October 28, 2026

The Litani: a Short Story from Carryout

by Hasan Dudar

In thinking about the current moment of erasure we’re witnessing, of Palestinian, Lebanese, Sudanese, Yemeni, and so many other SWANA communities in the US media’s headlines, it is hard not to think back to the US invasion of Iraq, not merely in terms of the embodied effects of post-9/11 policy, but also for the ways institutions of language were utterly complicit in memoricide, in how these US atrocities were dis-remembered. This butchering of memory lives in our bodies, in our daily rhythms, in our encounters with each other and failures in and beyond language. One of the remarkable qualities this short story, set among workers of a small Arab business which has become such a viscerally familiar social form for so many of us, is the ways Hasan Dudar brings the politics of the US media into the realm of the everyday, especially the politics of labor and the family unit. This story is just one of many memorable portraits of Arab and Arab American life from Hasan Dudar’s debut short story collection, Carryout, which is capacious in both scope and heart. Of Carryout, long-time Mizna contributor Susan Muaddi Darraj writes, “Dudar’s debut is an intricately linked story collection portraying the intersections of race and class in the lives of an immigrant community. You will cheer for these characters’ triumphs and mourn their losses. A powerful new literary voice!” Do not miss this spectacular new collection, out now with the University of Iowa Press.

—George Abraham, Editor-at-Large

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He came without his briefcase and had a lap dog cradled in his arms. It looked like maybe he had been crying too. And I wondered what could make a man like him, the most powerful man in the city, cry. I imagined it was a woman, but I imagined he didn’t have a woman. So I didn’t know what else to imagine. I just looked at him and he smiled at me sadly. And I smiled back at him sadly, and I turned to leave him at the door. But then the dog began to whimper.

—Hasan Dudar

The Litani

He approached the entrance slowly and paused, the kind of pause you take when you think the doors will part open for you and they don’t. For a moment, he stood there awkwardly, in the shadow of the awning, as if waiting on me to unlock and let him in. But I ignored him. I had a mop in my hand and a puddle of water at my feet and lots of videos waiting for me at home.

I waved him away and he waved for me to come close. Stupidly, I did.

He looked up at me, and in a high, formal voice, he said, “You must be new.”

“No, I’m Mustafa,” I said, even though it was only my second day busing tables at the Litani on Monroe.

“Well,” he said. “Let me tell you how this goes, young man. You unlock the door and lead me to my seat.”

“And you are?” I asked.

“I’m Paul Richard Day!” he said.

Paul Richard Day, I thought. The name sounded important—three-name names always do—and when a name sounds important, you think to yourself that you’ve heard it before. I told Mr. Day just that—that his name was familiar to me. And he exclaimed, “Why, of course! I’m the publisher of the Toledo Saber.”

Even then, I wasn’t exactly convinced. There were a lot of fraudsters in that part of Toledo, which was still a nicer but older part of town, perfect for all kinds of grifts. Any jerk could dress himself in a suit and glasses, carry around a briefcase, and go around at night calling himself the publisher of the daily paper.

I was going to tell him that, but instead, I decided to squeeze my mop dry and said, “I’m sorry. But not today, Mr. Day.”

He came closer and tugged at the door.

“I said it’s Paul! Richard! Day!” he said, stomping his feet like exclamation marks.

Then he eased up, stepped back, looked past me, and smiled, as though he had gotten what he wanted, because lurking behind me in the foyer was Adib Najjar, the owner of the Litani. Breathing short, shallow, angry breaths, Adib let the man and his briefcase inside and apologized like I had never heard a man apologize before.

It seemed to satisfy Mr. Day, and Adib asked that I apologize, too.

“What for?” I asked.

Mr. Day looked at me curiously; it was brief, very brief. I looked at Mr. Day just as curiously too. He must not have been used to people standing in his way. Because he was all clenched. His jaw, his eyes, both of his fists, the one holding the briefcase and the one holding nothing. Meanwhile, Adib was keeping it all in, but I didn’t know if he could tolerate my defiance for much longer. And I needed him more than he needed me, because that job was paying for my first year of college, for cartons of cigarettes at my parents’ store, and for anything and everything in between. So in the end, deciding this was what it meant to grow up, to mature, I conceded.

“My bad, Mr. Day, I’m sorry,” I said. Then I turned to Adib: “Can I go home now?”

I was sure he was going to send me home for good, but then, Mr. Day, who was by no means old or frail, took my arm like a short leash and had me lead him across the slippery floor and dim dining room, to a corner booth by the window.

I don’t know why but I had the sense he wanted me to stay there, and that Adib wanted me to stay there too, so I stood off to the side, except for the brief trip I made to the kitchen to put in his order. Fattoush, wine, and two skewers of grilled kafta, one for him and one to go, for the doggo.

He stayed until two, which meant we all stayed until two, including the kitchen staff, and of course, Adib, who seemed glad and somewhat honored by Mr. Day’s presence and couldn’t understand everyone else’s frustrations. But I could understand Adib, even if everyone else couldn’t, even if I disagreed with him and thought he was a coward. Because Mr. Day wasn’t just dining and wasn’t just dining privately; he was editing the final proofs of the Sunday Saber, which was something that happened every Saturday at the Litani, except for the one Saturday after the attacks.

He had converted that corner by the window into a little office. Around the table, he laid the national papers—the Times and the Journal—in a stack to his left, the state papers in a stack to this right, and every edition of that week’s Saber in a large pile in the center. He had a total of five pens, each a different color, and he placed them in such a way, like forks and spoons. He used both hands, left for eating, right for editing. And because he did everything slowly, he could do everything at once—including parting and turning the large gray pages of small black words with his knife.

He didn’t take breaks, only short pauses to look out the window and think things over. And he hardly said a word, besides the moments he corrected something for grammar. So when he suddenly looked up from a piece on the Pages of Opinion and asked, “What is like a tragedy but worse?” I thought he was talking to me.

“A catastrophe,” I said, refilling his water.

He looked not at me, but around me, and said very firmly, “No.”

I retreated to where I was standing earlier.

“Not a catastrophe,” he said. “Stronger. A failure! . . . It would be a tragedy followed by a failure if we do not save the region, and our world, from Saddam Hussein and all who are like him.”

In the margins, he recorded those lines, then used our cordless to call someone at the Saber named Corey. He dictated, and when he finished, he instructed him to change the title of the article to “A Tragedy and Its Opposite.”

Appearing satisfied and convinced of his own powers, Paul Richard Day neatly folded the pages before him and stood to leave. Adib rushed over and asked how the food was and asked how the service was and asked a million other small things that seemed to bother Mr. Day, who didn’t want to be asked anything and didn’t want to answer anything.

I was clearing his plates, and it was too tempting not to say it, so I said it:

“It was the opposite of a tragedy.”

That was the first time I had ever heard a laugh like his. It was short and memorized, like he learned it from a book. “Ha! Ha! Why, yes! The opposite of a tragedy! Ha, yes!” he said.

Adib drew a smile and held it between his ears until Mr. Day was out the door. He told me to finish cleaning and find him at the bar, where he was catching fire. That was what we called it when Adib drank. He was gray, ashy gray; his hairs, silver and many. And when he drank, especially gin, he turned red and looked like
smoke and fire.

Without a word, Adib counted my tips and slapped them on the barstool in front of me.

“Are you firing me?” I asked.

“I should,” he said. “To you, this is all just fun. You don’t come to work, you come to play. And you don’t know who you’re playing with.”

Eventually, I told my parents about Paul Richard Day because they had grown curious what was taking me so long on my Saturday shifts. My father thought I was seeing one of the waitresses, but I told him he should come see one of the waitresses and he’d know I wasn’t lying.

That gave them the idea that maybe they should go in and talk things over with Adib.

I told them that would be bad, that they were going to get me fired.

“Let him fire you,” my mother said. “We don’t need his money. I’ll go work the deli at Churchill’s or the Andersons and you can return to the carryout to help your father, instead.”

I assumed that was just talk. I didn’t think they would act on anything they’d said. But one Saturday, as if to prove it to me, my father showed up at the Litani. Paul Richard Day wasn’t there yet. The door was locked, the way he liked it. And I was mopping in the foyer, also the way he liked it. He liked to feel that he was entering the Litani after hours and that we had gone out of our way for him and made an exception.

My father asked me to let him in, but I waved him away and told him that Mr. Day would be arriving at any moment.

“You lock your father out but are going to let that bastard in?” he asked.

I thought he was going to cry, so I unlocked the door and opened it for him. Immediately, he went looking for Adib, who was in his office, smoking cigarettes, which Mr. Day despised smelling when he entered. We barged in there and my father demanded that Adib let me go home on time.

“Or else what?” Adib asked.

“Or else I’m gonna let you and that bastard have it when he gets
here,” my father said.

“Have what?” Adib asked. “You’re gonna let us have what?”

My father stared at him, then stared at me; he didn’t know what.

Adib, seated in his leather chair, surrounded by his glassy awards, looked across his desk like my father was beneath him. They both came to Toledo at around the same time in the seventies, but it always seemed like my father had just arrived in America and Adib had always been here—was born here.

“If Mustafa doesn’t like it, he can go,” Adib said. “I don’t keep him. Neither does Mr. Day.”

“Are you telling us to quit?” my father asked.

“I’m not telling you anything,” Adib said. “He wants to stay—stay. Wants to go—go.”

“Fine,” my father said. “We go!”

But he didn’t mean it, and it was rare when he didn’t mean it. I could tell from how he placed his hand in mine, weakly, waiting on me to grip his fingers and lead the way. But I simply led him to the door. And soon after he left, Mr. Day arrived for the night.

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There was one Saturday in December when we expected a blizzard.

We all sat around the Litani’s bar wondering if Paul Richard Day would show and what would happen if he did and the blizzard snowed us all in. He would make us tuck him in with the big blanket from Adib’s office, we joked, and make us cook him eggs and pancakes for breakfast and shower him with the power-rinse hose.
Adib wasn’t laughing. He said it was all possible, even admissible. He was hoping that Mr. Day would show soon, he said, because if he was going to be snowed in with the rest of us, it better be for a good reason.

As time passed, and it became clear that the blizzard had spared us, we grew tired of jokes and grew tired of waiting. We asked Adib to make an exception this one time and allow us to go home at a normal hour. To our surprise, he agreed. But first, he said, he had to call Corey at the Toledo Saber to confirm. Somehow, that made matters worse. Adib said he didn’t like the sound of Corey’s voice, it sounded like he was hiding something. It sounded like his voice on that one Saturday after the attacks.

We told him he had lost his mind, and that, more than any of us, he needed to go home.

He took our advice, and as he began packing, a strange thing happened.

The Sunday paper arrived—early. Only slightly past midnight. Like it had been edited well in advance.

We all asked to see it; we had to know what was so important in that Sunday’s edition, one of only two Sunday editions edited outside that corner booth, that Mr. Day couldn’t grace us with his presence at the Litani. But Adib was guarding the papers from us and told us all to go home. He said they weren’t for us, they were for customers, and proceeded to stack them in the newspaper stand by the bar. But we all stood around and read the front page and knew instantly why Paul Richard Day didn’t show his face that night and why Corey was being so weird, as weird as the week of the attacks.

There was a DVD attached to the newspaper called The Invasion of the Muslims; and beneath that, sponsored by dozens of churches across the country, was a fake front page that ran a headline with the same title; and beneath that, there was the real front page with a small picture of Paul Richard Day and an article titled
A Special Editorial from the Publisher: Our Freedoms.

“At least it’s not a bad review,” Adib said.

He laughed but we knew he was serious.

Mohammed Jawad, one of the line cooks, put a ten-dollar bill on the bar and said he was buying all the papers he could, so he could burn them. Adib stuffed the cash back in his pocket and took the stack of papers from his hands. “So you’re all Muslims now?” he asked. He was dangling one of the papers in front of my face and said, “I’ll give them all to you for free if Mustafa here can recite Ayat Al-Kursi by heart!”

I didn’t know Ayat Al-Kursi; I hardly even knew the Fatiha.

But still, I told him, “That doesn’t matter.”

“Of course, it does,” Adib said. “How can you care when you don’t even know Ayat Al-Kursi? I don’t know Ayat Al-Kursi, myself. I forgot it. So I’m not going to pretend like I care. It’s his paper. The man can print whatever he wants.”

“And I can care however I want,” I said, trying to remember the aya in my head, but forgetting all about it by the time I got home.

At the weekend lecture and afternoon prayer on Sunday, the imam recited from a long chapter in the Quran and every so often lifted his head and smiled at the growing crowd. When he finished, he paused and scanned above our heads, as though counting (because he was counting), and said: “Five hundred. There must be five hundred of you here. See how even a bad thing can be a blessing?
It unites us.”

“Bravo, bravo.” Dr. Abdelhadi clapped from the front row. “You learned how to count. Now that you have five hundred people here for once, why don’t you tell us what you’re going to do?”

The imam looked stumped; there was nothing he could do. He asked Dr. Abdelhadi for ideas, and Dr. Abdelhadi admitted stubbornly that he had some thoughts but he was not going to share them with us until the imam came up with some of his own.

The crowd laughed but nobody was patient enough to wait for either man. They all began bombing the room with opinions. Professor Imran, the S. M. Siddiqi Endowed Chair of Islamic and Peace Studies at the university, wanted to film a counter­-documentary. But that was too expensive and sophisticated, the crowd complained. The youth council wanted to stage a massive protest downtown, outside the Toledo Saber building. But that was too aggressive and naïve. My cousin Najla, vice chair of the Ladies’ Consortium, wanted to organize a citywide boycott she cleverly called “Taking a Stand,” where all the Muslim storeowners—and there were many—would stop selling the Toledo Saber in their newsstands. But the store owners didn’t like anyone taking anything off their shelves.

It was then that Dr. S. M. Siddiqi himself rose and asked if anyone had actually watched the documentary or read the editorial from the publisher, who happened to be his good friend and occasional editor, publishing his travelogues on canoeing in the Bangladeshi marshes, fishing in Russia’s far east after the fall of the Soviets, and coming face-to-face with death in the Amazon.

No one answered him; they all asked that he sit down. It was clear that most of them had not read or watched a thing—nor felt that they had to. Some even had the paper right there, in their hands, in their laps, but it was a prop.

A silence filled the room, and my mother stirred. She inched forward in her seat, which usually meant she had something to say. I sensed what it was, and I told her she better not say it. But she shushed me and said, “I’m your mother. I have to. I have to tell them who that man really is. The worst.”

So in front of the whole crowd, which must have grown to six hundred by then, she stood and told everyone the Litani’s secret.

Somehow, 95.5’s Morning Hash with Donny Seever—mortal enemies of all things Paul Richard Day—landed the scoop, and it was big enough to feed Donny and his crew for an entire week. We suspected it was leaked by my cousin Najla, who was friends with one of the show’s producers, a Lebanese Christian guy named Ricky Sleem.

Sleem was quick with his insults, calling the newspaper the Toledo Cheese Knife, because it stank, and reminding listeners that the Litani was an actual river in Lebanon that swelled with shit every spring, a perfect place for Paul Richard Day to edit his Sunday edition.

It got so bad that by Saturday morning, before the Litani opened its doors, Adib called the Morning Hash, live on-air, and confronted them and even threatened to sue.

“Who gave you this information?” he demanded of Donny Seever.

“So you’re confirming it’s true?” Donny Seever asked. “Well, you know what they say, ‘If it’s true, you can’t sue.’”

“I never said that,” Adib said. “Why don’t you leave me alone and leave Mr. Day alone. We didn’t do anything to you guys.”

Then, Donny, Ricky Sleem, and the rest of the crew began whispering and cackling to themselves.

“Hey, Mr. Najjar!” Ricky said, in a voice mimicking Paul Richard Day’s high-pitched tone. “I’d like to make a reservation for me and the Morning Hash team, for after hours at the Litani tonight. We have a very important production meeting. Please make sure you have our fattoush, wine, and kafta kabobs ready or else I’ll write you a terrible review!”

“If you show your face,” Adib said, “I will have you all arrested.”

Then he hung up.

Later that evening, Adib gathered the whole Litani staff in the dining room before the restaurant reopened for dinner. He had caught fire a little too early that day and stood at the hostess stand like it was a lectern and gave a little drunken speech. He had tried to put the leak behind him all week, he said, but the phone call on the Morning Hash had him worried. If anything went wrong that night, he said, he was firing the whole staff, regardless of who leaked it. Then he carefully explained what was at stake for the Litani: If Paul Richard Day didn’t show, it meant the Litani was done. The awards, the reviews—we could expect it all to vanish. And if he showed, and saw we were closed, we would be more than done. It would look like we were taking part in a boycott. Or worse, he said: like we gave the story to Donny Seever and the Morning Hash. That’s why he was willing to be there till dawn, if he had to.

He gave us all our final marching orders, and with a bottle of wine and a new pack of cigarettes from the vending machine by the coat rack, Adib went back to his office and hardly came out all night.

It was slow, so slow that we felt like we were the ones being boycotted. In the empty minutes, and in Adib’s absence, everyone—the servers, the bartenders, the cooks—seemed to be drinking or smoking or playing cards for money. They even let me have a shot or two of rum. And as they grew drunker, and as the restaurant
filled with more smoke, it became clear to me the direction the night was headed.

As soon as the hour turned to ten, Mohammed Jawad began spraying down the flat-top.

The sound of the hot grease reacting to whatever was in that cleaning bottle attracted Adib’s attention.

He stood in the doorway, trying to block the exit.

“You can’t leave now,” Adib said. “Mr. Day is coming.”

“And who is Mr. Day?” Mohammed Jawad asked.

This emboldened the cooks and they surrounded Adib.

“Yeah, who is he?” they asked.

Adib repeated parts of his speech from earlier, about how important the night was for all of us. He also promised that if the night passed peacefully, things would change around the Litani. But it was too late. The cooks were drunk, angry, and sweaty.

“You threatened to fire us, motherfucker,” Mohammed Jawad said. “You stay, we go.”

They grabbed Adib by the shoulders, dressed him in a chef ’s apron, and left. Now it was just me and him in there, and he told me that I should go too, to leave him alone for the rest of the night.

But I stayed.

I went and stood in the entrance, mop in hand, preparing for Paul Richard Day to show.

And when he did, when he approached the locked doors, expecting me to turn the key and greet him, I noticed there was something off about him that evening. He came without his briefcase and had a lap dog cradled in his arms. It looked like maybe he had been crying too. And I wondered what could make a man like him, the most powerful man in the city, cry. I imagined it was a woman, but I imagined he didn’t have a woman. So I didn’t know what else to imagine. I just looked at him and he smiled at me sadly. And I smiled back at him sadly, and I turned to leave him at the door. But then the dog began to whimper. And I looked back, and I swear, they both had tears in their eyes.

I unlocked the door and let him in. He wiped his eyes, gently took hold of my elbow, and had me lead him into the dining room, where he stood awkwardly and waited for Adib.

“This boy,” Mr. Day said. “What’s his name?”

“Mustafa.”

He began to mispronounce it, but the dog began to bark, and Mr. Day just said, “Well. Well, fire him!”

Adib took a great and sudden interest in the pure-white hairs on his knuckles. He stared down and ran his fingers through them slowly. He had no intention of speaking. He wanted me to leave just like that—without his hand in it.

When I returned home from the Litani, I found the entire family awake and waiting for me. My mom and dad. My younger siblings, Nawal and Walid. Najla and her family. My cousin Basim. My Aunt Aida and Uncle Brahim. They knew this Saturday was a big one and they were all curious to know how it went.

I told them I was fired. I told them the whole staff quit.

They asked how.

I told them I tried to lock Paul Richard Day out of the Litani but in the end his dog won my sympathy, and I let them in and was still punished for it—not by Adib but by Mr. Day himself, the man who actually fired me.

They were a mix of sad, proud, and confused.

“Do you want me to go there?” my father asked.

“And what—let them have it? No,” I said.

“Good,” he said. “Good. I’m proud of you. Let them have it—if you know what I mean.”

“Yeah,” I said. “But what they have is actually good.”

“And what about what you have?” my mother asked.

I didn’t know how to answer her. I gave her my money from the night, which wasn’t much, and apologized.

They all told me to not be so sad, that I could always find work. But that wasn’t it. Strangely, I didn’t care all that much about losing the job. I just didn’t like that Mr. Day had gotten away with what he had published, I said, that everyone was afraid of him, and that he could fire people who didn’t even work for him.

“To hell with him,” my father said. “Leave it to God.”

He was always saying that, Leave it to God. We left everything to God. We got angry, we yelled, we cried, we worried, we made threats, we said things we shouldn’t say, but always, it ended in the same way: leaving it to God.

My father told me to sit, to relax, to ethalla, to have something sweet and sweeten my night. He himself took a large, sticky spoon of qateen, golden fig jam, his favorite, and spread it across an open loaf of Arabic bread, then sliced a banana with big, brown honey spots down the middle, using the opposite end of his spoon. All was okay. It was in God’s hands. And in his hands was a sandweesh. He bit into it and smiled. He passed me the jar of qateen and I didn’t know what to do with it. I passed it on, and on again it was passed, until it returned to my father, who asked if the Catholic schools had taught us the story of Jesus and the fig tree.

I was surprised by his question. I didn’t think he knew anything about the Gospel.

“Our land is the Gospel,” he said. And he went on to remind me: Christ was hungry and came upon a fig tree while leaving town. It didn’t bear any fruit, so he cursed it and said, “May no one ever eat fruit from you again.” The next morning, Peter the Apostle pointed out that the tree had died, and Jesus told his disciples to have faith and that if you tell the mountain to throw itself into the sea, and believe it in your heart, it will be done.

“I get it,” I told him.

“But what don’t you get?” he asked, smiling, chewing, knowing there was more.

I couldn’t tell him because I didn’t know. I went upstairs to my room to watch The Invasion of the Muslims. There was a lot of talk about Jesus. They were cursing us the same way my father said to curse them. And I thought, sooner or later, we’re all going to be thrown into the sea.

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Excerpts from Carryout are reprinted here with permission of the author and publisher. It is available to order from the University of Iowa Press.

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