The Leveling

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The young woman lowered her bike to the ground at the edge of a grove of palm trees and looked left, then right. Seeing no one, she slipped off her shoes and ventured onto the beach. It was two in the morning. The moonless sky was clear, the stars bright. Whitecaps twinkled in the Persian Gulf.

Near the water she sat in the sand and pulled her knees up to her chest. A black cotton chador covered her head and body and was clasped tight underneath her chin. The exposed part of her face glowed with reflected starlight.

She bit her bottom lip and looked both ways down the beach. After a minute she tapped her fingers against her knees and smiled nervously.

She removed her chador and the tightly bound headscarf underneath, revealing straight brown hair that fell to the center of her back. Her yellow T-shirt was printed with a fancy pink butterfly pattern. Her jeans had bell-bottom flares.

She folded the chador carefully, hid it in the crevice of a coral formation that had washed up on the sand, stripped off the rest of her clothes, and hid those too.

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