Birds Of A Feather
A Short Story
“I want it to feel totally romantic you know? I want him to have me at ‘Hello’!”
Zia twirled on the sidewalk, her flowy skirt following her movement. She stretched her arms to their limits and flashed a disarming smile at Raha.
“What about you? What kind of love story do you want?”
Raha looked down. In contrast to Zia’s colorfulness, she wore a gray hoodie and loose cargo pants.
“I’m not sure,” she said.
In most ways, the two friends were quite different. They had been opposites since grade school when their parents had introduced them to each other.
After several failed attempts at conversation, Zia and Raha’s parents quietly and mutually decided that their own family friendship would never come to fruition. However, they begrudgingly supported their daughters’ burgeoning camaraderie.
Zia came from an open-minded family where nightly discussions over dinner were the norm. Raha had even heard Zia call her mother “unreasonable” before. She had cringed, thinking of what would happen in her own household if a word even close to that escaped her lips. Raha’s family was not so modern. They were petrified of losing their traditions and culture to the “evil forces of the Western world.”
