Some letters aren’t meant to be delivered. They’re meant to be remembered.
This is one of them—written by Anissa Ben Tayeb, in the land of her father, where grief takes root beside memory.
Salt Script
The villa’s generator hums in the distance, a low, tired sound like breath held too long. Anissa sits cross-legged on the floor of her father’s old study, surrounded by salt-stiffened notebooks. A lamp casts a pool of amber light over the pages. Outside, the tamarisk trees bend in the wind—pliant, whispering.
She finds a loose sheaf folded inside a weathered copy of Plantes du Sud Tunisien. The cover bears a faded thumbprint, dark with oil and time. Inside: sketches of Samar species annotated in French and Arabic, the ink bleeding along the fibers. Between the sketches, her father’s marginalia runs like a murmured prayer.
Anissa pauses. Her pen hovers over a blank page in her own notebook.
Then she begins to write—not notes, not taxonomy, but something else. A letter. Unsent, perhaps unsendable. But necessary.
To My Father,
Tonight the wind tastes of copper and brine. It curls through the shutters with the same persistence you once showed in your fieldwork, as if the desert itself were trying to annotate your old notebooks. I found them—your journals—wedged beneath a pile of rusted trowels and a shattered rain gauge. The pages are warped, brittle at the edges, but still legible. Salt has bled through the ink, as if the earth itself was crying your thoughts back into itself.
The tamarisks outside are breathing again. I swear it. Their branches rasp like old men clearing their throats. You would have laughed at that, wouldn’t you? Or maybe corrected me—“They’re exhaling sodium, not sentiment.” But I never believed your science was without feeling. You named each tree, didn’t you? Samar, Laila, Othman. I found those names in the margins. Were they your companions, or your ghosts?
There are things I didn’t say. Chief among them: I was angry. Not for the reasons you thought, not entirely. I was angry because you left me a language I couldn’t speak—not just Arabic, but the language of your obsessions. Of roots, salinity, of staying. You stayed even when everything else was leaving. That’s a kind of madness, Baba. Or maybe it’s love, which is worse.
When I left for Marseille, I believed I was escaping smallness. But exile doesn’t grant expansion—it only stretches your loneliness across wider distances. I understand that now. Every Latin binomial I memorized in sterile classrooms feels like an apology to the plants I misnamed here.
Your handwriting slants like the dunes beyond the villa. It leans toward silence. I wish you had written to me—not just notes on evapotranspiration, but letters. Or a story. Something about the first time you tasted dates, or the last time you dreamt in French.
I tried reading one of your entries aloud tonight. The tamarisk rustled louder. I imagined you nodding in approval, or perhaps just shaking your head the way you did when I used to mispronounce “halophyte.”
I’m still not sure why you stayed, why you fought for a dying grove while your family drifted like seeds. But maybe I don’t need to know. Maybe the act of writing this, of holding your notes and planting your trees, is enough.
The wind is picking up again. Sand taps against the window like someone wanting in.
I won’t send this.
But I’ll keep it.
—Anissa
When she finishes, her hand trembles slightly. She does not read it over. She folds the page, presses it between the pages of her father’s journal—an offering tucked among the roots of old knowledge. Then she rises, walks to the window, and watches as the tamarisks shiver under the stars.
The wind carries the scent of dust and distant figs. Somewhere beneath the earth, she imagines a seed cracking open.
Sofia Zahra Safar writes lyrical, place-rooted fiction that explores the tender intersections of memory, exile, and ecological loss. Her upcoming novel, The Wind in the Tamarisk, is a deeply contemplative journey through southern Tunisia—where one woman’s return to bury her father becomes a reckoning with language, legacy, and the fragile beauty of what endures.
đź“– Coming soon from Wanderlight Press.
