By Jeffrey Fleishman
The tea ladies come before the sun, lighting fires, shaking jars, spooning sugar. They hum and sing, lost women marked with tribal symbols, far from home. They sit and wait, kettles hissing in ember and ash, the great day beginning, rolling off the Nile like a damp, smothering cloth.
Wet, smooth and swift, her hands dart from jar to sifter, stoking the fire, the silver kettle blackening. Life has gone by selling tea to friends and strangers on a patch of sidewalk barely wider than her lap. This city turned hard and the man she married ended up no good, but her voice is pretty, like a hymn drifting down from a high wire, soothing the men in white turbans who sip from slender glasses.
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