It was not typically this quiet after isha prayer.

As Abid rounded the corner to our house,
the streetlights on the D Block of Model Town clicked awake,
dusk deepened, and a glossy summer moon beamed
over Lahore, lighting the mud path home.

He smiled small, thumb in mouth
clutching Amma’s green dupatta
with hands blistered from the spring kite festival,
unaware of what would soon unsettle him.

The buckbuckbuck of Amma’s chickens were
our musical breadcrumbs on the walk home from the masjid.
They would peck playfully at our feet as we pushed the gate open.
Abid’s favorite was a small white hen.
Eyes as dark as his, her chest fluffed in his lap
and him babbling along with her buckbuck.

But tonight,
Amma tapped the gate open,
And under the yawning charcoal sky,
her hand dripped with their blood.

Heads and wings scattered in the grass,
thighs sunken in the mud – still erect from the blow: a poultry warzone.
Fauzia auntie peered over the bloodied fence and yelled,

"Chor teri murghiyan leh gaye!"
Thieves had stolen the chickens from our yard
while we were praying in the masjid.

Abid found his companion.
The white hen once as glossy as the summer moon,
the fluff of her white neck indistinguishable from blood and dirt.
After the incident in our backyard on D Block,
Abid did not eat chicken for six years.

Later, we heard that they had sold the meat in a market,
and I wondered how it could ever be halal
to slaughter stolen flesh,
to bless it with God’s name,
to steal a poor woman’s chickens from her yard as she begs Him for salvation.

In the quiet after Isha,
I realized that if a man could steal chickens from a poor woman’s yard
Bless its flesh with an Allahu Akbar
And sell it down the block from her house,
Then I could no longer care for zabiha meat.