Qais, Laila and the Wolf

Author's name: Buthaina Al-Essa

Short narrative texts distributed over textual spaces of varying lengths. Each title summarizes the story's content and whets the reader's appetite to collaborate with the text's producer in constructing meaning. It seems that the narrative employment of the writer Al-Essa here was not devoid of grandmothers' stories. Rather, we find that this employment gave the folk tale and grandmothers' tales a special character of the ancient Arab narrative heritage, which enriched the written text with magic and attraction. It teased the reader's imagination and took him back to worlds he had missed, so that he could find what he was looking for in the text, such that the story is the beginning and the end. By passing through its gate, the story's potential is realized, and by exiting from one of the outlets, the story is completed, which makes the texts of the collection continue their deep excavation towards the most delicious, enjoyable and seductive worlds of storytelling. Under the title “..After We Killed the Wolf” we read: “What happened next… The grandmother returned to the bed, and the hunter left carrying the wolf’s body on his back. Laila sat on the edge of the bed, embracing her grandmother’s hands and staring at them intently. Laila saw that her grandmother’s eyes were withered and her sight was weak, that her hand was sweaty and weak and unable to embrace her, that her mouth was empty, wrinkled and aching. Laila secretly wished that her grandmother could hear her, see her, embrace her and kiss her and… Laila secretly wished that her grandmother was a wolf!” The book includes six short and very short story collections under the following main titles: 1- Letters Stripped from the Body of the Story, 2- We Still Strike Proverbs, 3- Internal Bleeding, 4- The Forest Again, 5- The Swing in Heaven, 6- The Time of Milk.