn down.

The family- a mom, dad and three young children- were very friendly to Mesham, they insisting at some point that he take a break and share in some pizza that had just been delivered. They all sat at a patio table next to an indoor swimming pool, the chlorine competing with the pepperoni for domination of everyone’s nostrils.

As the loading-in recommenced, at every chance that Mesham was left alone in some room in the house only containing piles of cardboard boxes, he quickly scanned the spaces for some sign of the previous tenants; there were none. Even a stray strand of blonde hair hanging from the ceiling fans or balled up in a corner would’ve been some tangible evidence that the girl hadn’t been some kind of phantom. Mesham attempted to comfort himself that at least he was breathing the same air that Ginate had drawn in and exhaled or that possibly her voice had at one time caused the walls there to vibrate. Every so often Mesham let his hands drag across the said walls, as if his skin could play the voice of Ginate Barker back like a needle within a vinyl record groove.

Mesham learned just from his conversations with the new family which realtor company had sold them the house and so the next chance he got, the boy entered one of the branch offices. Understandably, the agents were protective of their clients and would not give out any personal information to the teenager. This incensed Mesham that more than likely the name of Ginate’s father was written on a form inside a filing cabinet just a few feet away from his eyes. As soon as he left the agency office, Mesham drove straight a Waldenbooks and bought a copy of Watergate burglar G. Gordan Liddy’s autobiography Will, which had just been released the year before. Maybe the book could aid the teenager in learning how to break into the realtor’s office.

After Mesham came to his senses, the next step he took in his quest to find the vanished girl was to save up his money so as that he could pay a police sketch artist to make an depiction of the girl. This took a month or so of not buying sodas, fast food or any of the other things Mesham usually wasted his money on. It was amazing how close the sketch came to looking like the girl. Even though the image of Ginate brought a twinge of pain to Mesham every time his eyes came across the picture, he still had the thing framed and it went up on the wall of wherever the boy lived for the next few years.

In time with all of his leads and ideas dried up, Mesham began to grasp at the faintest of connections to the girl that might have brought him closer to understanding her or why she might have vanished into thin air. Before Ginate Barker had appeared in his life, Mesham’s passion was feeding his personal philosophical outlook, which he called “Futurism”. Humanity’s best days were ahead of it, that is if it could discard certain ancient idols that threatened to drag it back into the firey pits where humans had been sacrificed. Mesham subscribed to OMNI and Popular Science magazines. He had read all of the speculative fiction novels of Ray Bradbury, Ayn Rand, Jerry Pournelle and Larry Niven. Before Ginate Barker, Mesham’s home stereo was usually commanded by rock bands like Rush and Yes who often sang about advanced civilizations on other planets. When these rock symphonies weren’t thundering in his bedroom, synthesizer-based music was flowing from the boy’s speakers, Mesham once getting into a heated argument with Anson over whether Isao Tomita’s electronic interpretation of Holst’s The Planets was superior to the original orchestral version. Before Ginate Barker, Mesham had even began working on a research paper exploring why the image of earth’s moon- when viewed through most human’s ocular organs- triggered emotions of sadness or loneliness while high resolution color photographs of some of the moons of Jupiter tended to trigger no emotion when viewed through the same human ocular organs. Perhaps not the most earthshattering of theories but still not bad for a high schooler.

Now, because of his devotion to the missing Ginate Barker, the boy’s focus went into an entirely different direction. Mesham began to educate himself on modern Egypt but all he could find at the libraries and bookstores were historical accounts of the nation’s recent struggles to catch up economically and technologically with the Europe and North America, in addition to attempting to embrace democracy. Political science stuck in the teenage boy’s brain as unsuccessfully as Ginate’s Egyptian name had. Thus, Mesham felt he had no recourse but to begin delving into Egypt’s ancient glory days. Mesham repeatedly re-watched Raiders of the Lost Ark after buying the film on VHS tape, his eyes scanning crowds in the scenes in Egypt for the off chance that Ginate’s face was somewhere amongst their numbers. Anson of course had to be the wet blanket by pointing out that the scenes in the film that were supposed to be in Egypt were actually in Tunisia. Only a nerd like Anson would know such a factoid but apparently there was some connection for the film’s writer George Lucas to Tunisia given that the Tatooine scenes in Star Wars were also filmed in the said north African nation.

Then Mesham became obsessed with playing the variety of Egyptian-themed video games with titles like Pharaoh’s Curse, Sands of Egypt and Tutankham. There was even a computer game that Anson had on his home computer called Pyramid of Doom, it owning no graphics or images whatsoever, just words. “Text adventure”, is how Anson had described it. To Mesham it was like playing a book. Nonetheless the lovesick boy trudged through the game whenever he spent the night at Michell’s house. Even though the creators of all of these games were probably just suburban, Coca Cola-guzzling geeks in America who had never made a single footprint in the sands in Egypt, their productions were helping Mesham get familiar with images, names, words and concepts that were at least vaguely connected to the far-off ancestorial civilization of the girl he missed every moment of his life.

Anson, though still prejudiced against all females with gorgeous exteriors, became intrigued by the strange disappearance of Ginate Barker in spite of Mesham no longer wanting to talk about it. The nerdy friend began making more serious suggestions to his gloomy friend. One day Anson arrived at their high school with a duffel bag full of books about Egypt that he happened to own. Some were of the far-fetched UFOs-built-the-pyramids variety, but others were legitimate works focusing on the findings of archaeologist Howard Carter, folklorist Margaret Murray and other legitimate academics. Anson also persuaded one of his uncles who was a cop to search various data bases- including criminal and driver’s license records- to see if there was a record of anyone using the uniquely spelled name of Ginate Barker. The only hits that came up was a 87-year-old black-female in North Carolina who was living in a nursing home and a 30-year-old white woman in Oregon, the latter having died in 1971.

Later Anson suggested that his friend put an ad in the newspaper or personals asking for any information about the missing girl. Even if the female who called herself Ginate Barker was back in her homeland, surely someone in the area who had known her might respond. Mesham thought it was a good idea but was too prideful to allow himself to be so vulnerable. Instead, every so often when he had the extra cash, Mesham would create an advertisement for some entity that didn’t exist while working in the girl’s name somewhere. Using a post office box address that his parents rented, Mesham took out ads presenting Ginate Barker as a proprietor of a gyro catering service, a dance instructor, a matchmaker who specialized in aiding “old and fat and ugly” lonely hearts in finding their soul mates and as a scarab exterminator even. Surprisingly the newspaper ad sales staff never questioned the odd business services being offered by a woman who apparently was a jack of all trades. Other than kicking up a few legitimate letters from potential customers looking to hire Ginate Barker for her apparent varied skills, there was never any communications from the girl herself or anyone claiming to have known her.

Before Ginate Barker had upended his life, Mesham had planned on joining the United States military with hopes of migrating over into NASA at some point. Instead, when Mesham graduated high school later that year, he enrolled at a university and majored in archaeology while minoring in Egyptology. While it would’ve been very embarrassing for Mesham if he were to admit to anyone in the university’s humanities department that he had chosen his academic path because of an obsession for a beautiful female he’d only met once, the young man felt more at ease when he learned that probably 75 percent of the other students in his classes were there because they had become obsessed with Indiana Jones.

His third year in the program, Mesham found himself at an excavation site near the Valley of the Kings in Egypt. Considering his emersion in the ancient Egyptian civilization, the experience was a surreal living dream, to say the least. Being in the land where Ginate Barker hailed from, with the possibility of either running into the girl herself or someone who might’ve known her, kept the boy’s mind racing fast for nearly the entire month he was there. Try as he might, he found no trace of the girl’s existence in Egypt either, although he did spot a few of the other rare blonde-haired Egyptians that existed in the modern nation.

The intensity of his studies finally burned away in Mesham’s mind the hope that he would ever see the girl again. He came to just hope that somewhere along this path in life he had been jarred into that he might at the very least come to understand what had happened to the girl. Even if Mesham were to learn that Ginate’s father had arranged for her to be married to some rich Saudi or that her body had been crushed by the car of a drunk driver, at least he wouldn’t have to continue wondering. In both scenarios the young man’s heart would be devastated but at least the matter would be finally closed. This desire for knowing the truth- no matter how tragic or embarrassing- especially came up when any other girl at the university would flirt with Mesham. The young man did agree to go out on some dates but even as innocent as he kept the interactions with these other girls, the outings still felt like exercises in betrayal.

Mesham graduated from university in just three years and immediately went to work at a museum in the town of Carbondale, Illinois. While simultaneously working on completing his masters, daily the young man got to look through boxes of relics that the Heritage Museum of Histories had acquired over the years through various means. Mesham also gave tours of the facility to special guests. The southern region of Illinois had been dubbed “Little Egypt” by a Baptist minister in the late 1700s given its similarity to the flood plains of the Nile Valley. Hence, there had been a great effort on the part of the museum to acquire more Egyptian relics than those from other cultures, which is why Mesham was hired in the first place.

It was while the young man was in his first few months into his museum career that he decided to accept another shift in his thinking. While Ginate Barker was never going to re-enter his life, Mesham was able to salvage from that sad reality that their meeting had served a purpose, the young man having entered a field of work where he thrived and was always being told how alive he made history for others when he talked of ancient customs, epic political power struggles and lost languages. Perhaps Mesham would not have had the intellectual skills to get in at a place like NASA or if he had, he may’ve hated working for a sluggish government bureaucracy that even the world’s best space program was said to have suffered from. Thus, in spite of the heartbreak and the inordinate amount of hours wasted on wondering and pining, Mesham had learned to become grateful for the brief encounter with the girl. Feeling that he had paid his debt of devotion to Ginate Barker- as if she had been some ancient goddess- Mesham finally took the girl’s framed image down off of his apartment wall and inserted it in between some books on a shelf. The shackles from his mind loosed, Mesham threw himself even more into his passion for his job and actually began to experience days where he never thought of the girl.

The space in his brain that was now freed up became devoted to a new master of sorts. In spite of his shift from studying the future towards digging into the past, Mesham’s thinking as to what was the particular idol that held humanity back from its full potential was still strong and had become even more pronounced while immersing himself in ancient Egyptian thinking and history. That idol was authoritarianism or statism. In the modern age one could be seen manifested in communist slave states, religious theocracies and military dictatorships. In the ancient Egyptian culture this same regressive stumbling block could be seen in their blind devotion to the absolute power of the monarchs. At times Mesham found all the wonder of the Egyptian architectural and culture achievements a bit depressing, considering how much greater the nation might’ve been, had their focus not been on the worship of and devotion to the desires and whims of these handful of monarchs which often trumped the basic needs of their multitude of subjects. All of which led Mesham to work on a theory that was quickly turning into a thesis: what parts of ancient Egyptian culture might have been compatible with a government that limited its own power while still being able to protect and foster the potential and liberty of individuals? And what might such a civilization look like? Most of the professors at his university that Mesham ran the proposal by pulled faces that looked as if they had just taken in the stench of expired meat and surmised that his quest was a fool’s errand. After writing an Egyptian academic he had met during the excavation trip, the scholar wrote back that Mesham’s best bet for the thesis was concentrating on the anomalous Pharaoh Akhenaten. When Mesham discovered the unique-to-ancient-Egypt life and ideas of the Pharoah, he wondered why none of his professors had mentioned the man in all of his years of study. He also laughed out loud when he realized that Akhenaten was married to the aforementioned Nefertiti .

Anson came to visit Mesham a handful of times there in Southern Illinois, the former quite proud of his old friend in his new station in life. The adult version of the nerd always arrived with his young wife in tow, Anson on multiple occasions boasting on the girl’s sensibility, intelligence and plain appearance. Anson repeated this latter trait of the new Mrs. Cannon on more occasions than Mesham thought was wise or sensitive. The dumpy, unattractive wife appeared not to be offended by the back-handed compliments of her husband but Mesham was sure that deep down the constant reminder of her lack of attractiveness had to have stung a little.

In spite of Anson’s lack of sensitivity to his wife, he was empathetic with Mesham enough not to ever bring up the subject of Ginate Barker or point out on how this girl had certainly prematurely aged his friend. The two were able to talk nostalgically about their youth while skillfully dancing around the bomb and subsequent crater left by the blonde girl.

One day into his second year at the Heritage Museum of Histories, Mesham would find himself at the helm of a great discovery in the area of Egyptology, thanks to a flat tire. A state patrolman in Kentucky had stopped to assist a large box truck that had ran over a small woodscrew. The men who had been operating the truck began to get nervous and jittery around the trooper and so sensing that something was amiss, the officer asked permission to inspect the contents of the container. The men seemed resigned and agreed, though they also appeared to the trooper to be eyeing various avenues of escape. Opening the back of the truck revealed mostly electronic machines ranging from Xerox copiers to fax machines and a few computers. All of the equipment had metal tags claiming that the Badawi Telecommunications Company of Evansville, Indiana were the owners of the said machines. Given that their phone number was etched into the tags, the trooper asked dispatch to give the company a call to see if they were missing any equipment. Indeed, the company had experienced a break in, the dispatch officer relayed. The men from the truck immediately bolted into the woods.

In addition to the stolen office machines, there were also inside the truck several wooden crates, some the length and size of coffins. These containers also claimed to have owners but instead were branded by burned-in logos of the Heritage Museum of Histories. Inside were a collection of mummies and skeletons along with their various afterlife furniture. When the Kentucky detective put on the case questioned Badawi officials on whether the wooden crates could have been on the company premises when the thieves had stolen the office machines, the chief operating officer insisted absolutely not. The detective found the denials questionable, given Badawi Telecommunication Company’s Arabic-sounding name, it having for its logo an image of an Egyptian-style eagle with scrolls in each talon and the glaring fact that the Evansville branch was housed in an office building shaped like a pyramid. Only a moron could’ve missed the coincidence.

When the detective inquired on whether the Heritage Museum of Histories had experienced any break-ins, even Mesham’s boss who had been at the institution for over ten years couldn’t remember ever having anything significant going missing. Yet clearly the crates had belonged to the center. The museum director got to thinking and managed to locate the previous manager who was by then living in a retirement facility in Florida. Yes, he said there had been significant robbery and even remembered the date: November 22, 1963. This was an easy date to remember, given it was the day that the self-proclaimed Marxist Lee Harvey Oswaldo assassinated President John Kennedy. Given the shock the nation had received that day, the theft of some old bones didn’t seem all that important at the time.

Mesham was put on as the lead for examining the recovered relics, with the eventual aim of making a new exhibit featuring the lost artifacts. “The Stolen Relics of the Heritage Museum of Histories” and “Graverobbers of Sais and Carbondale”, were a few titles the young man toyed around with in his mind, he imaging them written in the Indiana Jones movie marquee font.

After studying the original museum reports from the early 1960’s and making his own observations, Mesham made appointments for a handful of the mummies at a local hospital to get x-rayed. It might make visitors emphasize with the centuries-dead individuals if they could see modern medical technology applied to the still very human bodies. Mesham also brought in some budding forensic facial reconstruction art students to get a speculative look at what some of these ancient Egyptians might have looked like.

Mesham and his team all came to a collective conclusion, based on all the data formed by themselves combined with the records of the collection since it had been discovered near Sais, Egypt. This particular group of formerly lost human specimens had all been from the household of a minor Egyptian official. When the official had died of unknown causes, many of his staff- including guards, servants and concubines- had been sacrificed so that they could serve their master in the afterlife. This grisly custom was not exclusively an Egyptian practice and had been found in other civilizations as well. Admittedly, many on Mesham’s team expressed sad sympathy with the murdered Egyptians, some patting the folded boney hands of the deceased while also making disparaging comments to the mummified remains of the royal official.

When the exhibit was about a week from opening, Mesham came into his office ready to tackle a few remaining tasks. The room was more of a workshop, it containing two long tables where various relics, tools and manuscripts were scattered about. There were also shelves that housed more artifacts mixed with an array of Egyptian-themed modern curiosities that Mesham had collected, he thinking they might make a popular small exhibit in themselves and doubling as a useful tool about the misconceptions of Egyptian culture and history. There was the “Pyraminx”, a pyramid puzzle in the style of the Rubrick’s cube. There were the aforementioned video games in addition to others that Mesham had discovered, including Entombed, Caverns of Khafka and Temple of Apshai. There were a few pieces of sheet music including Una Mae Carlisle’s “Beside the Nile” and “Egyptian Ella”, the latter chronicling the life of an overweight belly dancer. There was the long-playing record Captured by Journey that sat next to Iron Maiden’s Powerslave, Earth, Wind and Fire’s All ‘n All, the B-52’s Mesopotamia, The Alan Parson’s Project Eye in the Sky and Sun Ra’s Space is the Place, the latter featuring the musician dressed like an Afrofuturist Pharoah. Looking like a little brother leaning against the LPs was a 45 record of the Bangles novelty hit “Walk like an Egyptian”, the song that had caused many teenage boys that had toured the museum to ask Mesham if he had a mummy as hot as the band’s lead singer Susanna Hoffs. The young man always grinned while answering, “Yes, but she’s resting in a sarcophagus and she’s all for me!” That always kicked up a variety of enthusiastic whistles, whoops and laughter.

Sitting down at his desk, Mesham was about to make a phone call to the local newspaper when the feeling of eyes staring at him caused him to take pause. This was not an uncommon feeling, especially in a facility full of hundreds of eyes, many of them housed inside of centuries-dead corpses. When Mesham found the face that he had felt gazing upon him, he stopped breathing and felt a wash of coldness shoot through his body. His heart running through a range of emotions, they finally settling on rage, Mesham yelled out the name of one of his assistants.

“Yes, sir?”, the girl named Aurora, addressed as soon as she entered the room. “Are you ok?”

“Who put this in here?”, Mesham growled motioning at a clay sculpture of a human head.

The assistant looked at the piece. “I don’t remember his name but it was one of the forensic artists from the university. He left the paperwork next to it.” Aurora went over and glanced at some documents in a clear plastic folder before announcing, “This is C-925. She’s one of the concubines.”

Then stepping back, the assistant took in the sculpture, trying to understand what had made her boss so upset about it. “Pretty thing”, the girl concluded after a shrug. “I wish I had her looks.”

Mesham was finally regaining his composure and without explaining, ordered the assistant to leave, he managing to apologize to her before she had completely exited the office. He immediately picked up the phone and called the orthopedic technician who had advised Mesham’s team on the mummies and skeletons. “Hey Jennifer, do you have your files on our Egyptians handy? Good. I want to ask you about C-925.” Mesham gave over his specific question and after the technician audibly shifted through some paperwork, she was able to give an answer.

Hanging up the phone, Mesham made another call asking a student intern to wheel in the mummy that they had labeled C-925. This done, Mesham rubbed his eyes and stared at the concubines’ petrified face before having another good stare at the sculpture. Although the hair was wrong- the artist had assumed it had been black- there was no doubt that the clay face of Ginate Barker was staring lifeless right at his own. Then moving towards the mummy, Mesham placed his hand on a dried hand on the concubine. The orthopedic technician had confirmed that according to the x-rays that one leg was shorter than the other.

A few hours after the “Lost and Found Treasures of Egypt” exhibit’s premiere, Mesham Kissell sat in a folding chair facing the glass case that held the mummified corpse and reconstructed face of Ginate Barker, a flood lamp giving adequate light in the otherwise dark and empty museum. The evening had been a great success but that was not what was on the young man’s mind. For the past week Mesham had tried to process the last six years up that point. The day that he discovered Ginate’s reconstructed face staring at him in his office, Mesham went home early and wept in a manner somewhere between a child and an old man who had outlived his friends and family. Ginate was officially deceased and had been for centuries, the chance of their sharing their lives together now impossible. Of course, the discovery made absolutely no sense, a girl at one point clearly alive in the modern age and then a few short years later the ancient remains of the same individual were lying in a museum. Mesham had paid for another carbon dating test on the mummified female in case someone had found a way to give a dead body the appearance of being a thousand or so years old but the original results were confirmed. The sight of the mummified Egyptian official now received distain from Mesham, the young man wondering what horrible sexual advances the concubine had been subjected to. It may’ve seemed petty but by some primal instinct Mesham also found himself insanely envious of the long dead man for having been intimate with the person he knew as Ginate Barker. Mesham himself loved the girl and had devoted so much time, money and energy into her, yet only received an embrace and her fingers in his hair, both adding up to less than a few seconds. Then there was the manner in which the girl was killed to give her master sexual comfort in the underworld, poisoning or strangulation the common sacrificial practice in those days. There were moments that Mesham had been tempted to smash in the dehydrated face of the upper-class douchebag laying in his luxurious sarcophagus.

Strangely, the fact that nothing about the situation appeared to make sense actually gave Mesham hope. For him the illogical happenstances that had defied the laws of space and time meant that God or Ra- or some other higher power or unseen force- had orchestrated all of what was before him for a specific reason. In addition, he, the young insignificant man, had been factored into the divine grand plan, whatever it may’ve been. Now all Mesham had to do was ascertain why the girl whom he’d given his heart to was laying before him, her own heart missing from her petrified chest. The girl’s organ might’ve lain in a jar somewhere in a storeroom in another museum in Cairo, London, Paris or some other city. Perhaps it was still waiting in a yet-to-be-discovered chamber, itself buried in sand. Then again, it could’ve itself have turned to dust by the sands of time, so to speak.

Whatever the case, the couple had been reunited. As the man fiddled with one of the pieces of rudimentary jewelry that had been on Ginate’s mummified wrist, his eyes kept going from the sculpture to the framed police sketch which now sat propped up against the display glass, to the closed eyelids on the corpse’s face. Reaching over to put his hand over top Ginate Barker’s own, it’s surface now feeling more like a husk than flesh, Mesham sighed and repeated one of the girl’s own questions to him from six years before: “What will we do now, Ginate Barker?”