Copyright © 2024 Sonia Sulaiman

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

Development editor: Fazeela Jiwa Copy editing: Karim Abuawad Cover artwork by: Iasmin Omar Ata Cover and interior design: Lauren Jeanneau Printed and bound in Canada

Published by Roseway Publishing an imprint of Fernwood Publishing Halifax and Winnipeg 2970 Oxford Street, Halifax, Nova Scotia, B3L 2W4 www.fernwoodpublishing.ca/roseway

Fernwood Publishing Company Limited gratefully acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and the Canada Council for the Arts. We acknowledge the Province of Manitoba for support through the Manitoba Publishers Marketing Assistance Program and the Book Publishing Tax Credit. We acknowledge the Province of Nova Scotia through the Publishers Assistance Fund and Arts Nova Scotia.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Title: Thyme travellers : an anthology of Palestinian speculative fiction / edited by Sonia Sulaiman.

Other titles: Thyme travelers

Names: Sulaiman, Sonia, editor.

Description: Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: Canadiana 2024036824X | ISBN 9781773636948 (softcover)

Subjects: LCSH: Speculative fiction. | LCGFT: Short stories.

Classification: LCC PN6120.2 T59 2024 | DDC 823/.010899274—dc23

To past, present, and future Palestines.

Preface

Sonia Sulaiman

Someone once said that all Palestinian fiction is speculative; we are always grappling with the past and living in expectation of the future, while our fictions tell of alternate histories—being, by definition, histories told by the colonized. Others say that the definition of the speculative is itself a colonial imposition.

When I drafted the call for submissions to this anthology, I defined what I was looking for as “fiction that features a departure from consensus reality.” The majority of stories that came in were of a very high quality, which made my job as editor a pleasant and an easy one. It was also a great joy to come to know so many of my peers in the Palestinian diaspora.

Such were my thoughts as I prepared the manuscript in the summer of 2023. The fall of 2023 has now become the opening act of a monumental tragedy in the history of the Palestinian people. We hardly have the words to describe it, currently calling it a “Second Nakba.” As I write, we are still in the midst of a genocide in Palestine, with Israel’s relentless carpet bombing and ground invasion of Gaza.

Looking back, it is incredible that in such a short time, during the COVID-19 pandemic as well as the ongoing genocide and colonization of Palestine, we have been able to imagine these new speculative stories. I feel honoured and humbled to have edited this book you now hold in your hands. It is my hope that it is just the beginning of your journey. Whether you are a Palestinian or an ally, I welcome you to use this book as a stepping stone, to seek out the work of Palestinian writers and to take action to resist the oppression of Palestinians.

The sight of unprecedented solidarity around the world brings with it a fresh hope for change. The world as I know it will be a memory by the time you read these words. Know that these stories come from another time and place.

Down Under

Jumaana Abdu

I started digging my way to Palestine later than most, but I made good time. I had very little to carry.

A few things had set me back, but most difficult of all was finding a place to start. Once I was ready, I waited for my mother to leave for work one morning, then I got moving. The backyard of our house in the outskirts of Sydney had been cemented over in the 1980s. I tried getting through the foundation with a jackhammer, but I was only two metres deep before a councilman showed up saying a complaint had been made that I was disturbing the neighbourhood.

“That’s alright, I won’t be here long,” I told him. “I’m going to Palestine.”

“Oh, I heard about that trend,” he said, peering over my shoulder to eye the hole in the backyard. “Well, it’s too loud for these streets. You’re going to have to do it someplace else.”

“Please, I’m in a hurry,” I said.

“Why? Something I don’t know about Palestine? Does it disappear in the summer like the polar ice caps?”

“Yeah,” I tried.

The councilman gave a sympathetic shrug. I packed up and rushed to my grandmother’s house with a shovel.

Since my grandparents had died, another half Palestinian, half North African family had moved into their old house, only this family’s other half was from Fez, not Alexandria. Someone’s car was in the driveway, so I hopped the fence and sped around the back of the shed where I could dig unnoticed. One metre down, I hit solid stone. I cleared off soil to gauge how big the obstruction was and whether I could haul it out, and then I began to see the stone was engraved. I flattened myself to the ground and hung my head down into the hole to make out the inscription in the shadows.

To God we belong, and to Him we return. In loving memory of Munira Abdullah. 1939–2015. Born in Jerusalem, Palestine.

The black marble shone with gilded engravings. It was a headstone. I lay there on my stomach in the dirt and reread my grandmother’s name. There was no digging it out. There was no circumvention. I knew then if I tried another spot in this garden, I’d hit her headstone again. I knew it would be all under this house and it went all the way down.

“Why are you crying?” came a child’s voice from behind me.

I flipped over and lay flat on my back. Through the blur of tears, I recognized the boy as Mustafa, the youngest of the family that lives in the house now. I made out his Moroccan soccer jersey, so baggy it reached midway down his pants. He had his little head cocked to one side while I dried my face on my sleeve.

Half-delirious, I said, “I’m going to Palestine.”

“Haya’s gone already,” he told me, unfazed.

“Your sister?”

He said, “Come, look,” and headed inside. I stumbled after him past the living room, where his mother stared blankly at an Arab cooking show playing on mute and his father sat by an open window nearby holding an unlit cigarette in his mouth.

“Do they know she’s gone? Do they know where she’s going?” I whispered as we slipped down the hall.

“They don’t think about that place,” he said, and then we were in his sister’s room.

I knew Haya from a distance. We’d gone to the same university; I was in nursing, she was in arts/law. On those few instances my mother had allowed me to join a cross-city march for Palestine, it had been Haya at the lead, and her face splashed across social media, and her name co-signing public statements. Her bedroom looked as expected. She had Palestinian and anti-Zionist posters layered like wallpaper from floor to ceiling and hole-punched dinars hanging on gold necklace chains off her bed posts and three differently coloured keffiyehs tossed over a hat stand and postcards and envelopes with Palestinian stamps and addresses littering her desk and all the literature—everything people meant when they said Palestinian literature—stacked on mounted bookshelves and in piles on the floor.

I remembered being in the audience of a panel she was on at a writer’s festival featuring Palestinian essayists, and when the chair asked her how she always managed such eloquence and civility in debate, she stuttered when she took the mic. I saw her trawl for an appropriate response.

At first, she spoke in a measured way. “Oh…have I been civil? I mean, have I given the impression I see this as a civil debate? Or that…this question—which is the question of my life—is even up for ‘debate’?”

Then she grew possessed by a stillness, the way Arabs do when their emotions break through on a stage. She seized the crowd up in her intensity as she continued, “I-I don’t feel civil. My grief doesn’t feel eloquent or dignified. And I am in grief, and I can’t sleep, and I know it will be hell for me any time I want to see my family in Palestine until the day I die, and there is no civil feeling in my heart about that. I just want to go home to the place I was born. Can you understand how sick I feel from wanting to be back on that land? Wrath is the only response to an injustice God hates. Wrath is my birthright. And I won’t—I won’t have another single one of my rights denied in this life.”

On this, she finished. Her body shut in on itself. The audience applauded her; I could see she felt nauseated. I remembered being afraid of all her love and her anger.

That was years before. In her bedroom, Mustafa grabbed hold of the underside of her bedframe. Towing on it with his bodyweight, he dragged the bed from the wall. Underneath it, instead of carpet, was a huge, unending hole in the earth.

“She dug that?” I was in awe. Mustafa nodded. “How long…?”

“Pretty quick,” Mustafa said. He crouched on the edge and peered down, then turned to me. “She said it was easy because she knew where she was going. Have you been?”

I shook my head.

“Me neither. Anyway, you can use her tunnel; she wouldn’t mind,” he said sweetly.

“Why didn’t you go with her?”

Mustafa stood and toed the carpet with his Nike socks. “I’m scared. From what I see on the news.”

There wasn’t much to say to that. I climbed over the edge and lowered myself down.

“Is that all you’re taking?” Mustafa called as an afterthought.

Other than a compass, I had my father’s wristwatch, my grandfather’s leather jacket, my mother’s shovel, and, on a yellowed piece of paper in a plastic sleeve, a drawing of the Jerusalem night sky my grandmother had made when she was a child.

“This is all I brought,” I hollered back, realizing I was mortifyingly unequipped.

Mustafa told me to wait for a moment, zipped off, then ran back to drop me a flashlight. With a final wave, he dragged the bedframe back into place and I was sealed in the earthen dark.

When word spread that Palestinians Down Under were digging their way to Jerusalem, the logistics baffled non-believers. But it wasn’t the first time Muslims had travelled to Palestine at a supratemporal rate. The Prophet only took one night. Not being anywhere near prophethood myself, I was more realistic. I expected to arrive there by the end of the month.

Gradually, the tunnel’s gradient flattened out. I followed Haya’s path and kept steady re-excavation of the mounds she left in her wake. With engineering savvy, I turned my hijab into a head strap for Mustafa’s flashlight so I could free up my hands. There were no strange men to see my hair down there. The only thought in my mind was, Go fast.

Precedent was everything. For sustenance, I relied on the same Hand that had delivered out-of-season fruits to a monastery for Mary of Nazareth. When Haya’s tunnel veered up towards the crust, tubers and root vegetables hung from a thin ceiling of soil and I could tug them down, buff them with my leather jacket, and eat. Through the holes Haya and I left, where the vegetables had been, shone down increasingly foreign rays of sun or unfamiliar murmurs of night. Water trickled through the tunnel walls in places. I knew the more filtered the water tasted, the deeper down in the earth I was.

Closer to the surface, I could use my compass to determine the direction of prayer. But further down the arrow would spin, at first slowly and uncertainly, and then wildly, and in those horrible stretches I had the sense that I was slipping from heaven downward in a spiral so intense it was shearing the skin from my flesh. And then I was scared. Behind and before me stretched a blackness I could not comprehend. The weight of an obscure haunting pressed on my back all the way to Palestine. If I was sweating and panting and chasing after Haya, who was to say that there was not some blind, writhing creature salivating hot on my trail? Or that if I closed my eyes, my body would not think I was buried and instinctively die instead of just falling asleep?

All week, I kept moving…moving. Only my father’s wristwatch kept me oriented to time. Go fast. On the seventh day, I was shovelling like mad. My body burned. Haya can’t be much further, I told myself so I could flail the shovel out further and take longer strides. The dirt got in my mouth and ears. The dirt was my face. I had reached a stage where being alone was unbearable and being underground was unbearable, and those feelings combined to make me suddenly too claustrophobic to breathe. I collapsed and was sure I would die.

I stared up at the brown Underneath. Onto the roof over my body, the flashlight projected a halo of desperation, and I asked myself, what vision am I moving towards? How will it recognize me? Can it change my life? And if I am too estranged? I lay there in the dark until my breathing quietened down.

I became aware of a scratching sound from a few metres northwest. I shot up and listened. My heart was exploding. Then, like my life depended on it—and it did—I scooped up my scant belongings and sprinted towards the sound of digging. My headlamp caught glimpse first of the back of her calves and then, within a few frenzied steps, her whole being, wide-eyed and pressed up against the dirt wall behind her. Screaming, she dropped her shovel and whipped out a Swiss Army knife.

“Haya, Haya, wait!” I shouted over her. I let my shovel clatter to the ground and held my hands out in truce and self-defence. “It’s just me, it’s Nouran!”

She stopped short in incomprehension, then went limp with disbelief.

“Nouran…from the women’s soccer team at uni?”

Of all the associations to make, that one seemed the most random, but nothing about our situation was in the norm. I nodded and lowered my arms.

“I started a dig in my grandmother’s backyard,” I explained. “Couldn’t get through.”

“She’s dead,” Haya pointed out. “Allah yerḥamha.”

“I didn’t know it worked like that. Your brother said I could use your dig instead.”

“Right,” she accepted, looking neither pleased nor displeased. Exhaustion overcame her. She put the knife away. “Sorry. For a second, I thought you were…I don’t know.”

“An animal?”

“The IDF.” She laughed at herself, miserable. She lifted the base of her shirt up from her grazed and shining abdomen to dry her eyes, leaving streaks of mud across her face, which was gaunter than I remembered but no less full of anger.

Then the long night of our isolation was over. We slumped against opposite walls of the tunnel and rested our elbows on bent-up knees. For a while we just stared at each other. We panted and frowned under the interrogation of two makeshift headlamps. Mirrored on our faces was the dirt-caked grit of coal miners unused to human warmth.

At last, Haya said, “I’m going to sleep. I haven’t been able to sleep.”

“Me neither,” I said.

We arranged ourselves to lie one after the other parallel with the tunnel, my head closest to the northwest and hers close to my feet. That she let me lie in front came as a relief; the terrible sense of being hounded by a creature coming in leaps and bounds from behind wouldn’t leave me.

“We won’t rest long. I just want to get there,” Haya spoke up as I closed my eyes. Her long breath was bleak. “Can you believe this is the easiest way?”

We slept like the People of the Cave; maybe years passed. When we awoke, Haya took out from her backpack radishes and onions that she had collected along the way. She split them with her knife and passed halves to me. Still rusty, we ate in silence, and in silence we continued on our way.

The first few days, Haya piped up frequently. “Why do you always check your compass?” she asked me once while we were in the middle of our first dig session of the day. She stuck her shovel in the ground and propped her forearms on the handle, breathing hard as she faced me.

“Just…to double check.”

“I know where we’re going,” she said, a tad indignant. “We don’t need that, you can put it away.”

Pushing my luck, I said, “We’re a few degrees off track.”

“That’s because I’m not heading there as the crow flies. I’m planning to join tunnels with some other Palestinian folks under the Maldives.”

“How do you know where their tunnels are?”

She tapped her forehead with two fingers. “We’re in communication.”

I had no idea what that meant. Outside my own family, I wasn’t in communication with any Palestinians. Even of my own family’s Palestinian-ness, I knew close to nil. It was not something my grandparents had wanted to pass down, or perhaps they had not been able to bear dredging it up, or perhaps they had convinced themselves that it was uninteresting. By the time I had grown conscious enough to wonder about the histories that had led to my life, they were dead.

To Haya, I said, “Oh, right,” and kept digging. I had my own pride to protect.

Weeks passed. All we did was dig, eat, pray, sleep, dig. Haya spoke to me less and less, maybe because I never initiated conversation. I was still nervous to be around her, more now than in the past. Labouring side by side made me more aware of the imbalance in our claims to Palestinian indigeneity. If we grew close, I thought she’d see I knew nothing.

In looks, also, we could not have been more unalike. It was difficult to make each other out except under direct torch light, so I had to take inventory of her in stolen throws of my beam in the dark. My eyes were browner, she was more tanned, her curls were looser than my Egyptian coils, and I had a squarer frame.

She never commented on it outright, but once, while we were resting, she said, out of the blue, “I never met two Palestinian Australians who look like they’re from the same country.”

I laughed because it was true. And then I didn’t know what was true about it. What did it mean, “from the same country”? Especially for us, who were and were not from one place.

She heard me thinking and shrugged, “Or, whatever—same ethnicity.” Sometimes, I felt her study me with an aggravated feeling.

All she spoke about in those weeks was the people we would meet under the Maldives, always with a tone like I wouldn’t believe how incredible these “real Palestinian” men and women were, from all around the world.

Well, we reached the Maldives and there was nothing. Every hour that passed without the wall of earth ahead collapsing into an adjoining tunnel and delivering us into the arms and smiles of our fellow wayward siblings, Haya’s mood stiffened. She started saying maybe they had overshot us because we were going so slow, so we’d have to speed up if we ever wanted our paths to intersect. What we gained in speed over the following days, we sacrificed in the width of our dig. We began to bump up against each other while we worked, everything was mixed, our grunts and sweat. Even with my grandfather’s jacket tied around my waist and Haya’s keffiyeh stuffed in her bag, we grew agitated under the close press of each other’s body heat. I could dig faster and for longer than her without rest. Sometimes, when Haya strained too hard to match me and eventually doubled over and lagged for a few steps, I caught her watching me with what I thought was hatred.

A month in, we were butting shoulders. She shoved me off abruptly. “Can I get some space?”

I gestured to the shoebox we were in. “Where am I supposed to go?”

Tightly, she said, “I don’t want any distractions. I just want to get to Palestine.”

“What distraction?” The sportswoman in me reared up against attack.

Haya looked restless. Suddenly she turned and started pounding the wall of soil to her right, trying to break through. “We should have met the others by now!” she said, voice rising. She spun and began banging against the wall on my side. “They should be right behind here! Are we too low?” She started slamming the roof, making it rain pebbles and soil.

Frightened, I grabbed her arms to hold her back, and she threw me off, shouting, “What did I just say? Back off! If you weren’t here, maybe I would’ve spent more time concentrating on being in the right place at the right time to meet up with the people I actually asked to join me. Why are you even here? Why are you so rude? Why don’t you ever say anything? Turn around, if you want! It’s not too late for you to go back the way you came!”

With this last word, she slammed her fist into the roof, and immediately a massive hole opened in the earth and gallons of water started gushing through. We had been on a downward incline: the deluge pooled at our feet and within seconds was up to our knees. I saw Haya’s face zip up with panic. I checked that my grandmother’s drawing of the night sky was safe in its plastic sleeve in my pocket and began digging to high ground as fast as possible. I assumed we’d hit a narrow water pocket right over heads, because every upward strike of my shovel elsewhere found dry soil. When I couldn’t feel Haya beside me, I glanced behind to find her still dredging her backpack out of the water. I yelled for her to hurry up. I was making ground quickly, but Haya was waist deep. I saw her struggling to climb up after me. The water swelled. It was sucking her down.

I staked my shovel into the soil, dropped my leather jacket and my grandmother’s drawing on the dry ground, then jumped down into the water. I crouched so that my whole body was submerged in the freezing, gushing torrent, grabbed Haya’s legs, and straightened up with all my strength to propel her to higher ground until she could take hold of my staked shovel and climb to safety. When she had solid footing, she threw off her backpack, lay flat on her stomach and shot an arm down to me. I downed several lungfuls of air before we were both up on the ledge. By then the water bubble had exhausted itself and was dispensing only a drizzle, but I dug us further up into a niche just in case. Then we were both coughing until we felt secure.

Haya shuddered uncontrollably. She tried to her wrap herself in her keffiyeh, but it was soaked. I got up and put my grandfather’s leather jacket around her shoulders. The water had washed the dirt from her face, and under my headlamp her skin looked lilac-tinged from cold. Her eyes held fast on me. I met her with equal silence.

After eons, she said, “I used to watch your soccer games. Not for you, but I noticed you play. I always thought you looked strong. I didn’t realize how strong you were.”

“Sorry,” I said, confusedly.

“Why?” she asked. “You were the best player. You were unpredictable. Everyone else, their next step was obvious. But with you, I couldn’t tell which direction you would go from moment to moment.”

I said, “I was just following the lead of the game.”

There was a pause. Haya asked, “Where is your family from? You’ve never told me.”

“My mother’s side is from Jerusalem. My father’s side is from Alexandria, Egypt.”

Haya rummaged around for a plastic sleeve of her own in her backpack and came to sit beside me. She held between us a hand-drawn map, and on each house, there was an Arabic name. “My grandmother made this map of her old neighbourhood in Jerusalem from memory.” She pointed to her family’s house, labelled “Luqman Abu al-‘Aish” in Arabic. One block down was a house labelled “Bassam Abdullah.”

“I think that’s my great-grandfather’s name.”

“We would have been neighbours,” Haya said, with less awe in her voice than pain.

“I wouldn’t exist if my family had stayed in those streets,” I said, then felt bad for always contradicting her. I could sense her discomfort at my implication, especially in the face of where we were, and the enormity of what we were doing. “You really miss it,” I said in apology. “You were born there.”

“Not only that, it was my home until the Second Intifada.”

“My family has not lived in Palestine since the Six-Day War. We were scattered across Canada, Australia, Germany…”

“Last time I visited with my family, we got stuck for twelve hours at a checkpoint outside East Jerusalem. The guards only let us through after my father finally started screaming and shouting, and then he was embarrassed. They’d been waiting for him to snap. His dignity was the price of entry. I heard him swear to my mother we would never come back again. That’s the dream of the occupying regime.”

No one had ever looked at me and seen enough Palestinian dignity to be worth taking.

“My dream is to live there,” Haya went on, pointing to the map, “in this home my grandfather built. I have this fantasy of walking in, holding up a deed and being like, ‘Okay, show’s over. Get out of my house!’” She laughed, but her whole body was electric. “Imagine living there and knowing, ‘This is my land.’ I mean to work there, and write, and grow food, and eat. I miss it so much. I miss it even more because it’s so hard to get to. God, it makes me cry like I’m dying when I leave.”

I said, “I’ve never been.”

Haya went quiet. I felt it sink in. “I can barely understand Palestinian Arabic,” I continued, self-immolating. “Only my Egyptian grandparents spoke Arabic to me. My Palestinian grandfather died when I was young. My Palestinian grandmother never told me anything except that the sky above Jerusalem leads straight to heaven, where The Prophet, ‘alayhi al-salam, was taken to speak to God and receive the gift of prayer on behalf of mankind.”

“Is that why you came?” Haya asked me.

Actually, what my grandmother had said was that The Prophet, an orphan in more ways than one, had been taken to Jerusalem to be raised up, to meet the men who had come before him and believed what he believed, all his brothers, cousins, fathers—that they had smiled upon him and said, “Peace.” My grandmother used to say, when I was little, “I used to think, how lucky I was that I could look up and see the same sky The Prophet saw on the night he learned all the loving precedent there was for the mission of his life.”

But how could I tell Haya all that? Instead, I said, “I came because I felt lonely.”

“You came for companionship?”

“I came for precedent,” I said. “I came for my soul. That land is holy.”

I listened to her mind whir as she absorbed my mission. I felt her hold it up against her real and heart-strong politics. I wondered if she would deem my task worthy.

“You ever hear of John Foster Dulles?” she started. “He was one of the men responsible for the US invasion of Vietnam. Back in the fifties, someone asked him about Palestinians. He said, ‘They’re unlucky because they fell under the feet of elephants. The old generation will die and the young will forget.’ Well? Do we look like we’ve forgotten? Forced amnesia is a war tactic; that’s what you’re facing. But you’re digging so deep to love what you can’t even remember. Here, in the soil, in the earth, where we are…can you imagine how momentous a reclamation your love for that land will be when it rushes back into your heart?”

I was humbled. “You’ve been kind to me,” I said quietly.

“No, I haven’t,” she said. Then she leaned close and kissed me on my right, my left, my right cheek. “My cousin, neighbour, countryman.”

In the night—or in the portion of the dark we told ourselves was night—she got up from her roost at my feet to come lie beside me, and it stirred me from my sleep.

Hours later, we rose and continued. Our quietude was pleasantly transformed, even shy, full of relief and little smiles. I had a feeling we were close to our destination. I had a feeling the worst was behind us. Haya was singing a dreamy Palestinian melody. We spurred on in good spirits.

Suddenly, the wall on Haya’s side gave way and collapsed into a massive adjoining tunnel. Haya turned to me, her whole body blazing with joy. She climbed through into the other space. I was on her tail, significantly more wary.

“They must be just ahead!” she beamed.

“They must be.”

She dropped her shovel with glee. “We don’t need these anymore.” The path ahead was so clear. I dropped my own shovel and followed her. She was so excited, she started running and laughing.

It was easy enough for me to keep up that I could scope out our surroundings with my headlamp as I went. The dig-out was incredibly wide and pristine. There were multiple sets of footsteps in the soil. Some of them were going the opposite way, which alarmed me. I looked back more closely at the walls. The soil along the edge was compacted. In some places there were the huge claw-marks of a large machine.

My stomach dropped.

“Haya, wait—” I called, angling my light towards her.

A soldier stepped out of a niche and struck her head with the base of his rifle. She crumpled to the ground.

A light came on from somewhere. I was frozen in place. The only movement I managed was to tug my hijab down over my hair. The soldier used the toe of his boot to nudge Haya’s shoulder. “Stand up!” he barked in a mixed accent. I thought it was European. Then I saw the three-letter acronym on the shoulder of his black uniform.

Haya struggled to drag herself to her feet. I came to my senses and ran to help her up, pressing her to the wall opposite from the soldier with her body behind me. There was blood dripping from her temple onto the black and white keffiyeh she wore as a neckerchief.

“Give me your bag,” the soldier spat. He had white-blue eyes.

Once he had Haya’s backpack, he held it upside down and emptied the contents on the ground. Out tumbled photographs with Palestinian addresses on the back, a mobile phone with Palestinian area code numbers in its recent calls, an anti-Zionist zine. He kicked dirt over everything, then threw the bag to the side.

He nodded to me. “You, where are you going?”

“Palestine,” I choked.

“Where? Which street?”

I realized I had no idea.

“Say something in Arabic,” he pressed.

I stuttered an Egyptian Arabic sentence. He threw his head back and laughed. In two swift strides, he pushed me further down the tunnel and seized Haya’s arm. He pointed the rifle at my heart. “You can keep going,” he said. “We only stop Palestinians.”

I couldn’t move. My eyes were on Haya, who was shaking in his white-knuckled grasp—shaking with rage. I knew exactly what she was planning to do. I didn’t even have time to scream “NO!” before she drew her Swiss Army knife from her pocket and plunged it into the soldier’s arm. He howled in pain as she flew from his grasp.

“RUN,” she roared, but I was already sprinting northwest. I begged God to save us. I was listening to Haya’s feet pound the soft, infra-Palestinian ground when the gunshots rang out. I spun around to see the soldier’s rifle aimed at the ceiling in front of Haya and a huge column of dirt sink down between us, cutting her off from me and everything she wanted. The last I saw were the two burning stones of her eyes. Then I was alone.

For a moment, I stood paralyzed. I heard a muffled thud. Terror sent me sprinting into the dark. I don’t know how long I kept running. If I stopped moving for a moment, my body was seized with violent tremors, so I stayed moving. I had nothing on me except the drawing and a torch. I had no food, no water, no companion. The steady incline told me I was close to arriving, and the closer I drew, the more a nauseating panic possessed me. What vision am I moving towards? How will it recognize me? Can it change my life? And if I am too estranged?

My flashlight began to flicker, then I was in the absolute dark. It made no difference. I moved in a semi-lucid state. Haya’s scream ricocheted in my mind’s ear. How could so much love and anger stay trapped underneath huge cities without causing the lights to burst and the ground to quake?

In the far distance, I became aware of a pinhead of light. Soon it was upon me. I emerged from the mouth of the earth into a full Mediterranean night, the reverse and the equivalent of dying. I was standing surface-side at the edge of a huge city. The first thing I did was look up to the sky. I took my grandmother’s drawing out and held it up for comparison. The light pollution of the city dimmed all but a few celestial fires. Those few stars pierced the dark in a crescendo under my gaze; they began splitting across the sky, opening the wide, creaking jaw of the night for me, so that a Hand could reach down and clasp my soul. My legs gave way. There was no doubt; this was the place.

I looked around for details. The street signs in this part of Palestine were not in Arabic; they were in some foreign language. But I had come all this way. Then I thought, Wait, how will I ever get home?

The Third or Fourth Casualty

Ziyad Saadi

It didn’t seem to bother any of them that one of their own had just been killed seconds ago. They kept on swimming.

The water warmed them after all, toasted their coarse, pimply skin lightly enough to make them resemble more contented versions of themselves. The cold autumn month was made barren by a string of afternoons that scattered through time to form what appeared to be—faintly on the horizon and decidedly everywhere else—a ceasefire. This subtle comfort was not to be taken for granted in Gaza, particularly in the presence of such a devoted moon, which stood watch over the sea anxiously and helplessly as a mother over a child whose youthful inhibitions shrivel away at dizzying speed. Its shine dimmed at times, forced to combat the heap of trash glooming the shore, but it sufficed.

The corpse belonged to Ibrahim Salah. But that hardly matters. Death will not propel this story. Instead, we’ll discuss the activities of the sextet of adolescent boys who swam expertly in what is undoubtedly the land’s most liberating corner.

Murtaza was the most accustomed to the art of swimming and, even more so, the art of racing. His relentless splashes often preluded a showy display of a fact that he—and to a lesser extent, they—already knew: the sea rendered him invincible. But the whole point of their meeting there was to flex the muscles of their accelerated youth before circumstances stiffened them for good. Talib, especially, ached for that exact opportunity and ultimately was the one to take it.

He and Murtaza agreed to race half a mile into the sea. Murtaza had enough confidence to down half a bottle of smuggled whiskey beforehand. Talib lacked enough confidence to do the same. Within a matter of seconds, they were off.

Murtaza didn’t come back.

His corpse drifted towards the first one without so much as a nudge and remained there indefinitely.

Please keep in mind that his death is as insignificant as that of the Palestinian boy whose death preceded his, and remains irrelevant to what happens both in and out of this story. The most significant event at this point was the break the quintet suddenly decided to take. Each of the boys stopped swimming and began simply to float on their backs. They knew too well that it was only a matter of time before the incoming breeze conquered the night. The boys never cared much for that bitter wind unleashed upon them even in their most docile moments. It was the same wind that always wrested the sand and demolished the beauty with which it freckled the sea.

During their period of rest, they glanced, as was typical of young Gazan boys on moonlit nights, at the horizon. Its mercy emerged more often than not, a transcendental pull bending the bars that shrouded the strip, flashing a panorama of cheetahs swallowing fire and daffodils dancing the tango or whatever else their sleepless minds made of the kaleidoscopic splotch of colours before them. In the midst of this break, however, Nabil grew tired of floating around and eagerly challenged the rest of the group to what was his area of expertise. Saeed, noticing the reluctance of his other three companions, figured he ought to be bold enough to accept the challenge himself.

He and Nabil dunked their heads below the water.

As the seconds passed, the wind grew stronger and harsher. The moonlight bouncing off the surface of the sea was initially the night’s highlight, but with members of the quintet now succumbing to goosebumps and runny noses, it had by then turned merely into its consolation. Saeed came up from beneath the water, while Nabil’s body drifted to the same graveyard as the two corpses before him. The quartet could no longer handle the increasing chill of the night. They slithered out of the sea and dried themselves off with the towels they’d left on shore.

Kindly remember that the death of Palestinian children is irrelevant to this story.

Talib confronted a swarm of ants orbiting around his towel. Though typically a passionate fan of plant and animal life, the boy was suddenly consumed by a bout of rage that thrust him into a fit of wild, unbridled violence to ensure that no ant would dare englobe his possessions ever again. Good riddance to those pesky ants, he thought. Who were they to insinuate themselves into such a discreet and exclusive adventure?

Hadi, who sometimes swam naked and emboldened the others to do the same, wanted to take a picture of the dead ants, but without his phone he was forced instead to document their deaths with nothing more than his photographic mind. He sprinkled clumps of dirt over their disintegrated bodies, but their antennae and legs poked through to the surface in a futile rejection of their resting place.

Amir gazed at the sea with the desperate expectation that the wind would be as brief as it was cruel. Talib smacked him on the back of his head, but it failed to knock any sense into him: Amir dumped his towel and ripped back into the sea in search of the divine cure that often glittered in its waves.

None of them could leave if any of the others remained in the sea. It was a rule to which they had all agreed since they began these escapades. The other three rejoined Amir and the quartet swam for a while. Talib grew somewhat anxious as the night progressed, mainly because the night was not progressing at all. Time froze in the sea, as each wave that crashed over their heads echoed the seconds that ticked into their ears until both the crashing and the ticking undulated into one another’s paths and, rather than bumping clumsily into one another like careless couriers on a frenzied run and expelling a thunderous blare across the adolescents’ minds, both sounds simply merged to form a newer, more deeply unsettling sound that muted their minds altogether.

Yes, the night remained perfectly constant indeed. And yet the wind never stopped growing stronger. Grains of sand eventually severed from the shore and fluttered across the water. More significant than any of the deaths that have occurred heretofore is that those grains entered Saeed’s eye, forcing him to leave the sea once more. Talib and Hadi soon fell victim to the wind’s strategic mercilessness and were ultimately forced out of the sea as well. Amir was more fortunate and was able to swim for a little while longer. A few minutes later, his corpse drifted to the same graveyard as the others. The trio sensed that it was time to bring the night to a close. They grabbed their possessions, leaving behind those of the other three (or was it four?) before trekking back along the strip that entrenched their feet in dry, hermetic normalcy.

There is no need to mourn Amir, or Nabil, or Murtaza, or that first one. The sea drew them in as nothing else could, and the moon will remain long enough to illuminate their indelible signatures. And on some night in the near future, the trio will return as a septet, just as they had on this night. Neither wind nor sand will ever steal the lust for the world’s most glorious mirage.

The Generation Chip

Nadia Afifi

I stepped off the plane into the sauna known as Saudi Arabia in June. It was the worst time to visit the country, when the slow burn of summer was at its fiercest, but death doesn’t plan for the weather. I scratched my stubbly face, already clammy from the humid night air.

Maha greeted me at baggage claim—and by greeted, I mean she arched her brow and raised two manicured fingers to her temple in a mock salute. Her expression was unreadable behind wide sunglasses. Had she been crying? She was the closest to our Teta, my grandmother Hind. Like me, she didn’t make the funeral. Islamic burial custom dictated that Teta go into the ground within twenty-four hours of death. Maha came from London. I came from Austin. We both arrived too late.

“You look the same, Kamel,” Maha said, lowering her sunglasses and taking in my scuffed jeans and Tool shirt, the one with a hole under my left armpit. “Mama’ll be thrilled.”

“I like to be comfortable when I travel,” I said, defensive as always. I liked to be comfortable everywhere, at all times. In body and mind.

This week was going to be rough.

“I’m driving,” Maha said with relish. She wove and dodged through Jeddah traffic, her smile hard and knowing as she turned to me.

“He’s already at the house,” Maha said. “They move quick.”

I frowned. “Who, Salim?” Of course my brother was already there. He was the reliable one, the one who didn’t waste his time working for a local Austin insurance company and playing in a prog-rock band on weekends. He was an engineer, the most prized of professions for my traditional Palestinian parents. Of course he’d beat us, the pothead musician and the struggling journalist.

“No, not Salim. The lawyer from the you-know-where,” she said with gritted teeth. The tires screeched as we rounded a corner. “That creepy Dubai Mind Clinic place she got into in the last few years. Apparently, she left a will.” Maha pressed her lips together, her fire engine–red lipstick congealing in the heat.

I pressed my head against the passenger seat window, suddenly dizzy. I’d heard the stories through the intricate family grapevine. Hind had become obsessed with the past as her mind began its slow decline. She talked about it constantly—not just the usual stories about life in Jerusalem, about fleeing the family home during the Nakba with only the clothes on her back. Her stories, the family said, took on strange colours. Facts changed and timelines shifted. Even I experienced traces of it. The last time I spoke to her over the phone, Teta Hind said, in her usual honeyed tone and thick Arabic accent, that she’d see me at the farm in Jordan. We didn’t have a farm in Jordan. Her family fled south, and she married a businessman from a wealthy Jerusalem family who had settled in Saudi Arabia.

The house we pulled up on spoke to those facts. Three stories tall and surrounded by concrete walls, it was a typical home in this part of Jeddah. But the red terracotta roof and tall plants beside the ornate wooden front doors carried a Mediterranean aesthetic. Despite the heaviness in my chest, my mouth twitched in a faint smile at the sight of the banana trees in the garden. As a kid, I used to kick the trunks until overripe bananas fell and then hide peels around the house’s smooth marble floors in hopes of someone slipping. I wasn’t the best kid.

Inside the house, the family had already gathered around the living room. My suitcase clicked against the tiled floor as I wheeled it in. My parents rose perfunctorily from the loveseat, planting kisses on my cheek. As Maha predicted, Mama wrinkled her nose at my T-shirt but said nothing. Salim followed with a tight hug that assaulted my senses with expensive cologne. Other relatives were there—cousins, uncles, aunts, and some extended family paying a visit as was mourning custom.

And in the centre of the room, the lawyer. He stood out with his pressed suit and plastered smile. But the man behind him drew even more confused stares. He looked to be in his sixties, wearing a thobe striped black and gold. His long white hair, which curled behind his ears and hung in a long wizard’s beard, made him look like some kind of Middle Eastern shaman. My mom visibly recoiled as he took a step forward, next to the lawyer.

Exchanging amused glances, Maha and I took our seats.

“If I could have everyone’s attention, please,” the lawyer said with a booming clap of his hands. “I’d like to communicate the final wishes of your dearly beloved matriarch, Hind Al-Nabilsi, may God forgive her and welcome her. Mother of Adnan, Sara, and Hiba. Grandmother to Maha, Salim, and Kamel. Loyal wife to Walid, who passed before her and with whom she will now be reunited.”

“We don’t need a fucking obituary,” Maha muttered under her breath.

“Sir, I don’t mean to be disrespectful,” Salim interjected in a tone that made no such promises. “But my grandmother Hind already had a will. Her money, her property—that’s been sorted.”

“Of course,” the lawyer said with a polite wave of his hand. “We have no business with Hind’s material possessions.”

Maha snorted, and I suppressed an eyeroll. They probably took plenty of her money in the last few months.

“We come with Hind’s more prized possessions,” the shaman said, his voice surprisingly deep and gravelly. “What was in her mind.”

A heavy silence followed. Uncertain glances were exchanged, but some faces lit up with interest and curiosity. The Dubai Mind Clinic made headlines around the world, a topic of fierce debate in coffee shops around the region. They did it all—therapy, memory retrieval, dream analysis. They had an AI learning engine that could apparently show you a simulation of your life if you took a different path—if you went on a date with that person or accepted that job in New York. That last offering was the most controversial—people questioned the accuracy of it, and the ethics. There were headlines of people spending a fortune to visit their on-site Dubai clinic, playing out another version of their life in order to chase away their regrets.

Mama broke the silence by clearing her throat. “Go on, then. We’re waiting.”

The lawyer clapped his hands and after a preamble filled with legalese, he and the shaman jumped into the heart of the matter.

“My grandson, Salim Al-Nabilsi, will have legal ownership of my Paths Not Taken Chip,” the lawyer said. “This includes all recordings I took in Dubai that simulated other paths my life could have taken had I made different choices or been offered alternatives. They may not be released outside of the family without his authorization. I’ll be sending the paperwork electronically.”

A loud, nervous giggle rose into the air—one of my aunts, hiding her face behind a teacup. Salim scowled, confusion playing across his features, but his face relaxed into cool neutrality as he shook the lawyer’s hand. Of course, the responsible one got the power of attorney over this whole weird operation. Teta Hind hadn’t completely lost her senses.

“For my granddaughter, Maha Al-Nabilsi, I give the gift of peace by leaving her my favourite recurring dream, recorded by the Mind Clinic,” the lawyer said, while the shaman stepped forward and handed my sister a small, crystal-like device shaped like a USB drive. She blinked in confusion, but accepted it with a trembling hand.

“And for my other grandson, Kamel Al-Nabilsi, I leave the Generation Chip,” the lawyer said, as every eye in the room turned to me. “My most prized memories and experiences, the ones I wish to pass down from generation to generation of the family, to keep my legacy alive and to ensure my stories are never forgotten.”

I swallowed. Blood pounded in my ears. The shaman stood before me, smelling faintly of mahogany and sumac. He handed me the same type of device he gave Maha. It was heavier than expected, its surface cold and smooth.

My throat burned. Ninety years of memories, contained in something so small and fragile. And Teta made it mine to keep. Not her own daughter, her nieces and nephews who now stared at me in stunned disbelief, or Maha and Salim. Why me?

“Why Kamel?” Salim exploded. He rose from his seat, pacing wildly and looking everywhere but at me. His voice echoed across the room. “All of her most important memories…really? And she left me the fake stuff? And Maha a single dream?”

“The Generation Chip,” Mama intoned with a theatrical warble in her voice. “If only all families had such a thing. We’re blessed in that way. But what a responsibility, to carry them. Especially Mama’s. She was a refugee! She witnessed history.”

No one in this room, aside from the Mind Clinic people, had even heard of a Generation Chip until now, but in under a minute it had suddenly become a big deal. A very big deal. And I, of course, wasn’t worthy. Irritation crept across my skin.

“I thought you all saw this as a big joke,” Maha said dryly to Salim and Mama.

“Our grandmother being taken advantage of is not a joke,” Salim said. “But if those are real memories…they confused her. Exploited her for money, instead of bringing the family into her will.” He cast a dark look at the lawyer and shaman before finally rounding on me. “Give a Generation Chip to Kamel? Of all of us, he’s the least likely to have children. He can’t even take care of himself.”

“Why do you say that?” Mama said, but the room spun and I sank back into my chair. Maha shot Salim a look sharper than two poison-tipped daggers. Salim wet his lips, defiant, and I mustered the willpower to shake my head at him. Don’t you dare.

“Of course Kamel will marry someday,” Baba interjected. “You all will.”

Other relatives began to speak, eager to break the tension. They thanked the lawyer, who said his goodbyes despite Mama’s protestations that they join us for dinner. She didn’t want the Mind Clinic people there, of course, but hospitality demanded that she offer several times before they managed to escape out the front door. But all this happened through a heavy fog, a scene muted by the fury that coursed like poison through my bloodstream. Just looking at Salim made me dizzy with anger.

I’d lost my job weeks before Hind’s death. I was unemployed, spending my days at cafes around Austin applying for jobs between long stretches on Instagram. Salim and Maha knew, but my parents would be horrified to learn I’d been laid off from my already unglamorous job. They wanted me back with them, in Jeddah, and this would add fuel to their arguments.

Salim and I traded scowls all through dinner. We were bickering kids again, as if the last twenty years hadn’t happened. What kind of grown man needs his Mama and Baba’s approval so badly? I loved my parents, sure, but I knew their limitations.

After dinner, I found Maha sitting outside with her vape pen. I pulled out my own and sat next to her on the steps. We blew thin trails of smoke into the muggy Jeddah air as crickets sang in the dark banana trees. The evening call to prayer rose in unison from nearby minarets.

“You going to do anything with that?” I asked, gesturing to the crystal chip in Maha’s twirling fingers.

“I’m going tomorrow,” Maha said matter-of-factly. “They have a local Mind Clinic branch here in Jeddah, according to their website. You need to go to Dubai to actually record and do their fancier stuff, but we can get plugged in to view our inheritance here.”

I thought it was jet lag or a joke, but the next day, we drove along the Jeddah corniche to the shiny, blue glass building that housed the Mind Clinic. We stepped into the foyer, immediately assaulted by bright lights and the smell of incense. Patrons waited on plush cushions in the lobby, lost in their phones. Light spilled into the room through a high, stained-glass ceiling. As Maha checked in, my pulse drummed at my throat and my tongue turned to cotton. Why was I so nervous? I didn’t have to do anything. I could join the zombies in the lobby until Maha was ready to leave.

Only I couldn’t. My sweaty palm tightened around the Generation Chip. My grandmother’s story. Her history, a life marked by years of domestic drudgery punctuated by war and exile. She wanted me to see it. If I couldn’t give her that much, I’d only be confirming what so many in the family believed—that I was the disappointment, the coward hiding from myself in Austin.

Maha and I shivered in white robes as two attendants ushered us down a long hallway framed by soft blue lights. We separated at the end of the hall, into adjacent rooms. The room was simpler than I expected—bare and dark, the opposite of the opulent lobby. My stomach twisted at the sight of the reclining chair in the room’s centre, adorned with wires and cables, but I advanced before I had time to change my mind.

I leaned back into the chair, the leather cool on the back of my head. My mouth was so dry, I started to cough.

“Relax,” the attendant said, pressing a button to recline my chair. She made a gentle hushing sound with her teeth, like I was a nervous horse in a stable. Her hand flashed and I caught her inserting the chip into a glowing port before everything went black.

Maha beamed at me in the lobby.

“How was it?” she asked.

I couldn’t even muster a basic reply. A soft sound escaped my throat and I made a gesture with my hands, my attempt to turn the question back on her. My sister smiled knowingly and led me back outside.

In the car, she grabbed my hand.

“It was a city like Jeddah, but different,” she said. “It had elements of different cities, all mashed together, like dreams do. But instead of roads and sidewalks, it was connected by pools and waterways with beautiful trees and vines forming arches overhead. Like a public transit system made of water. These shallow pools with fountains were like train stations, and you’d swim through the pools to get to different parts of the city. I just swam from place to place, in this beautiful blue water. Other people swam with me, like commuters on a highway. It was so weird…but wonderful.”

“Sounds nice,” I said. The words came out as a croak.

“Want to talk about what you saw?” Maha prompted.

I shook my head and Maha drove us home in silence, not pressing the issue. I leaned back in my seat and closed my eyes. My grandmother’s memories enveloped me and weighed on my shoulders like a cloak, my heart heavy with secrets. Part of me wanted to take Teta Hind’s secrets to the grave, but the other half ached to unload everything I had learned in the last two hours. But where would I begin?

She never loved my grandfather. She regretted marrying him. There was that little detail. Invisible nails clawed at my throat, making my skin burn and itch. I loved both my grandparents—the idea of them, surviving in a new country and growing old together.

It was a lie.

I sat in silence over dinner, barely picking at my maḥshi while Maha told the rest of the family about the dream. Although she was the same, caustic Maha, some of the edge had left her voice and her hands moved with a lightness I’d never seen before. But Mama and the rest of the family didn’t seem to notice, more focused on the possible meanings behind the dream.

“Funny,” Mama said. “She never swam much, from what I remember. I never saw her get into a pool.”

I had. A small backyard pool in a walled house in Jerusalem’s Old City, framed by shrubs with vivid purple flowers. My grandmother, then a teenager, sat on the pool’s edge, the bright sun warming her back. The memory was so vivid, I could feel the heat on my cheeks and smell the fresh, flower-scented air. Another girl splashed in the pool, her dark, curly hair forming a curtain in the water.

Her name was Noor, and my grandmother loved her until the day she died.

Noor was the daughter of a widowed Palestinian accountant employed by the British government during the Mandate. Hind and Noor became close friends, spending afternoons after school walking through the Old City and eating sweets against the backdrop of the Mount of Olives.

One windy afternoon, while they shared a plate of knafeh, Noor traced a finger around the outside of Hind’s mouth, which was sticky with syrup. When I experienced the memory in the dark Mind Clinic chamber, time slowed and Hind’s thundering heartbeat drowned out the noise of the city. The two young women leaned forward and their lips met, quickly and shyly.

Her first kiss.

The entire Generation Chip download lasted two hours, but I’d never need to do it again. It was burned in my memory, and some of Hind’s moments felt more real than my own. The Mind Clinic, it turned out, wasn’t a scam. Far from it.

I spent the next few days in a haze. Visitors came and went, bringing their condolences and stories of my grandmother. Every night, I dreamed of Jerusalem’s narrow streets, the air rich with the smell of freshly baked bread. I dreamed of hot summer days where gunfire crackled at dusk, of radio broadcasts warning of massacres, villages burnt to rubble. My grandmother’s memory of her father loading their belongings in their car, her mother frantic. Noor’s family had left for Jordan the day before, too fast for the young women to say their goodbyes. The memory of the car winding through hills and farms pulsated with Hind’s heartbreak, a longing hand pressed against the backseat window. In the midst of a national catastrophe, a quieter, more personal tragedy unfolded in that car.

And now her memory was mine—my inheritance and burden.

“Kamel? Did you hear anything I just said?”

Salim stared at me from across the dinner table, his fork stabbing a greasy chicken thigh.

“I think it’s a wonderful idea,” Mama said. “A perfect way to honour her memory.”

The wonderful idea, painstakingly laid out by Salim, turned out to be handing over Hind’s chip to a Palestinian organization that was collecting memories from Hind’s generation. A chronicle of the Nakba, from the memories of the people who experienced it.

Under the table, my knuckles whitened as I gripped my napkin.

“Teta didn’t say she wanted her memories made public,” I said.

“Why wouldn’t she?” Mama asked with a low sigh. “It’s not just about the family’s history…it’s our people’s history. She left the Generation Chip because she wanted the memories to survive.” She didn’t say that the way things currently sat, Hind’s memories would likely die with me, but she didn’t need to. It was clear that me carrying the chip wasn’t enough.

“But she almost never talked about it with us,” I countered. “Remember? If she didn’t want to talk to us about that time, why would she want it shared with strangers all over the world?”

Salim’s fork clinked against his plate.

“Why are you like this, Kamel?” he snapped. “You live in Texas, forgetting more Arabic every year and now that you’re suddenly here, you think your opinion matters? You barely saw Teta in your adult life compared to me. Even Maha visited more often. How would you know what she wanted?”

Anger burned my throat, but when I opened my mouth to retort, the words died at the tip of my tongue. How could I explain it without sharing Hind’s secrets?

“And anyway,” Salim said with an air of finality, “I have control over one set of recordings, and I’m going to petition the Mind Clinic to give me control over the rest of them. Teta trusted me to do what’s right, and I will.”

The chair screamed against the marble floor as I shot from my seat. Mama threw her hands in the air, lamenting in a theatrical stream of Arabic and English, while I stormed from the room. I was being dramatic as well but didn’t care. Everything I knew about my grandmother had been upended in the last few days and now Salim was pulling his usual shit. He said I was too removed from the family, from my heritage, but I’d never felt closer to home than I had this week. Seeing Jerusalem through Hind’s eyes, a historical Palestine rich with complexity, filled me with pride and hurt. I ached for the life that had been imposed on her, thanks to her uprooting. And I was ashamed over how little I’d known about her.

“What was in that memory anyway?” On the rooftop balcony, Maha offered me her vape pen.

I told her. Her mouth formed a small O, but she listened without interruption as I described our grandmother’s heartache over her teenage romance and the years of unfulfilling marriage that followed. The lie she was forced to live.

“Mama’ll have a seizure,” Maha finally said with a hint of grim satisfaction. “A lot of people in the family will.”

“That’s why I can’t let Salim release the chip,” I said.

“Or maybe we should,” my sister said with careful deliberation. “Think about it, Kamel. There are people who want to cling onto the past, to this traditional idea of a Palestine we need to return to. It would be good to show Teta’s story—let people see that there were queer people in our society, hidden in the shadows. That we were all affected by the war.”

She had a point. The thought had crossed my mind for a fleeting second before Salim’s cold smirk made my blood pressure rise.

“But it’s so personal and private,” I said. “Teta left it to me for a reason. I want to make sure I know what that reason is.”

Maha blew out a stream of thoughtful smoke.

“The dream with the pools,” she said, “had another detail I forgot about, until I started having the dream myself. It always ends at this farm. Not an Ohio, cow-town kind of farm. A farm with olive trees and dry soil, on top of a rocky hill.”

My heart leapt to my throat. The farm in Jordan that she kept mentioning in her final months. Maybe that’s where Noor had gone.

Luckily, Maha was willing to put her skills as a journalist to use. She found out that there was indeed a Noor, whose last name, age, and background matched the girl from Hind’s memories, living outside of Amman, Jordan. She was ninety-four, still alive.

Our joy was short lived, however, when we finally found a phone number for the suspected house, and a man who turned out to be her son answered. The conversation began on an awkward note, but he softened when I explained that my grandmother and Noor were childhood friends back in Jerusalem.

“She mentioned her a lot,” Noor’s son said.

Maha and I exchanged an excited smile, before I realized that he had spoken in the past tense.

“It won’t do you all or her any good to talk about the past now,” he continued. “She has Alzheimer’s. Barely recognizes me anymore. We take care of her as best we can, but she has mostly bad days now.”

He texted us some old, black-and-white pictures of Noor and thanked us for the call. In one, she grinned under a stone arch, her dark curls and large eyes a perfect mirror of my grandmother’s memories. An invisible weight pressed on my chest as I stared at her face. In later pictures of her surrounded by a husband and children, I searched for signs of that sadness and regret that Hind carried. Had she continued to think about my grandmother, even as her memories slipped away?

The mourning period ended, but we all stayed. Salim took conference calls from his bedroom, arguing with his team about monthly reports and managerial briefings. But he also booked a trip to Dubai to meet the shaman at the Mind Clinic. The idea of the historical archive had hooked into him like a falcon’s talons, encouraged by my parents. They thought it was a good idea, and Salim wanted to make them happy.

But he was also a businessman and could maybe be bargained with.

“I’m open to authorizing the Generation Chip to that group,” I said to my brother one sweltering afternoon. “Believe it or not, I also care about our grandmother’s history being preserved beyond an unemployed guy with excellent taste in music but terrible fashion sense.” Salim’s mouth twitched in a reluctant smile. Putting myself down was the perfect way to soften him up.

“But before we do that, I want to tie up some loose ends,” I continued. “I’d like to see the Paths Not Taken Chip. Seeing Teta’s memories answered some questions I had about her, but raised even more. I’m curious to see what she chose to record in that other Chip.”

Salim frowned. “Why? It’s junk science, probably, and they aren’t real memories. What’s the point?”

“Her regrets are real,” I said, swallowing back a surge of grief that rose, at random times, like bile in my throat. “By seeing her Paths Not Taken, I can learn what she wishes she could have done differently. I can learn more about her.”

A dark cloud of emotion passed across my brother’s face. He shook his head, his expression confused and angry in equal measure.

“The dead don’t have regrets anymore,” he said. “The only thing you’ll get from that Chip is sadness.”

My throat tightened. He may have been right. But that idea gave me a strange comfort. It wasn’t just the memories Hind passed along, but the emotions they carried. Her joy, her grief. That was the best way I could honour her. Unlike Maha, who hid her feelings behind a sarcastic veneer, and Salim, who avoided anything that made him uncomfortable, I knew how to feel. That’s why Hind chose me, trusted me with her past.

As Salim, Maha and I sat in the Mind Clinic’s waiting room, the skyline of Dubai glinting through the high-rise window, I had another realization. Hind wanted to bring us together through our fractured inheritance. She gave Salim the keys to the Paths Not Taken so we’d have to cooperate and come together. And it worked. Salim had agreed to discuss options together at the Dubai clinic. We sat in a single row on plastic chairs, dazed that we had come to this moment.

But how would Salim react to the revelations about my grandmother? Like Maha and I, he was part of a more tolerant generation and accepting of gay rights. But would he apply that abstract support to the grandmother he’d known all his life and seen as a loving spouse to our traditional grandfather?

They brought us into a larger room with a circle of reclining chairs, which the shaman explained were used for group therapy sessions. Salim didn’t speak, and when the attendant reclined our seats to begin the Paths Not Taken reel, he jerked back, as though waking from a trance.

“I need a minute,” Salim said, his voice high and panicked, the same tone he used when our father first taught us how to swim in the Red Sea. He sounded so young in that moment, lost and frightened. My heart tightened into an aching knot. Maha squeezed his hand.

Then he nodded, and we were plugged in.

Back in college, I drove drunk from a bar and nearly died. Not a story I’m proud of, but I tell it because of what happened to me when my car spun across the road divider and stopped in front of oncoming traffic. A car raced towards me, ready for a head-on collision, and a reel of my entire life passed, from birth to present like lightning in my mind. In a matter of seconds, I experienced it all, every key moment in my life, before the car managed to screech to a halt.

Hind’s Paths Not Taken Chip worked in a similar way. One path would appear to us in a reel of key moments that lasted minutes but covered a lifetime. In the first one, my grandmother hurled herself out of that car into the war-torn streets of Jerusalem, in search of Noor. She was shot within hours. In another memory, she tried to run away to Jordan, with similar fatal results. Another path had her travelling to Amman for private school after she refused to get married, and she and Noor were able to carry on an illicit affair over several years until Noor married and left the city. My nails dug into my palms as waves of my grandmother’s pain washed over me—the loss of Noor, but also the loss of her own children, and of us. In another timeline, the affair went on longer but the romance faded, as the two women discovered that their childhood infatuation couldn’t carry them for a lifetime.

In the end, the final path she pursued was a delicate compromise. She still moved to Saudi Arabia, married my grandfather and had the family that would eventually lead to Salim, Maha, and I. But she also tracked down Noor, and they exchanged letters over the decades. And when my grandfather died, she spent her money not on the Mind Clinic but on a ticket to Amman, where she took a taxi to a farm on the hills. Noor watched Hind through the window as my grandmother approached the house, a ceramic bowl falling from her hands and breaking across the kitchen floor. They reunited, at the end of their long lives.

Back in the waiting room, we locked arms in a tight embrace. Now Salim had tears streaking across his face. He didn’t need to speak the words aloud for me to understand. Our grandmother didn’t love my grandfather, didn’t want the cards that fate dealt her—but she still wanted us, loved us. She wouldn’t have traded her fate for a life without us. That was what Salim needed to understand. What we all needed.

Twigs crunched underneath my feet as I walked up a hill in the Jordan Valley. Across the mountains was the Dead Sea and on the other side of the Dead Sea, Palestine. So close and yet unreachable. I made an unremarkable sight, with my black Type O Negative shirt and sun-beaten jeans, but the shaman walking beside me, lugging a Mind Clinic machine on wheels, drew curious stares from neighbouring windows. A group of kids abandoned their soccer game to follow us, laughing.

Noor’s son greeted us with a wary but polite smile. Salim had worked his magic before the trip, selling the son on the idea without getting into the particulars of how close my Teta and Noor really were. My grandmother had consented to share her past, but Noor had not. For that reason, we only released an abbreviated version of Hind’s memories of the Nakba and the years before to the Historical Society. It was a difficult decision, and I still don’t know if it was the right one, to censor her history. When Noor passed away, I wanted to revisit that decision.

Inside the house, Noor sat in the living room, blank-eyed, while a Turkish soap opera played out across the TV. She didn’t flinch when the shaman set up his equipment or when her son eased her closer to the machine. The shaman attached electrodes to her temples to allow the memories in the Generation Chip to fire across her neural network and appear in her mind’s eye.

“Ready?” he asked. The son gave me a frightened, bewildered glance, as though unsure if he’d ever be ready for something like this, but I gave him a reassuring nod.

When the Shaman plugged in the chip and the machine whirred, Noor’s face came alight. Her wrinkled forehead stretched in surprise and a soft, dreamy expression passed across her face. With a trembling smile, her hand extended forward, trying to touch something that none of us could see. A tear trailed across her weathered cheek.

As the son cried out in surprise, I sank into the nearest chair and felt the same contentment and peace Maha described from Hind’s dream. I was floating in an endless current, one that would carry me where I needed to go.

Soul Searching

Rana Othman

What a stupid way to start a novel, thought Hiba as she crossed off, for the sixth time, what she had written with her green, apple-scented glitter gel pen.

She had the perfect idea for a novel: Zahra Sultana, a Palestinian witch, fights zombies on the Moon, freeing Palestine and saving planet Earth. Zahra looked fabulous wearing her purple embroidered Palestinian thobe and a veil studded with golden coins on her forehead while she kicked zombie butt.

Hiba wasn’t sure how fighting the zombies would free Palestine, but that was not important. The novel was going to be funny but also heartfelt and profound. She was going to be the youngest prize-winning novelist in recent memory, impressing adults everywhere and proving how brilliant she really was.

Adults. They were all the same. They only heard what they wanted, and all the rest was white noise. She would never be like that when she became an adult. In fact, she was already twelve, which was almost a teenager, practically an adult! How dare they make her prove it.

Hiba crumpled up the lined paper and tossed it at her pink butterfly calendar on the wall, which read May 2005. The paper missed, bouncing off the potted mint plant on her windowsill and falling next to her yellow trash bin. The mint plant belonged to Hiba’s mother, Intisar, and Hiba was supposed to be taking care of it. But despite her best efforts, the mint had been wilting for months now.

Frustrated, Hiba put her tattered notebook away and decided she would try again later. Besides, she had to study for her geography test tomorrow and review the Mahmoud Darwish poem, “Identity Card,” that she was memorizing for Arabic class. She could not wait to get a ten out of ten on those assignments and rub it in Yasmeen’s stupid face.

No, really, Yasmeen’s face was stupid. She had bangs that she clearly thought covered her acne-infested forehead. Her strawberry-blonde hair was greasy and unkempt. The lenses on her huge turquoise glasses were the size of saucers. She was also about two heads shorter than everybody else her age. Hiba hated Yasmeen; her very existence annoyed her. She made it a habit to chew gum and stick it on Yasmeen’s backpack anytime she wasn’t looking. Hiba’s best friends, Rawan and Mariam, thought this was hilarious! It was good lunchtime entertainment.

A bus arrived every morning at 6:15 to take the neighbourhood kids to their respective schools in Jerusalem. The bus had the necessary yellow Israeli license plate that allowed it to enter Jerusalem from the West Bank, as the white and green Palestinian license plates were banned from entry. Both the boys’ and girls’ schools didn’t start until 7:45, but they needed the time to pass through the maḥsoom, which is what the Israeli soldiers called their military checkpoint. This made timing unpredictable. Depending on the soldiers’ mood, passing through could take anywhere from a few minutes to several hours.

The neighbourhood kids congregated in front of Tata Jamila’s house to wait for the bus every morning. Omar and his quiet little sister Diana walked from the opposite side of the street, while Haifa and Majd were dropped off by their parents, and Mira and her cousin Waleed were always running late. And of course, Yasmeen, who stood alone and frazzled.

Tata Jamila was almost ninety-nine, and as far as Hiba could tell, she was everyone’s grandma. She was hard of hearing but refused to get a hearing aid. The kids often snuck around Tata’s garden in the mornings to see how many mulberries they could pick before the bus came or before Tata yelled at them out her window. Tata was always yelling when she heard noise; she didn’t know who was doing what, but she yelled at anyone who would listen. “Don’t step on the flowers and leave the cats alone! Get lost!”

That morning, Tata brought out her purple Quality Street tin full of sweets. They weren’t Quality Street sweets, of course; those were long gone. But she’d been using the same old battered tin for as long as Hiba could remember, always refilling it with the same coffee and caramel candies.

Hiba loved the caramel ones and always snatched a few before they were gone. She quickly unwrapped the shiny gold wrapper that read Werther’s Original and felt the sticky caramel between her index finger and thumb. The candy was oval shaped, smooth, and had a circular dent that Hiba traced with her finger. She gave it a sniff, filling her nostrils with the sweet scent of caramel before popping it into her mouth. She impatiently squeezed it with her tongue and the roof of her mouth. After a moment of this, there was a loud crack as Hiba loudly crunched on the hard candy.

“How many times have I told you not to do that!?” yelled Tata, the gap on the top right side of her mouth exposed. “You’ll break your teeth! Don’t bite it! Khalas!”

Hiba tried to look sorry, but she was grinning. “The bus is here, bye Tata Jamila!”

She ran to the front of the bus behind the rest of the kids. Yasmeen was already there. The bus door opened but Hiba didn’t climb on. “Go ahead, Yasmeen.”

“No, I know what you’re going to do, you go first.”

“Yallah, we’re all waiting for you.”

The bus driver, Fadi, whom the kids respectfully called Abu Ali, gestured for them to hurry up, “Yallah, get on, we have to go.”

Yasmeen cautiously walked towards the door as Abu Ali went to check the trunk of the bus. Hiba quickly stuck her foot out in front of Yasmeen’s back leg so that she fell right on her face and muddied her school uniform. Omar didn’t seem to be paying attention, while Diana looked deeply uncomfortable but didn’t say a word. The other kids glanced over and chuckled but were busy exchanging morning gossip and their newly acquired playing cards.

They climbed on the bus and Hiba rushed to the back of the bus, where Rawan and Mariam were saving her a seat.

“Good morning, Hiba,” yawned Rawan. Mariam had her nose buried in a notebook.

Hiba handed the caramel candies to her friends.

“From Tata Jamila’s tin?” asked Mariam.

Hiba nodded, as the girls unwrapped their candies. “Don’t bite them, you’ll break your teeth,” she said, mocking Tata’s croak.

“She tells you that every time, doesn’t she?” chuckled Rawan.

“Every single time. We get it, Tata! Besides, our teeth haven’t fallen out like yours!” Their shrill laugh rang through the bus.

“Stop insulting Sitti!” Yasmeen whirled to face the girls. She tried to look authoritarian, but her bright red ears matched her tangled hair, her muddied shoes dangled about a foot from the floor, and she clung her backpack to her chest like a shield.

“Oh, hey there, qazameh,” smirked Hiba. “Let’s get away from Yasmeen or we’ll become fallaḥi too. It’s contagious!”

Sitti meant “my grandma,” unlike the more elegant Tata, which meant “Nana.” You could tell what town a person came from based on whether they said Sitti or Tata. Someone who said Sitti would also say Yamma and Yaba, mom and dad, while someone who said Tata was more likely to say Mama and Baba. Tata was urban; it was modern, elegant, upper class. Sitti was rural; it was coarse, unrefined, working class.

“It’s ḥaram to mock people,” said Yasmeen sternly. “We are all Allah’s creation.”

“But some of us were luckier than others,” Hiba attempted to say quietly, but burst with laughter at her own cleverness.

“Hey, I think qazameh is actually about to cry,” laughed Mariam.

Indeed, Yasmeen looked like she was going to burst. A few kids were stealing looks at her, while others took no notice. Looking down at the floor that was now caked with mud, she slid off her seat, hurried to the very front of the bus, and sat behind Abu Ali with a big huff.

Hiba was vaguely intrigued. “I wonder what’s wrong with qazameh today,” she mused aloud to her friends, taking out her geography book.

“Oh, there’s always something wrong with her,” said Rawan, not looking up from her book. “Come on, we need to review for the test or we’ll fail. Capital of Jordan?”

“Amman!” replied the other two girls.

“Capital of Lebanon?”

“Beirut.”

A few minutes later, the bus was stopped for a random check at the maḥsoom by an Israeli soldier, who yelled for everyone to get off the bus. The kids shuffled out of their seats, some grumbling, some nervous, as the second soldier searched the kids’ backpacks when they got off the bus. Hiba stashed her book in her backpack and hurried to the front of the bus.

As Hiba ran down the steps of the bus, her shoe hit a well-worn patch on the step and slipped. Her foot flew out from under her. Hiba’s head slammed onto the top stair, and she crumpled onto the ground.

Hiba heard noises around her like she was floating above her body. She heard the soldiers yelling in Hebrew and separating the crowd of panicked kids who were trying to get a better look at Hiba. Some were crying, others shouting. One soldier stopped traffic completely, while the other approached Hiba with a dangerous look on his face. Abu Ali headed towards Hiba, but the soldier, holding his rifle and shouting in Hebrew, shoved him back. Cursing loudly, Abu Ali pushed the soldier aside and made a beeline towards Hiba and carried her back onto the bus to take her home.

Of course, all the townspeople had altercation stories with the soldiers, especially since the Separation Wall’s construction began in the last few years. Palestinian protestors tear-gassed on the streets. Teenage boys forcibly taken from their homes in the night and thrown in jail with false accusations. Pregnant mothers prevented from passing through the maḥsoom and forced to go into labour in the middle of the crowded checkpoint.

Hiba had the worst story of all. Two years ago, she was playing pick-up basketball with the neighbourhood kids outside her home. An Israeli tank drove by announcing mamnu’ tajawol, commanding everyone to go home effective immediately. Curfew. One of the kids threw a stone at the tank as it drove by. The soldiers stepped out of the tank, screaming in Hebrew. Hiba yelled back. Mani’ tajawwol? They were interrupting their game! The soldier whipped out his rifle. At that moment, Hiba’s mom looked out the window of their apartment on the second floor.

“My daughter!” Hiba’s mom was down in two minutes flat; Hiba wasn’t sure how she could have possibly run down the stairs so fast. Her dad, who was slower, yelled out to her mom, “Intisar, be careful, ḥabibti!”

Intisar shielded Hiba in her arms, but the soldiers were still shouting that they were breaking curfew. Intisar’s face flushed red as she ushered her daughter away and screamed back at the soldiers. How dare they threaten her daughter? The soldier pointed at her with his rifle, but she didn’t back down. How dare they storm around here like they owned the place? Intisar’s family could be traced in Palestine for generations! One soldier grabbed Intisar’s hands behind her back, the other soldier fired at Intisar’s leg, and then they took her away. Hiba couldn’t look away. She was stunned. She was sobbing. She was screaming. Her dad squeezed her tight and took her upstairs. It was Hiba’s personal Nakba.

They never saw Mama again. The family received news months later that she had been left to bleed to death. They fought to receive her body to properly bury her, but they never did.

Intisar became a martyr, honoured in their small town. The funeral was a blur. Posters of Intisar were put up all around town, decorated with the Palestinian flag and the date she disappeared in large bold letters.

Hiba hated seeing the posters. Everyone told her to hold her head high and be proud of her mom. She didn’t want to be proud. She wanted her mom back. And worst of all, it was her fault. She would never live down the guilt.

Hiba was breathing, but she wasn’t waking up.

Was Hiba dead? She didn’t think so. She was inside the corner store she always bought chips from. How did she get here? She was wearing pajamas. Wait no, she was wearing her school uniform from first grade. Huh? The store was all white marble, with a grand staircase. Even though it looked nothing like her store, she knew it was the store near Tata’s house. She wanted a snack. There was a blue bag of her favourite chips, Bissli, and a pink bag—that was odd. She had never seen those colours on Bissli bags before, and she couldn’t decide which to choose. It was agonizing, and she had to make a choice. Shoppers were staring at her. The clerk told her to hurry up. Hiba panicked and tried to explain that she didn’t have shekels, she only had British pounds, but the clerk scoffed. Wait, was the clerk a djinn? No, a witch! The witch from Hiba’s novel. She was here, in this dream. She smelled like apples, cloaked by green static, reminding her of her glitter gel pen.

“Zahra Sultana? Where am I?” Hiba asked frantically.

The witch’s voice boomed all around her:

To awaken from this nightmare,

Three items you must prepare.

The first a souvenir of one so dear,

Next a flower’s bloom at which you sneer.

Solve this puzzle by sundown tonight.

With orange cat’s silk, your destiny is in sight.

Hiba stirred. She had clearly had a nightmare. She rubbed her eyes, wracking her brain to remember what had happened yesterday to put her in such a daze. She got up from the bed and looked around. Where was her butterfly calendar? Her yellow trash bin? Her mother’s mint plant? This wasn’t Hiba’s room; was this still a dream?

She slowly walked around her room and glanced at herself in the mirror. Ya Allah! That wasn’t her face, it was…Diana’s face, with green eyes and straight black hair.

Hello? Hiba thought. Could Diana hear her?

Diana didn’t react. Hiba cautiously willed herself to touch her face and accidentally flicked her own eye. Ouch! Okay. Well, that explained that. Hiba’s soul was inside Diana’s body, and she was in control. What was she supposed to do?

Hiba heard Diana’s mom calling her to hurry up to get ready for school. Hiba panicked. Was she going to live inside Diana forever?

Then Hiba remembered the witch’s riddle. A souvenir, a flower, and an orange cat? Hiba was overwhelmed, but she willed Diana to get ready for school. Luckily, Diana’s mom had put out her uniform for her. Hiba needed to pretend everything was normal until she could figure out how to get out of this.

But what did “normal” mean for Diana? Did she have friends? Who did Hiba need to play with to blend in? She had no idea; she had never paid attention to Diana and only knew her as Omar’s quiet little sister.

After a rushed breakfast, Hiba-as-Diana followed Omar towards their daily bus stop.

“Why are you so quiet?” asked Omar, looking concerned. Hiba didn’t know what to say. Wasn’t Diana always quiet?

“Are you nervous about your math test? Don’t be, ḥabibti, you’ve been studying so hard.”

Hiba still said nothing.

“What is it? Are you worried about Hiba? I see her bothering Yasmeen, but has she bothered you?”

At Omar’s words, Hiba suddenly saw Diana’s memories, like a movie playing in her mind. She saw herself, Hiba, from Diana’s point of view: a tall, scary girl who pushed other girls around and laughed about it. Hiba felt Diana’s body tense up at the memory and was horrified. She had never even bothered Diana. That wasn’t fair!

Omar took her silence as a yes. “If she bothers you one more time, I’ll kick her butt!”

Hiba mustered up her voice to ask, “Will she even be here today? She fell pretty hard yesterday.”

“That’s true, may Allah restore her health. On the bright side, Yasmeen might have a peaceful morning for once.”

As they walked to Tata Jamila’s, Hiba saw it. A poster of her mom. A souvenir of one so dear. That could be the first part of the witch’s puzzle! How was she going to get it without Omar noticing?

Omar spotted Waleed at the bus stop and playfully punched his arm. “Hey, look who’s early for once!”

Hiba seized her opportunity. She pretended she had dropped something and ran back to the poster. She ripped it off the pole and folded it as tightly as she could. As soon her fingers touched the poster, Hiba heard the witch’s voice boom in her mind: “Two more to go before sundown.”

She scanned everything around her. Where could she keep it? Her shoe? She dropped her backpack as an excuse to bend down, but her backpack burst open and her markers scattered everywhere. Of course. I try to blend in but then attract even more attention! Her frustration swelled into her throat. She took a deep breath to collect herself, like Mama always said. She tucked the folded poster into her right sock and began to gather her scattered markers.

“Here you go, ḥabibti!”

Hiba looked up and was horrified to see Yasmeen handing her some markers that had rolled over to her.

“Shokran,” Hiba said meekly, extending her hand.

Yasmeen’s touch felt like lightning.

In a whoosh of light and swirls, Hiba felt herself becoming lighter, like she was floating up slowly, then she rocketed downward out of control. She felt dizzy and closed her eyes. When she opened them, she was looking at Diana, and the scene was outlined in turquoise.

Confused, she reached up and felt the huge glasses on her face. Oh no, she thought, anything but this, anybody but this! But she glanced down at her shoulder and saw a strawberry-blonde braid.

She was Yasmeen.

Ya Allah, the poster is in Diana’s sock! No sooner had Hiba thought this than she felt a lump of paper in her right sock. The poster wasn’t in Diana’s sock, it was in Hiba’s sock! Which was now Yasmeen’s sock.

This was so weird.

I have to complete this puzzle, Hiba thought desperately. What was the second clue? Something about a flower?

As the bus arrived and the kids hurried on, Hiba saw Yasmeen’s memories, invasive thoughts forcing their way to the surface, showing Hiba images of herself sticking gum on Yasmeen’s backpack; images of Yasmeen falling and muddying her uniform; images of Hiba, Rawan, and Mariam making rude gestures at her. Hiba felt the relief in Yasmeen’s body at the realization that Hiba wouldn’t be here today. Wow, that’s rude, I’m right here! thought Hiba.

Luckily, Yasmeen was Hiba’s classmate, so she knew where their classroom was. She resisted raising her hand during English lessons to avoid any attention, but the other girls whispered loudly to each other that Yasmeen must be too stupid to know any answers. Then when she answered a question incorrectly, the other girls laughed at her loudly and cruelly. She was trying so hard to blend in, but her classmates mocked her no matter what she did! Hiba became so nervous that she was sure she bombed the science pop quiz, even though she was normally good at science. At least math class was so hard that the other girls were too busy taking notes to bother her. Phew.

Then came the part that Hiba was dreading the most: recess.

What was she supposed to do? Maybe she’d say her stomach hurt as an excuse to go to the nurse’s office. But no, the nurse would offer mint tea, and the thought of it made her stomach churn. Mama had loved mint and had made tea every evening using fresh mint that she grew in a planter box on the windowsill. After she disappeared, Hiba had tried to keep it alive in her honour. But one by one the plants had died, and now there was only one left: the one in her bedroom. Hiba couldn’t stand the idea of mint tea anymore. The nurse’s office was out of the question.

As Hiba wondered what to do in the playground, Rawan and Mariam stormed at her and stuck gum in her hair. “That’s for tripping Hiba!” yelled Rawan.

“It’s your fault she’s in a coma!” shouted Mariam.

“What? But Yas—I didn’t do anything to her!” said Hiba indignantly.

“Ikhrasi!”

The two girls marched away. Hiba was relieved, but she needed to get through the day as best as she could. She cautiously touched the gum in her hair and another intrusive memory popped into her mind. Hiba saw images of Yasmeen’s mom scrubbing gum off her backpack, yelling at a crying Yasmeen that they couldn’t afford a new one this year.

The bell rang to signal fourth period. Hiba wanted to scream. Ya Allah, double Arabic next, can’t I catch a break? But then Hiba perked up at the thought of the Mahmoud Darwish poem she had memorized. Surely she’d get a ten out of ten on that recital!

Hiba walked toward her sixth-grade line to head to class. Haifa and Jumana, seventh graders, snickered, “Get a move on, qazameh!” The insult was technically directed at Yasmeen, not Hiba, but it still stung. It wasn’t fair, she wasn’t even bothering them!

Even though she knew that Mahmoud Darwish poem by heart, she was so anxious that she couldn’t get through it and failed the assignment. She was humiliated. The geography test didn’t go much better. She truly couldn’t focus after that humiliating poem recital. By the end of the day, Hiba was drained. Did Yasmeen really live through this every day?

Alḥamdulillah, the school day was over. What a waste of time when Hiba was supposed to be searching for clues. She climbed onto the bus to go home and sat alone, which was typical for Yasmeen and perfectly fine by Hiba as nobody bothered her while she was deep in thought. What was the second item? A flower’s bloom at which you sneer.

The bus lurched and she bumped her head on her reflection in the window. Oh. It hit her like a truck (or like a bus window, in this case). The flower she was looking for was a yasmeen! Lucky for her, Tata Jamila had plenty of jasmine vines on her fence.

Hiba got off the bus in front of Tata’s house. Tata was outside and called out, “Yasmeen, come over here and pick some mulberries for me, I can’t reach.”

Perfect.

“Coming, Ta—Sitti,” Hiba said, hopping onto the large stone near the tree to pick the mulberries.

It was a relief to be away from the neighbourhood kids and surrounded by the sounds of the trees. Yasmeen was much shorter than she was used to, so Hiba stood on her tiptoes to reach the tallest branches. Tata was worried she would fall, but Hiba jumped onto the ground and handed Tata the mulberries, still planning how she would sneak some jasmine flowers into her pocket. Tata Jamila had brought out her purple candy tin, and Hiba eagerly stuck out her hand. Their fingers touched…and it felt like lightning.

Ya Allah, not again.

In a whoosh of light and swirls, Hiba felt herself become lighter, like she was floating slowly upward, then she rocketed downward, out of control. She felt dizzy and closed her eyes. When she opened them, she was looking at Yasmeen, who was staring at the caramel in her hand, dazed and confused.

Hiba thought quickly. “May Allah bless you, girl, now go home before it gets dark!”

Yasmeen stammered, then ran, her backpack flying from side to side as she sprinted.

Well, thought Hiba, at least I don’t need to sneak around now, but how am I going to finish this task in Tata’s old body?

Lost in thought, Hiba reached for a caramel, but as soon as her fingers touched the candy, memories invaded her mind. Hiba saw a young Jamila crunching on a caramel candy and breaking her tooth, then her worried parents unable to afford fixing it. She saw Jamila crying, humiliated at the gap on the top right side of her mouth. Hiba put the candy back in the purple tin, feeling the sharp pain of a broken tooth. No wonder Tata had tried to convince her not to bite the caramels.

Placing down the bag of mulberries, she reached down to her right shoe where her mom’s poster had magically appeared again. She placed it in the chest pocket of Tata’s thobe. She was surprised to feel how nimble Tata Jamila was. Mashallah, for ninety-nine years old, Tata felt spry despite the pain in her joints. Impressed, Hiba walked over to the vines on her fence to pick a large bunch of jasmines. Their light fragrance filled her nostrils.

“One more to go before sundown,” boomed the witch’s voice in her mind.

She only had about an hour—what now? With orange cat’s silk, your destiny is in sight. Tata Jamila had cats, but were any orange? And how would she know if she found the right cat? And why would a cat have silk?

Her question was answered almost immediately when she heard a loud hissing noise coming from a few trees over. A large orange tabby with a silky ribbon around its neck sat on the top branch of Tata’s olive tree, its tail gently swaying. Hiba softly called for the cat, who answered by nimbly jumping down and gracefully landing on all fours. It began to walk with its tail held high and pointing forward. The cat did not look back, but Hiba knew she had to follow it.

The cat walked for a long time but waited whenever Hiba paused for Tata to catch her breath. Finally, they made it to the town cemetery. Hiba’s mind was flooded with brief and scattered images of Tata’s past visits here. Tata had come here so many times, visiting the graves of her parents, her sister, her uncle. But it was the memories of Tata’s husband that stood out the most. Hiba saw a younger Jamila crying over his grave, cursing the soldiers who had taken him from her far too soon.

The cat led her to the plot of land where they had planned to bury Intisar. Baba came here to pay tribute sometimes, but Hiba never joined him. Why did adults do stupid things like that? It felt pointless when she knew the body wasn’t there. Painful and pointless.

The cat walked in a circle on the would-be grave, then it nuzzled its head against her leg and stuck out its neck. Taking the cue, Hiba gently removed the silk ribbon from its neck. As soon as she touched the soft silk, more memories flooded her mind. She saw Tata Jamila tie a red ribbon around some flowers and place them on her husband’s grave as she wiped away tears.

The cat nuzzled her leg one more time before skittering away.

Hiba understood what she needed to do. She tied the silk around the jasmine vines, tucked the poster of Mama in the bouquet, and set them down on the empty grave.

She wondered what happened to her body. It was so cruel not knowing. Mama deserved better. She imagined Mama’s reaction to the bouquet. She would give Hiba a hug and excitedly say, “Oh Hiba, this is so beautiful, ḥabibti!” Mama loved every birthday card, every drawing, and every poem Hiba gave her. Her mom was so kind, protective, loving, and warm. Hiba missed Mama so much. She began to sob.

The witch appeared behind her blurry eyes. She came into focus, and Hiba realized the resemblance. She had the same brown eyes as Hiba and the same dimple on her nose. The witch spoke in a beautiful singsong voice:

As the sun sets, casting its shade,

Transformed the girl into an aid.

Her mother finally free to rest,

Grateful and feeling oh, so blessed.

In a whoosh of lights and swirls, greenery sprouted suddenly from the would-be grave. It was mint! Beautiful, vibrant, green mint was growing, surrounding the bouquet, wafting its fresh scent into Hiba’s nose.

Hiba woke up. She looked around—it was her room. Her body felt stiff, but she ran to her mirror. It was her face! And the dimple on her nose that she hated but was so relieved to see now. She heard the Quran playing on the radio in the living room and opened her bedroom door.

“Baba?”

“Hiba!”

Baba hugged her tight, and she didn’t let go. But there was something important she needed to say.

“Baba, let’s go to visit Mama’s grave.”

Baba looked at Hiba in surprise. “Hiba, are you sure? What changed your mind?”

“I guess you could say I did some soul searching.”

She thought about apologies she owed Diana and Yasmeen and Tata Jamila. And she thought about her story, about Zahra in her purple thobe. Maybe there were other, even more important stories she could tell. Fighting zombies on the moon would just have to wait.

The Heart Knows the Truth

Layla Azmi Goushey

Arwa awoke refreshed. She patted her blankets and swept her hand under her pillow until she located her iPhone under her shoulder. She rolled over and sat at the side of her bed. She reached for her oversized tunic and pulled it over her pajamas before going into the kitchen. Dawn would break soon, and she made a hot cup of tea for her morning walk in the garden.

Her psyche was still tender from the gravitational wave of the previous day. She sensed an intangible resonance, like a swell in the ocean fuelled by the turbulence of a faraway storm. She looked out her kitchen window, and flashes of fool’s fire were visible between the plum tree branches. Normally, she would not be lured into nonsense after last night’s carnival, but her tremoring psyche needed a distraction, so she opened her back gate and walked up the slope of the small bridge behind her home. Al-ḍafaḍi‘ trilled in the creek below, its small eyes reflecting the fairy lights that blended into the stars. A luminous footpath began at the end of the bridge. Its mother-of-pearl gravel had earned it the name ṭariq alghubar alfawaar, the sparkling dust road. She let her empty cup drop into the grass near the bridge as she stepped onto it. She looked ahead of her and waited for the stars, fairy lights, and iridescent gravel to coalesce and open the portal.

Just before the sun broke the horizon, she saw the walls of al-Quds and the dome of al-Aqsa emerge in the centre of the portal, still some distance away. She stepped carefully to keep her balance as tremors of fractal vortexes shook the path; they could throw a traveller off her feet as they popped and expanded. After veering with the path’s twists and turns around asteroids, comets, and mysterious aeriform worlds, she entered the city. She was at al-Bab al-Dhahabi, The Golden Gate, The Gate of Mercy, The Gate of Repentance…and she felt a weight of judgment invite her to plea for forgiveness.

She wandered into al-Aqsa, a place where she once was refused entry because of her mixed, diluted blood. Was this the reason for the subtle demand for forgiveness? Atonement, she thought, is an unreasonable request. She had done enough penance for her parents’ idealism.

She stepped through an open door into a shaded room. Red, green, yellow, and gold were woven into carpets covering the floor. She bumped into a middle-aged man coming out of the entryway. He was looking down in contemplation as he walked, and he jumped at her touch. “Ostaz,” she said. “My apologies.”

He looked up and responded in a careful tone. “My sister. Perhaps you need another door. It is not allowed for you to be here.” His beard was full and black but speckled with gray hairs. He wore a thin natural wool tunic and a dark, iridescent brown robe which must have protected him from gamma rays. The tunic was a mottled pale gray; the kind of gray that reaches for white but is thwarted by multi-shaded threads varying in accordance with the fleece colours of local sheep. He was holding a few loose papers, and at the top of one page, she read Deliverance from Error.

“I know you!” she gasped. “Mujaddid. The Reviver. The Renewer.” He remained still and stared slightly past her as one does when sunlight reveals a hidden shadow. “You don’t know me, but I’ve read your text,” she said.

“How have you read it if I did not yet write it?” he asked, pulling his pages closer to him.

He looked closer at her wrinkled tunic and hair. She still had traces of yellow paint on her face, and green stripes in her hair from the costume booth at last night’s carnival.

He gasped. “But you are not real. You are a djinn.”

I am no djinn, she thought, but maybe that was the truth of them all along. Travellers on the silver road moved in and out of realms. If travellers weren’t mindful, fractal waves would catch them up and buckle their faces or twist their bones into other shapes: leaves, trees, ants, cats, and things with horns. Radiation can burn faces off while leaving a twisted body. Unable to communicate as humans, they would resort to emitting particles and waves. Sometimes, the wind and clouds carry their story.

Arwa leaned into her musings and did not respond to his exhortation. The Renewer began to back away.

“I came to look for the angel,” she blurted. This also might not have been true. She had set off on the starry road on a whim that morning. The last video she had watched the night before was on the UFO/Reddit forum on the UFO over Jerusalem. “Some said it hovered over al-Quds and they caught it on film.” She suspected the video was a hoax. How could the most hotly contested military region in the world not notice a ball of light hovering over al-Aqsa and Via Dolorosa?

“Angel? Film?” he mouthed the last word slowly.

“It is an image: a moving picture. Like this,” she held up her iPhone to show him the screen. “This can capture an image so that it remains still, and it can capture objects and show how they move.”

The Renewer stepped back. “Does it have an eye?”

“Yes—” she began.

“Then it is a shayṭanic eye—” he began.

“No,” she looked at the iPhone in her hand. “It is an eye that stops an image in time. It preserves a moment for an eternity. It is like a memory to hold in our hand, or it can be a prophecy.” But then she remembered how propaganda about Palestine showed it as an empty land, ready for taking. Yes. Images could lie. She regretted trying to explain. “Yes, well…maybe you have a point,” she put the iPhone back in her pajama pocket. “But like any truth, some truths are eternal and some are used to incite the ignorant. Some do both.”

“Your box is not eternal,” he said. “Someday it will grind into dust like a stone. I could do that now to prove it to you, but the eye would only find another dwelling.”

“Field Marshall Allenby!” someone shouted. Arwa turned to see a man in a British military uniform running after another man. Both turned a corner and were gone just as a nearby pine tree burst into flames.

She and The Renewer jumped and ducked. Arwa heard crunching steps and she turned away from the smoldering pine tree. A procession slowly walked across the mall. “Queen Melisendra!” someone whispered.

“Melisendra is the daughter of the Frankish king,” said The Reviver. “And who are these other people? Who did you conjure into this holy place?” he glared accusingly at Arwa.

“We are all tourists here, apparently,” Arwa said. “You are from Tus, yet you are here, writing your scholarly ideas in Arabic—the language of The Prophet.”

Abulail, a portly, balding man sitting nearby, overheard Arwa’s comments. He was smoking a shisha with two attached pipes, something that had not been available during the time of The Reviver. Abulail breathed in the smoke as his sister Nemati placed another coal on the plate near the tobacco and breathed in from the other pipe.

Abulail waved his arm toward the city. “No one can hold this land. Look at this procession of Greeks, Romans, Fatimids, Crusaders, and colonists.”

His mother, Umm Azmi pointed to Arwa, “Lately, it has been your kind, the diaspora dreamers, the Refugees with Keys, the sympathizers, the scholars. However, we’ve been here and we will still be here. The olives prosper in this rocky place.”

Now it was Arwa’s turn to be confused. “Are you from my time? How did you get here?” she said to Abulail. “You must know the sparkling path.”

“We’ve always been here. We know no such path,” responded Nemati. “Therefore, it does not exist. Go, and leave us in peace.”

“Like this planet, this dimension of Palestine,” said Arwa, “it exists on the starry path, yet not everyone can see it.”

“Do you mean the Hay Merchants Way? Why should I look for it when I live in it?” challenged Umm Azmi.

“In my spiritual crisis,” The Reviver suddenly said, “I asked, how do I know the stars are bigger than the Earth? I am asked to trust mathematics and reason, but how can I reconcile the tangible with the intangible? I purified my heart to gain knowledge of the divine. Even though we cannot see, it doesn’t mean it is not there.”

“But this angel,” Arwa reminded him. “It floated down into the heart of Jerusalem nearest the Dome without touching a single building, and angel air began to float all around like silver strings. There was a flash, and then it leapt into the darkness of the heavens. Maybe it marked the opening of the ṭariq alghubar alfawaar. The road that creates worlds. That is my theory, and now I am here waiting for it.”

“What is your theory,” asked The Reviver, “that silver strings can remake the world? What is your proof?” A long shadow stretched out behind him. The sun was slowly lowering toward the horizon. “A star dropping down and then leaping up? What is this, heresy?”

“There are particles smaller than we can see—” began Arwa.

“We cannot trust only our eyes,” The Reviver interrupted. “We must consider our divine intuition.”

“When it came,” said Arwa, “there was an invisible iron dome imprisoning the Dome of al-Aqsa.”

Nemati was still nearby. “Tsk-tsk. Look,” she pursed her fingers with her eyebrows in a frown. “If you are telling the truth, it evaded the iron dome to show that a usurper cannot hold the land or the sky.”

Yes, the heart knows the truth, Arwa thought to herself.

Night fell, and Planet Palestine turned in its orbit as Arwa, Nemati, and The Reviver conversed. They had neglected to eat, so Abulail shared his bread, cheese, olives, and tea. Before they knew it, Thuraya, the constellation of the seven sisters, was above their heads. They silently watched the ladies demurely slide behind a cloud. As darkness covered the city, glowing filaments wafted in the breeze. Arwa reached out and caught a few in her hand.

Cyrano de AI

Karl El-Koura

Nait Sirch drummed his fingers on the glistening, polished oak surface of the large boardroom table, waiting for the interviewers to arrive. After a few minutes, he forced his hand flat on the table, but his right foot began twitching, his nervous energy finding a new outlet.

And why nervous? Because he knew he’d be asked to turn off his augmentation. His grad school colleagues had all been asked to turn off theirs. And nervous because Cymark Industries was the only competitor, in Canada at least, to Cyrano Intelligence, where his dad worked. If he didn’t ace this interview, he’d have to choose between three unpalatable options: grovelling to his dad, abandoning his field of study, or leaving his home country.

The door sighed open and he sat up a little straighter, then jumped to his feet, then wiped his hands down the front of his pant legs.

Three straight-faced executives in dark suits introduced themselves one at a time, then sat across the table from him.

“Before we begin, Mr. Sirch,” the central figure said, “we need to ask you to turn off any augmentation you may be using.”

Absolutely, his cyrano suggested, the words floating in the upper right corner of his field of vision.

He could say those words and, surprising the cyrano, just not turn it off.

But lying to these highly paid executives who spent their days in interviews like this one, who would probably smell his BS more acutely than real BS?

His gaze glanced past those words to the phrase cloud behind them, the implant recognizing the tiny movements of his eyes and updating the image it fed to his brain.

“I prefer to keep it on, if you’ll allow that,” he read. His foot began jackhammering their floor again, in time with his heartbeat. A moment later he selected the next phrase, and the next one the cyrano suggested: “You deserve to interview my best self, and I can’t give you that opportunity without the augmentation that I’ll be bringing to this job.”

It was a good argument. He liked it. “My best self” was a good phrase.

Still his foot tried to drill a heel-sized hole into their spotless parquet floor.

The middle executive blinked slowly. Almost imperceptibly, she turned her head to one side, then to the other. She fixed her gaze on him again and, still almost imperceptibly, nodded.

He wasn’t sure he’d seen it, but then she said, “In that case, let’s begin.”

His foot stopped beating the floor. His heartbeat receded from his ears. He let out a loud breath through his nose.

The rest of the interview went just fine.

His footsteps were light as he walked through the large mirrored doors that separated the thirty floors of Cymark Industries from the rest of downtown Ottawa, but the good feeling didn’t last. By the time he arrived at the fifth-floor walk-up he shared with three roommates, he realized why that was.

Soon everyone would be augmented. A year or two ago, an interviewer wouldn’t have thought to ask a prospective employee to turn off their augmentation.

He unlocked the front door and was grateful to find no one else home. He grabbed a can of Coke from the fridge and brought it to his bedroom, closing the door.

The room was small and narrow, with enough space for a simple wood-frame bed and, tucked between the bed and the wall, a comfortable gray lounge chair someone had been throwing out, which he’d lugged up the five flights of stairs. Behind and just above the chair was a small rectangular window that looked out onto their quiet street lined with alternating columns of trees and light posts.

He didn’t mind the room. He threw himself into the lounge chair, cracked open the Coke. No, this was fine, though a far cry from the room he’d grown up in. His dad had offered to buy him a nice apartment in Ottawa, once the old man had accepted that his son wasn’t going to attend his own alma mater.

Nait’s mom had been the loving, caring, nurturing, involved parent. Nait’s dad…had money. And access to experimental technology. Nait had been one of the first people in Canada to get augmented. Now their chief technology officer, at the time his dad had been vice president of research and development at the Toronto-headquartered Cyrano Intelligence. Nait’s dad offered him the implant in Nait’s first year of high school. Although he now relied on his cyrano so much that he couldn’t imagine going through a job interview without it, Nait also resented his father for, as he came to think of it, treating him as next in line to the chimps on which the first chips had been tested. When you’re thirteen, and the father who has always seemed unsure around you begins showering you with attention, you’ll agree to anything, even to having your skull drilled so that a just-approved chip can be soldered onto your brain.

Getting away from his dad was why Nait had chosen to study at Carleton University, rather than his father’s own school, the University of Toronto, and why he wanted to work for Cymark. But resentful or not, his rebellion was half-hearted: he’d still chosen to follow in his dad’s footsteps and get an undergraduate degree in cognitive science and now a graduate degree in human and artificial intelligence interfacing.

“I gave you a gift,” his dad had said once, when they had fought over something now forgotten and Nait had resorted to his standard accusation: his father viewed his own flesh and blood as an advanced form of guinea pig. “And,” his dad had added, “if you don’t like it, you can turn it off.”

But more and more, Nait had grown less willing to turn it off. Yes, the cyrano chip made him more intelligent and witty; yes, it gave him instantaneous access to all of the data available on the internet; yes, it corrected his colourblindness and sharpened his vision in other ways. But, more important than any of that, it made him a better person. Cyrano suggested responses and actions that were kinder and more considerate than ones he would’ve thought of on his own. As a consequence, not only did his grades improve throughout high school, his circle of friends also expanded. The awkward, lonely kid he’d always been became a thoughtful, kind—and funny, yes—friend that people liked having around.

It wasn’t until undergrad that he met another person with augmentation outside of his dad’s network of colleagues. Dr. Edmund taught first-year philosophy. Many of his lectures consisted of him reading to the class—from augmented memory—extracts from the works of two philosophers, say Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, and then linking them in often interesting and unexpected ways. The rumour surrounding him was that he’d had the augmentation against his wife’s wishes, going into so much debt—and trying to hide it, and failing—that she’d left him.

But the cost of the chip had come down, as it always did with new technology. And now everyone had it. So much so that employers had to introduce a new line to their opening script.

And the bartender from The Pine Cone, too. “When I talk to someone,” she’d said, “I want to talk to him.”

He’d forgotten about her.

There were two campus bars, one for undergrads and one for grad students and faculty. He almost never went to The Pine Cone, but a few Fridays before, his roommate Roy, who’d started dating an undergrad, insisted they all accompany them, saying the nachos and the wings were better there.

Nait’s feeling was that nachos and wings, once past a certain minimum level of competence, tasted just about the same everywhere, but he went with his friends, and sat at the booth, and ate wings and nachos, and drank beer from pitchers, and then slipped out of the bench to go “sprinkle his toes”—and for the first time that night, he caught sight of the bartender working.

Her iridescent hair shimmered, each turn and toss of her head sending waves of neon reds and blues, pinks, and purples, down from her roots to the tips. She spun behind the bar, mixing drinks, placing them in front of her few stool-seated customers, her eyes sparkling under the overhead lights and a natural but wide smile on her angular face, her expression friendlier than even the stock-in-trade friendliness of those in the service industry.

Nait stared. Now that he’d gotten to his feet, he realized the beer coursing through his veins had made his head foggy. Soberness was an illusion that could be maintained only while motionless.

“You lost your way, sport?” she said, laughing, leaning across the bar.

He focused on the cloud of phrases, picked one out. “I’ll be on my way as soon as the world stops spinning.”

She laughed again, told him to have a seat before he fell over, and offered to bring him a coffee.

He nodded, climbed onto the stool nearest him. Then he sipped his coffee, and sobered up, and introduced himself, and asked her name—Robin Magdalene.

“Robin Magdalene,” he repeated, and then read from his cyrano. “The little bird who told the disciples that Christ’s tomb was empty.”

She seemed delighted by him making that association. He returned to the same stool after a quick visit to the bathroom. They spoke for the next hour, in between Robin serving a few customers who came up to the bar, until he read from his cyrano’s phrase cloud, “So, you come here often?” which he thought was a funny thing to say to someone who worked at an establishment, but she didn’t find it amusing.

She drew away from him for the first time that night, the wide, friendly smile that seemed a permanent fixture of her features dropping from her face. “You’re using augmentation,” she said.

“So?”

“I thought you weren’t.” The look of disappointment in her expressive brown eyes was unmistakable, as was the thirty-degree cooling of her demeanour toward him.

“Is it a big deal?”

“Will you turn it off?”

Nait wouldn’t have been more shocked if she’d asked him to remove his clothes and dance on the table for her amusement. He raised his eyebrows and said, “Uh, no, I won’t turn it off,” in an aggrieved tone.

She shot him a fake smile, turned away, pretended to busy herself with something that needed to be done on the other side of the bar.

He was debating asking to settle his tab or transfer it to his table, when she drifted back and said, “I’m sorry I asked you that.”

“I don’t understand why you’re upset,” he said.

“I just thought you weren’t, that’s all. My apologies.”

“Come on,” he said.

And then she’d sighed and said the strange words: “When I talk to someone, Nait, I want to talk to him.”

None of the responses his cyrano suggested seemed appropriate, and all of a sudden, he felt very tired. He asked for his bill, paid it, then rejoined his friends and tried to forget about the lively girl who wanted to speak to someone when she spoke to someone, whatever that meant.

Which he’d done successfully, putting her out of his mind—until now.

Well, the little bird with the colourful hair and bright eyes was about to get a lot more disappointed if she expected to only interact with non-augmented people.

He sat up straighter in the lounge chair as a call came in from his dad; he told the cyrano to let it through and his father’s face shimmered into view in front of him.

“You interviewed with Cymark?” his father said. He was in his office (where else?), the outline of his tall black leather chair visible behind him. His father’s dark eyes stared expectantly.

Nait looked away. “No hello, how are you?” Straight into the accusation. But he couldn’t look away from his cyrano, which like a needy puppy desperate to be helpful offered him a cloud of phrases, one more prominent than the others. For a moment, he thought about turning it off, like Robin had asked him to do. But then what?

Instead he accepted the cyrano’s most prominent suggestion and said, “Hi, Dad. How are you?”

“I got a call from a colleague. You should’ve told me.” Then his eyes flicked to one side as his own cyrano caught his attention. “I’m fine, thanks. How are you?”

“It was just an interview, Dad.”

“It would’ve been nice to hear it from you.” He leaned back in the chair. “Not be surprised.”

His father had gotten his hair cut since the last time they’d spoken; it was close-cropped now. Nait preferred when his father let it grow long, the straight white hair making him look like a wizard.

He didn’t know what to say, but his cyrano did. “I’m sorry you were surprised by your colleague,” he said. “I didn’t want to mention it until I knew if I had the job or not.”

“Thank you,” his dad said, reading. “Breakfast tomorrow?”

“Sure,” Nait said.

He dismissed the call and leaned back in the chair, bringing the momentarily forgotten can to his lips.

And there was the perfect counterargument for Robin. How would that conversation have gone without augmentation? Their cyranos had helped them diffuse the tension; without their suggestions, the conversation would’ve been three times as long with three times fewer words spoken. Instead, they’d survived the encounter and, because his dad was flying into town for business, they’d even be having a pleasant breakfast together.

The next morning Nait took the bus downtown, then walked a few blocks to Ed’s, his father’s favourite diner in Ottawa. His dad was already seated; Nait saw him through the large double windows facing the street. He had his back to the windows and seemed to be staring off into space, but of course that only meant he was working or catching up on the news or checking his stocks.

Only a few other customers were in the diner this early in the morning, one table of two and one of three.

“Good morning, sir,” Nait said, approaching his father’s table. “May I take your order?”

His dad’s eyes lost their faraway look and focused on him. His lips twitched in a half-smile, then he told him to sit down, son.

Nait sat but regarded his father warily. He’d assumed he’d flown into town for business and wanted to have breakfast together before he got his meetings started. But his dad’s eyes were fixed too intently on him. This was his dad in bad-news-delivery mode—like the day he’d sat Nait down in the uncomfortable folding chairs in the hospital hallway to tell him his mother wasn’t going to make it.

“What’s happened?” Nait croaked, his emotions causing the cyrano’s phrase cloud to blur.

His father quickly blinked away the look in his eyes. “Coffee?” he said, his fingers wrapping around his own mug. “I’ll put in your order—or are you not drinking it anymore?”

“Dad—what’s happened?”

“Nothing, nothing. Coffee? I’ve been waiting to see if—”

“I still drink coffee. But I’d really like to know what’s going on.”

His dad nodded, tilted his head as he ordered it, then brought his own mug to his mouth and took a long, slow sip.

“Dad,” Nait said. His cyrano suggested he ask about his flight or the weather in Toronto.

His father set the mug back down, licked his lips, then said, “It’s about the job with Cymark. You didn’t get it. I thought it better you hear it from me.”

Nait’s cyrano suggested gratitude for his father’s thoughtfulness, but Nait couldn’t bring himself to say that. He looked past a few prominent expressions of gratitude until he got to something more aligned with his feelings.

“They shouldn’t have called you,” he said.

“Professional courtesy.”

A cart rolled up to their table. Nait picked up his coffee, then added a few drops of cream before he dismissed the robot. “Did they say why I didn’t get the job?” he said, without looking at his dad.

“You should’ve turned off your cyrano. Just for the interview.”

Nait’s eyes snapped up to meet his dad’s. “But I…I thought I explained. It was better that I kept it on.”

His dad sat back in his chair. “When you go in to interview with someone, son, and they ask you to turn off your cyrano—you should do it. Not argue with them.”

“Why’d they let the interview go on, then? Why didn’t they insist I turn it off?”

“Professional courtesy,” his dad said. Then he leaned forward again, and wrapped his fingers around the handle of the mug again, and Nait realized that was only the prelude to why his dad had flown almost four hundred kilometres to see him. Now the main act. “When was the last time you turned off your cyrano?”

A vulgar, childish expression he hadn’t used since high school bubbled up into his throat, but he forced it back down. The cyrano’s suggestion, the cyrano his father was currently asking him about turning off, was a much better path to walk. Why escalate things? He’d get through this breakfast, then go back to his life. Which meant trying to figure out what to do with himself, since Cymark didn’t want him and he didn’t want to work with his dad, now more than ever.

“It’s been a while,” Nait read. “Why do you ask?”

“Do you need to talk to someone? I have a friend I golf with, she specializes in—”

Then it escaped, rolling under his defences and out his mouth, loudly, like an explosion. That childish expression he hadn’t used in years. The elderly couple enjoying their bacon and eggs stopped talking to turn and stare at him. They were strangers (his cyrano hadn’t recognized them as anyone he’d met before), for which Nait was glad. And then he remembered that they’d been scrolling the menus projected on their tables when he’d walked in, which meant they were unaugmented. He was glad for that too. It was nice to think they wouldn’t have a name to associate with his outburst.

His father’s eyes had gone a bit wider and Nait saw the ball of spit go down his throat as he swallowed anger or disappointment, but otherwise he didn’t react.

“I’m sorry I said that,” Nait read. Then the next line: “I know you’re only trying to help.”

“I forgive you,” his father said, though the tightness in his voice belied his true feelings. Left to himself, he might’ve said something else—or nothing at all. The silence could’ve stretched out forever. “I am only trying to help.”

“How about we order some food?” Nait read.

His dad nodded, then his head tilted again as he consulted the menu.

There, the cyranos had smoothed everything out. Now they could carry on, have a nice meal together, say goodbye in a friendly way, and go on with their lives until they were forced together again.

With his father distracted by the menu, Nait took the opportunity to stare at the old man’s face. He’d always called him that, the old man, for as long as he remembered, but it was becoming truer. The wrinkles around his eyes were more prominent than he remembered, the sacs underneath fleshier.

His cyrano noticed too. “You’re working too hard,” he read.

The eyes lost their faraway quality again and focused on Nait. “It’s true,” he said, reading. “But I do love it, you know.”

Nait didn’t know, but his cyrano seemed to. It had lots of suggestions for compassionate responses.

“So—have you decided?” his dad said.

“You ever feel that it’s like our cyranos are talking to each other? Like we’re just…I don’t know…vehicles for them, carrying them around.”

“No,” his dad said, leaning back in his chair and crossing his arms. He wanted his son to turn off his cyrano from time to time, but he certainly didn’t want to rehash the value of having one at all or the good or evil the cyranos and similar augmentations meant for society at large.

“When was the last time you turned off yours?” Nait asked.

His dad forced himself to uncross his arms and lay them flat on his lap.

“Will you turn it off now?” Nait went on. “With me?”

“If that’s what you want,” his dad said, reading, as if his cyrano were implicitly granting him permission.

Nait nodded, once, curtly, then closed his eyes and turned it off before he could change his mind and tell his dad to forget about the whole thing. When he opened his eyes again, the world looked different, like the lights had been dimmed, the colours of the walls and people desaturated. His father’s eyes were open. Nait shifted in his seat, trying to get comfortable. The table of three at the other end of the restaurant pushed their chairs away as they stood, making a screeching sound along the floor.

How strange to look at each of them in turn and not see a halo of information, not even their names.

“Is yours—off?” Nait said.

His dad licked his lips. “Yup. Off.”

“Strange, huh?”

“Very.”

They nodded, looked around, looked back at each other, nodded.

“We forgot to order,” Nait said suddenly. “Before turning them off.”

His dad shrugged, then pressed on the table, which lit up. His dad didn’t need to consult the menu; he always got the same thing, two eggs over-medium, sausage with a small bowl of maple syrup, crispy bacon, and fruit. It was Nait who liked to change things up every time, and now Nait who took his time scrolling through the items. Finally, he selected French toast with a fruit salad on the side.

They put in their order. Nait looked around the restaurant again. A painting hung on the wall; he hadn’t noticed it before. It depicted a cafe during a snowstorm at night. Was it Ed’s? He had no idea, or who it was by, or when it was made, or if it was for sale, or how to order it if it was.

“So,” his dad said.

Nait waited for his father to think of something to say.

“So,” he repeated. “Is there a special person in your life? Someone special?”

His father’s cyrano would have never allowed him to ask that; it would have known, unlike his father apparently, that Nait didn’t like talking about such personal things with his dad, that Nait didn’t want him prying into his life.

“Not really,” he said, trying to think of something else to talk about. But then the injustice of the claim played on his conscience—it wasn’t true what he’d just said. “Well,” he corrected, “I mean I guess there is. A girl, I mean. We’re not together or anything.”

“What’s her name?”

“Robin Magdalene.”

“That’s an interesting name.”

Nait nodded. “She is—interesting. Very interesting. But I don’t know her that well, like I said.”

“Sounds like you want to get to know her better?”

Nait nodded again.

His dad grinned. Nait couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen his dad with anything but a scowl on his face, either because of something that Nait had said or done, or something that had come in on his cyrano. Certainly, it had been before his mom had died. “So…you want a few tips from your old man about approaching women?”

The robot with their food pulled up to their table then, saving Nait from having to tell his dad that he would rather never talk to another woman than have to sit there and listen to advice from his father on the topic.

They placed their trays in front of them, dismissed the cart, began to eat.

But then his dad waved a piece of egg in front of his face and said, “I’m only too happy to share.”

“No, thank you,” Nait said, his eyes wide but staring down at his food.

“Suit yourself,” his dad said quietly, temptingly, teasingly, then popped the piece of egg into his mouth. “But just remember: I’m the man who charmed your mom into date after date, and she was leagues above me.”

Nait looked up. “All right, tell me.”

Nothing his dad said next was helpful to Nait for speaking to Robin, but he liked hearing all of it. He was amazed he’d never before asked how his father and mother had met, or how his dad had proposed to her, or about their wedding day.

The food was finished and cleaned away, the coffee gone cold and replaced, before there was the next moment of silence, during which Nait said, suddenly, “You must be late for a meeting.”

His father’s eyes flashed to the clock above the entrance to the kitchen. His face dropped. “You’re okay if I turn it back on?”

“Of course,” Nait said.

His father closed his eyes, tilted his head, sending messages of apology, most likely, then rearranging his morning.

Nait had turned on his cyrano too. The painting was by a local Ottawa artist, and it was of Ed’s, and it was for sale, for several hundred dollars.

“I’ll need to get going,” his dad said, standing up.

Nait got to his feet too. “Yeah,” he said, not bothering with the phrase cloud. “Thanks for coming to tell me in person.”

His dad stood staring at him for a moment, as if trying to decide if he would reach out for a hug. The moment passed. “You let me know how it works out with Robin, okay?”

“You got it,” Nait said. “I want to hear more stories about Mom later.”

“You got it,” his dad said.

They walked outside. His father offered him a ride back to school or to home, but Nait knew the old man was already very late.

“Nah—I have some errands to run.”

His dad looked down the street, a gust of wind blowing litter off the sidewalk. “No one says ‘I have errands to run’ when they actually have errands to run.”

“Well you need to go,” Nait said, walking his dad to the black Lexus parked on the street. The driver’s side door slid open as they approached.

Thoughts bubbled into Nait’s mind, but they weren’t from the cyrano; they were from deeper in his psyche, trying to break through a mental barrier, something like when he was in high school and both wanted his dad to look at a bit of code that wasn’t working and also didn’t want to admit, to himself or to his dad, that he needed help, least of all his father’s.

As his dad dropped into the car seat with a small sigh that betrayed his age, Nait forced himself to say, though in a hesitant, quiet voice, “But, listen, if you’re in the mood for favours—”

For a moment his father didn’t respond. Nait wondered if he’d been stunned into silence by his son’s humbling himself enough to ask for help.

“You want to come work for Cyrano?” his dad said finally. “That’s…great.”

“Oh—no. But another interview at Cymark, if you think that’s okay.”

His dad nodded with understanding, a smile stretching out his lips. “I think I can manage that.”

“Just a fair interview. I’d appreciate it. I’ll turn off my cyrano this time. Now that the rust is off.”

“You’ll do great.”

“Thanks, Dad. And you can use that opportunity to tell whoever it is to stop calling you about me. Deal?”

His dad laughed, then nodded again. He slid the door closed and, waving through the window at Nait, drove off silently.

Nait watched the car until it receded out of view. He looked up The Pine Cone on his cyrano and called them. The bar was closed, but the nice automated agent who answered said Robin was working that night. Her shift started at eight.

He thanked the agent and hung up, then turned off his cyrano for the second time that crisp early morning. He walked along, back toward his bus stop several blocks away, listening to the sounds of a quiet, drowsy world that seemed to be waking up.

The Frontrunner

J.D. Harlock

Flight 214 was headed for the newly reconstructed Chams Mohsen Beirut International Airport. Even though most of the seats in first class were unoccupied, Bilal tried to keep as low of a profile as possible in his cordoned section. The flight attendant had been eyeing him with interest as soon as he boarded the plane, and he had tried his best to avoid initiating a conversation with her. However, after many sleepless nights out on his foreign tour, he desperately needed a cup of Turkish coffee—the kind you only find in Lebanon—and what Middle East Airlines passed off as that would have to do for now. When he gestured to the flight attendant, she promptly strolled over to his seat with an overeager smile.

“Mr. Mohsen, can I get you something,” she asked as she leaned in closer—too close—winking as suggestively as she could. “Or should I call you Bilal? You mentioned in that interview that you preferred being called that. You really are as ‘tall, dark, and handsome’ as they like to keep telling us.”

“Thank you,” Bilal smiled as politely as he could. “Mr. Mohsen will do, and a cup of coffee, please.”

The flight attendant rolled her eyes, then turned to the lithe woman in mirror shades staring out of the closed window in the seat next to him. “And you, miss, are you doing all right?”

With a coy expression, the woman turned to her as if she was addressed right on cue, then raised her piña colada and winked.

“Alrighty,” the flight attendant nodded, flustered, and scurried back to the galley. As soon as she was out of sight, the lithe woman rotated her seat to face Bilal.

“Pleased to meet you, Mr. Prime Minister,” she flashed an orthodontic smile. “Or is it still too early to call you that?”

The words “Bilal Mohsen, the prime minister of Lebanon” had now been repeated to him so often that Bilal had to remind himself that the president of Lebanon had yet to officially select him. Not that it wasn’t a sure thing. His backers would see to that. However, even though he had gotten accustomed to being recognized in public as a child, he was startled by the familiarity her tone seemed to convey.

“Pleased to meet you too,” he stuttered back. “And you are?”

“I was one of the attendees at the UN summit in Geneva. You gave an impressive speech back there. I wouldn’t have been surprised if a ceasefire had been announced by Hezbollah and Israel soon after.”

“I’m glad the international community has been so receptive to it.” Mohsen recited the PR responses he was instructed to memorize. “This is a decisive moment in Lebanese history.”

The woman, who looked just like any of the faceless bureaucrats he’d been forced to deal with in the West, suddenly responded in fluent Lebanese: “More than you could ever imagine.”

With her deep red hair and smooth white skin, he would never have pegged for a local. Still, there seemed to be more about her than that.

“You’re one of the few expats I’ve met that have followed up on the situation,” he sighed, for once allowing his public persona to falter, but she just chuckled in return.

“Oh, of course,” she leaned in and whispered. “After all, my employer has been observing closely.”

“Oh, really?” Bilal chuckled nervously. “Are you a reporter?”

“Not exactly.” Unprompted, she lowered her shades, allowing her cybernetic eyes to flash aureate irises. “My name is Ms. Bshara,” she smiled again. “I’m a prognosticator, and I’m here to save your life.”

“Apologies, Ms. Bshara, is it?” Bilal faltered, “I’m going to need you to elaborate…”

But Ms. Bshara did not respond, studying her analog wristwatch instead.

“What’s going to happen?” Bilal finally blurted out, losing his cool. Back at the Farm, he was trained to maintain his composure in situations like these, but he never believed that he would have to actually deal with a prognosticator. It was said that they could see the future with their implanted eyes. But not just one future, all of them. Every possible future for every possible action was laid out in front of them like a kaleidoscope of the realities that could be once a decision had been made. Despite that training, all he could ask was: “Am I in danger?”

And she responded, “Hold tight, Mr. Prime Minister, and watch out for the coffee.”

“What?”

But before he could react, heavy turbulence hit the plane, and the cup spilled onto his lap. The leaders of Arab industry, and the Lebanese political class that were all seated in the first and business classes with them, audibly broke down as their private security teams tried to calm down. However, Ms. Bshara did not partake in the alarm, casually sipping her drink. Though at first glance she almost seemed incapable of it, in that instant between her warning and the turbulence, Bilal could’ve sworn he saw the tip of a frown form on her face.

When the plane steadied, calm returned to the passengers. Bilal realized he was the only one still on edge, his hand jittery, threatening to spill the replacement cup of coffee the flight attendant had begged him to take.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” The aircraft cabin speakers screeched. “I’m afraid that we’re going to be experiencing more turbulence later. God willing, by the time we cross the Mediterranean Sea, we should be out of it.”

“Do I have to point out that we won’t?” Ms. Bshara casually slushed the cup of red wine she had just ordered. “And watch out. This one won’t last as long.”

Violent turbulence returned as quickly as it ended. In a state of panic, the passengers in the economy aisles had exited their seats, trying to bypass security into the first-class section by force to have access to the parachutes. Bilal was too shaken to notice that his new cup of coffee had stained the other leg of his custom-tailored suit. Without his scripted answers to misfortune, “Why this…why now…why us?” was all he could muster out loud to them in his withdrawn state.

Ms. Bshara maintained her candid demeanour and spoke to him in Lebanese again. “If you survive this, you’re destined to reshape Lebanon.”

Although he’d heard this ad nauseam for as long as he could remember, it seemed to snap Bilal out of his catatonia, even though he still sounded unconvinced. “How can we save the plane?” Bilal hoped for another answer, one he hadn’t already figured out due to her mere presence, but Ms. Bshara frowned again—this time in no way trying to hide it.

“It’s simple,” she took a deep breath. “We don’t.”

Bilal could now feel the air leave his body, and he felt as if he could pass out. Ms. Bshara placed her soft hands on his and spoke to him as a mother would her child. “Don’t worry. The agency has placed a parachute specifically for you under your seat, so you don’t have to fight others for the limited number on the plane. We’re telling you in advance so that you can get yourself out of this safely before the situation in the plane descends into pandemonium. A rescue team is on standby and will reach you in time before you drown. We couldn’t stop you from taking this plane because it would’ve tipped off your enemies on both sides, giving them time to figure out another way to take you out and prolong this war.”

“But what about you? All these people…”

“All of us are dead.” Ms. Bshara’s eyes shimmered. “Even if I can see all possible futures, only one of these futures will come to pass, and saving you is the only outcome within our means.”

“What are you saying?”

“I’m sorry.” Ms. Bshara tried to hide it, but he could tell she was tearing up. “Nothing can be done. It’ll start up again soon; next time, it won’t stop.”

“There’s still time. There’s still time. My father always said there’s still time.” Bilal wanted to cry out with all the passion he could shore up for Lebanon and its people, but in disbelief, all that came out was a tantrum: “We can save them! We can save you! What do I need to do? Tell me!”

Ms. Bshara closed her eyes and took a deep breath. This was always the hardest part. She turned to him, trying her best to keep a brave face. “Knowing the future doesn’t mean you can change it, love.”

Mohsen turned toward the passengers and then back at her. “I can’t just save myself,” he broke down, but Ms. Bshara remarked, as if she was reciting a litany, “This is for the greater good, Mr. Mohsen.”

Inside the underground bunker, champagne sparkled under the harsh light of the lone bulb in the room. Even as she savoured her drink, Ms. Bshara was distinctly aware that this location was nowhere near as glamourous as the one she had been recruited in. It would have to do until they could smuggle her out of Lebanon.

“Is there anything else I can get you, Ms. Bshara?” The Handler asked in a coarse version of her native tongue as casually as if they were enjoying a quiet night together, but she shook her head slowly, painfully aware of where she was and under what circumstances. After that cruel lie she told Bilal Mohsen back on the plane, she could scarcely utter a comprehensible sentence, let alone act as calm and collected as The Handler insisted. This was not the first time she had been tasked with such an assignment. However, it had never been on this scale and had never hit this close to home.

The Handler, fed up with her evasive humourlessness, set aside the bottle and asked her, in his language, in what he believed was a neutral tone, “Is it done?”

The woman nodded. The Handler made sure to lean in. “Are you sure?”

“As foreseen, Bilal Mohsen has drowned in the Mediterranean Sea.”

“Excellent.” The man crossed his hands and leaned his chin on them. “We’ll let our associates across the border and in the West know our mission was a success.”

Ms. Bshara was aware that he wanted her to celebrate with him, but for the first time, she had second thoughts—second thoughts that distressed her enough that she would risk her life to share them. Regardless, she chose to remain silent and instead ask, “Was any of this necessary?”

A moment of silence passed. The Handler fixed on her wavering gaze. “Ms. Bshara, need I remind you that this is for the greater good.”

“No,” she replied without hesitation.

Glancing at her with an indecipherable expression, the Handler proceeded to take off his shades—his irises glistening—and asked her point blank: “And how are you feeling about all of this?”

Though a flurry of emotion raged within her, all she could say was, “What does it even matter?”

A Table Set for Two

Emad El-Din Aysha

“That building doesn’t make any sense,” the Arabic scientist said in English to his colleague in the white hijab. He pointed out the open window, like he was taking aim from his sanitized lab coat to the world outside—the city of Cairo. A Levantine Arab with mildly tanned skin and dark hair that was neither curly nor straight, he had a strong nose that looked European. He was broad shouldered, just not quite enough to satisfy his parents, and not far sighted enough to warrant glasses. His parents had his baby-brown eyes lasered as a kid to avoid any further embarrassment.

He was a geek, and he was where he belonged. Earning money working for somebody else. And as was always the case with him, he had to have something to complain about. The white-on-white walls of this bland scientist’s paradise never satisfied his craving for bronzes and blues and olive greens. If he had a multi-coloured bucket of paint, he’d turn this capital city upside down from its beiges and browns to his liking. And plant jasmine and orange orchards and olive groves between every nook and cranny.

The building he had his sights on, a church, was that same shade of beige. As if the colour would ward off the sun. A reasonably cool but odourless breeze was coming in from the crowded morass that was Cairo, along with the cosmopolitan noises of the city that was again—as Ibn Khaldun had Christened it—The Mother of the World.

“Well, I think it’s quite charming,” his partner in crime replied. She was draped in white from head to toe like a nurse left over from the Second World War, tending a patient who steadfastly refused to heal. She had translucent brown eyes that caught the sun even behind the thick pair of glasses she insisted on wearing, pinkish white skin, and a small but very triangular nose. Her parched lips were always pushed out, like they were hiding a secret. She hardly wore makeup and her nails were clipped short and not manicured. However, her research partner, technically her boss, looked like he was always ready to receive the Noble Prize—on behalf of someone else.

She rewarded him with a broad but defiant smile, exposing her second set of dimples. “It doesn’t have to make ‘sense.’” She scoffed at the mere notion. Geometric forms needed no justification in her book. They were prior to creation, according to Kepler, a credo she held to even before her conversion to Islam.

“I know,” he said at first, then stuck to his guns and added, “but still. It’s a church that looks like a synagogue.”

“So? In Spain we have synagogues that look like mosques. Why should things be any different here in Cairo?” she pestered.

“That’s on the inside.” He’d been on the compulsory tour organized by the institute and came across a synagogue in Mar Girgis—a complex of Egyptian cathedrals and churches—that was near identical to the one in Spain she was referring to, with khazaf woodwork and geometric patterns and Islamic chandeliers alongside the painted Stars of David. Geometry piled on top of geometry. But again, on the inside. “That whole building looks like a synagogue. There’s no Orthodox domes. It’s all squares and rectangles. You have crosses but the portholes are all on the Star of David shape. And the arches…”

“They’re Moroccan. I see what you mean.” Her smile broadened, exaggerating her first pair of dimples, the less well-hidden pair in her cheeks. The other two were at the corners of her mouth. If you didn’t look carefully you’d miss them; the larger obscured the smaller. “Maybe some wealthy benefactor from Andalusia built this church to his specifications,” she added.

“A refugee, you mean?” His words stabbed the air unintentionally.

“It was a long time ago.” She knew what he was driving at.

“The fall of Ghernaṭa or Palestine?” he just had to say it.

“Both,” she chided him, giving him a gentle jab to the arm like a prize fighter who’d lost his nerve. The white scarf that covered her hair blended in with her so uncharacteristically Mediterranean pasty white skin, making her hard to see against the purist background of the lab. “It doesn’t matter anymore. Most Spaniards are Muslims now.”

“And you became a Muslim when it wasn’t fashionable,” he reminded himself. “But there’s still Palestine to contend with.” Her long skirt and short shoes were white too.

“It will get sorted out, eventual.”

“Eventually,” he huffed and puffed. “That’s the appropriate word.”

Tomorrow it would be May 15, 2048: Nakba Day. Exactly a century since the Nakba, the catastrophe that had left the Palestinian people homeless, not unlike the last Muslims of Ghernaṭa, who were booted out once they outlived their usefulness. And the institute they worked in, pairing a Palestinian and an Iberian in Egypt—the heart of the Arab world—wouldn’t commemorate the occasion by so much as giving them a day off.

Still, it gave him quite a view from his office. And to think, Andalusian art and architecture, in its initial phase, was Levantine. Just stripped of the colours, like bark. The Levant, he lamented. It was the most stripped-down part of the world. Bleeding and disfigured, from Palestine to Iraq and back, with a detour through Syria. That’s why they were housed in Egypt, the one fertile area that had weathered the storm. More or less.

“Have faith,” she said pleasantly, trying to downplay the collective weight of the occasion.

She pressed her lips tightly together, or tried, struggling with the buck teeth that lay behind them. This move left her lips pushed out as if in preparation for a kiss. It made him want to kiss her all the more. Instead he resigned himself to giving her a fatherly pinch to the chin, between two forefingers, touching the near invisible cleft that lay in the valley between her cheeks.

A shiver went through his body, and hers.

“So, how’s the research coming?” he said crisply in an effort to distract himself.

“The Time Lens…is good.” She pronounced it goud. “We still haven’t figured out the calculations, though.”

“Maths was never my strong point,” he lamented out loud. He could barely do mental arithmetic.

“That’s why you need me,” she said proudly, her eyes charting out shapes and coordinates in the thick air between them.

I need you for more than just that, he kept to himself. He grouped his face in frustration, muffling his mouth with his hand.

“You’re still thinking about it, aren’t you?” A slightly more serious tone entered her voice, dulling her normally melodious manner of speaking.

“It’s all I think about.” He scratched his clean-shaven chin.

“We’re here to observe,” she repeated. They’d had this conversation one too many a time. “And nothing more.”

“What’s the point of ‘observing’ if you don’t change things? That’s why we gather the data.”

“You learn from history’s mistakes. That is changing things. The Lens lets us collect the right information so we don’t misread the past.” She pronounced it miss-red, like she was talking about a contestant at a beauty pageant for the near-sighted.

“Another time.” He patted his tummy. “What are you cooking up for lunch at the canteen?”

“Paella.”

“Again?” he said in mock frustration at the mere mention of the famous Spanish dish that was never meant to be served for a party of one.

“If we listened to you, all we’d ever eat is Lebanese food,” she retorted.

“It’s not fattening and it’s certainly better than the local cuisine,” he said beneath his breath.

And they were still in the lab, all by themselves.

“There’s so much of it now, it doesn’t taste right. Being an Arab is too much in vogue. And you said yourself it’s crusader food,” she spat out.

He had been referring to the snails and frog legs they ate up in the Lebanese mountains. “We beat the crusaders in the end,” he said anti-climactically.

“Everything is a battle with you,” she said in her own effort at melodrama. “And you forget,” she added.

“Forget what,” he said stupidly.

“In the end, you didn’t need to beat them!”

“Oh God, what am I doing,” he said out loud to no one as he turned on the Time Lens.

He’d made sure not to turn any of the lights on in the office. There were still guards posted at this time of night.

He punched in the space-time coordinates as best he could, then clicked ENTER. What had they said at lunch earlier that day?

“If I was to go backwards in time, and that’s a pretty big if…”

Her bushy eyebrows met for an instant as she eyed him suspiciously, like a frog that simply refused to be dissected.

“If I could go anywhere in the past, anywhere at all,” he continued. “It would be to the Umayyad Court in Damascus, at the time of Umar ibn Abd al-Aziz.”

“The Fifth Rightly Guided Khalifa.” She spoke it as if reading straight out of her school textbooks, even pronouncing the last word correctly in Arabic.

“Exactly.”

“But why him? Why not at the time of Amr ibn al-As in Egypt or Tareq ibn Ziyad in Morocco?”

“You mean Iberia!” Tareq, the Berber liberator of the Iberian Peninsula, was her favourite figure from Islamic history. Amr ibn al-As was the Arab conqueror of Egypt, where they lived and worked at this point in time.

“I grew up in Gibraltar, or the Mound of Tareq as you say.” Her Arabic was good but she still insisted on translating things literally in her speech.

“Jabal Tareq,” he chided. “It’s a more colourful pronunciation too.”

“It is still British, after all this time,” she said. Her brown eyes weren’t nearly as cheery as before.

He still couldn’t believe it, himself, after all these years. A European country invaded and occupied by another part of Europe. He’d always thought white people stuck together. Maybe that’s why Iberians insisted on mixing two species of white meat—fish and chicken—into a single meal, then used spices to compensate for the blandness of it all. That was paella for you. Such efficient people, the Spaniards, making the best of any and every opportunity. And they preferred the food down south in Morocco compared to the grub of their fellow Europeans.

He plodded on, “I’d head back to Umar ibn Abd al-Aziz to warn him about the poison—”

“We don’t know that for a fact. He may have just died of natural causes.” She didn’t like talk of court plots in her reading of her newfound faith’s history. She was more of a Muslim than he was, in some ways.

“We’ll soon find out if you can get the calculations sorted out,” he added for measure.

“I might not, just to make life difficult for you,” the words popped out of her mouth. He wished he had a needlepoint handy so he could burst each delightful bubble.

“You should want me to head off back to save him,” he still insisted.

She shrugged her shoulders in miscomprehension.

“Because…” he groped for an explanation before his databanks kicked in. “He wanted to pull the Muslim armies out of Transoxiana and, here’s the rub, Iberia.”

Her eyebrows pressed together again. “But why?” She was genuinely surprised. He was the resident historian.

“Umar, sweet man that he was, said the conquests were ‘illegal.’ They weren’t about spreading the religion, doing away with oppressors who wouldn’t let people worship freely or convert to Islam. The conquerors, they were just in it for material gain.”

“What, like the armaments industry that funds our research?” she said with a swagger of her head. The silk hijab she was wearing gently wove its way across the velvety skin of her neck.

“Hush,” he said, only half-jokingly.

He distracted himself afterwards by scooping up an extra helping of her delicious cooking.

He’d recollected the conversation as his consciousness hurtled back through time.

He’d felt the room and everything in it dissolve. Parched earth beneath his feet. The sun, moon, the stars, above. Everything that had been and could have been came and went across his eyes in a dizzying haze.

He’d exerted his mind to slow things down and move himself north and south, east and west. The only problem, the only thing missing, was mathematical precision.

He saw the Egyptian army led by Pharaoh Ramses II heading off to Kadesh to fight the Hittites. So at least he was in Syria, if a few millennia too early. He also couldn’t help but notice some of his fellow countrymen in the lower ranks with their distinctive headgear, slogging it out on foot while their masters rode all the way in the heat and the dust. (So much for the Sea Peoples).

No change there, he said to himself.

The first thing Saladin had done, before liberating Jerusalem, was to build a navy to patrol the coastline. And it was the British navy that let the Zionist settlers in through the back door.

He stopped himself moving backwards and concentrated. He had to go forwards. Start again, think again…remember again.

The food had been excellent!

He woke up to find himself lying face down on the console. He’d been there all night. His skin felt like it was glued to the plastic of the keyboard. It stung as he pulled. It was a wonder his head didn’t come off with it.

What time was it? It was May 15; he was sure of that at least. He looked at the window, squinting his eyes. The sun was blaring through as usual.

He heard the door open, startling him. His head craning backwards like a bird’s, he found a man in a white lab coat. Someone he didn’t recognize at all. The walls were as blandly white as before though.

“Who are you?” he coughed out.

“Excuse, Sir,” the man said in atrocious English.

“You’re not one of the team,” he said defensively. “And where’s my partner?”

“I not understand.”

“My frien—colleague,” he felt he had to explain. “You know, the foreign gir—er, mathematician. Desiderata.”

“But Dr. Qadar, you have no partner. That is the way you wished it.”

Had he heard that right? His name was Qadir, which meant “capable” in Arabic. Not Qadar, which loosely translated meant “fate,” something he’d always insisted on cheating.

The man standing astride him continued. “And why would have an assistant by that is name? Spanish a dead language, not something to ‘desire,’” he explained, with the pun on the name. That’s actually what the name meant. The joke fell on deaf ears.

What’s the hell’s going on here, Dr. Qada—Qadir, he said to himself. “Who do I report to? Surely they must have a manifesto of all the name—”

“The police commishionar is not likely to meet—”

“Police,” he blurted out. Or was that commissar? Dr. Qadir took another look at the window. Were his eyes lying to him? Surely it couldn’t be. “Where’s the church?”

“What are you speaking of? There was no building there, or forever was.”

“The church…the church that was there?” Dr. Qadir stood up in a hurry. “The one with the…Moorish arches and Stars of David,” he said as he made his way to the bulletproof glass. The city didn’t look as cheery as it was before. The people weren’t as diverse either in their dress or skin tones. What in the blazes was going on?

“Stars of…what are you talking. You are mad. There is no such thing in existence. Not since the agreeme—”

“I know they’re not that popular anymore in our part of the world, but you can’t just pretend they never existed just because it isn’t conveni…” He scraped away at his chin. It was covered in stubble. He looked down and noticed his protruding belly. It felt like eggplant in there, a favourite dish of Egyptians (those who couldn’t afford meat). But he still couldn’t believe…

“Were you dreaming? Should I called the Mind Control Department?”

Mind Con…what have I done? “No, no. That’s not necessary. You’re right. I was dreaming. I’d been reading a book on Andalusian architecture late at night and—”

“Andalus? No such place.”

“How can that be?” Dr. Qadir was beginning to sweat. He missed the building now almost as much as he missed Desiderata.

“It was given to Britannika in exchange for Palestine. Muslims are ‘protected’ subjects there. There is no Spanish. And there is no Stars of David. They all converted, were converted, to either side. Arabi or English. Surely you of all know this.”

His eyes widened to breaking point.

It took some persuading to get the man out and give everyone the day off, but he did it in the end. Turns out he had discretionary powers for special occasions to give people another excuse not to work and make their lot in life a little bit better.

It had been poison, after all, that killed the Fifth Rightly Guided Khalifa. So, it was something undoable, not God’s will. Or re-doable.

He would give the humble, pious man a choice, tell him what would happen if he continued to live out his good intentions. He was like Socrates, willing to drink the hemlock for the greater unforeseen good.

Dr. Qadar knew he would succeed. It hadn’t been a dream. He patted his upset stomach, the taste of the paella still on his tongue. The one good thing that had come from this manifestation of himself was that he knew his numbers were right. Some dark cosmic hand had compensated him for that lack, his need for a better half to complete himself.

He finally had all he needed to navigate through the topography of the past.

“I’m coming back to you. Back to myself. And I won’t let you get away from me this time, ever. Or my name isn’t Dr. Qada—Qadir,” he said as he jabbed down on ENTER.

In the Future, We Can Go Back Home

Sara Solara

The moment I set foot in Jerusalem for the first time, I remove my sandals and delve my toes deep into the tender earth. Pure air slips in and out of my lungs. Under the warm glow of the sun, a date palm towers over me, stretching high into the heavens in all its magnificent glory.

Hesitantly, I reach for the trunk and run my hands along its bark—as if in touching this lone tree, I can forever root myself in this precious place.

My heart thuds in my chest. Palestine. Palestine. Palestine.

For my whole life, I have ached to return to the ancestral homeland my grandmother spoke of with awe, and by some long-overdue miracle I am here. I thought I’d never make it. Only five years ago, Israeli officers turned me away at the airport for my news articles exposing their apartheid state, refusing to let me enter my own homeland. Because they fucking could. I had waited twenty-seven years of my life for that opportunity, storing up spare dollars and laying out precise plans, only to have it seized from me as soon as I arrived.

“You hate Israel,” the officer had said upon looking up my latest article about illegal Israeli settlement expansion in The Intercept. “Why would we let you in?”

“Because this is my home,” I said through gritted teeth, tamping down the rage burning inside. “This is my family’s native land. You took it from me.”

Wrong answer. Entry denied. With a scoff, he sent me away on the next flight. Colonizers love commanding every aspect of our lives, flaunting their power to exact the worst possible pain, robbing us of the simplest joys we fight for. Colonialism is cruel like that.

Now, it’s over. In a free Palestine, nobody can stop me from going back home.

My cousin Reem nudges my shoulder. “Come see the family, Nadia. The food is waiting for you.”

“Shokran.” I follow her in a dazed wonder, as each step on the earth buoys my stride.

The whole plane ride here, I questioned whether I would belong, and still that fear eats at me. It is my first time here in Palestine. I cannot speak the language of my ancestors. There is so much I do not yet know, as much as I have tried to learn, because I was barely raised in my own culture, because it was taken from me in the violence of colonialism that pressured my family to erase themselves. There is also the fact I am in love with a woman, and I cannot help but wonder: Will the land love me back in all my queerness? It all hangs heavy over my shoulders.

No matter what, I am here. I am present.

At the new house, my great-aunt, great-uncle, and all my cousins greet me with hugs and double kisses on both cheeks. They ask if I want to take a nap after the long flight, but I am so alert I could not dream of sleeping. Instead, I take a shower and we settle in for a feast, with maqluba, fattoush, falafel, and every sweet imaginable. “This is your home,” my great-aunt says. I am automatically included at their table, because I am family.

Aside from Reem, who visited me in the US on her occasional trips, I am meeting them all for the first time—my grandmother’s sister and her kids and grandkids. Yet in my bones I have always known them, for we share the same blood, thicker than any force that could attempt to separate us. Their voices ring familiar in my ears.

Afterward we drink tea on the balcony over a lush vineyard lined with fig trees. I close my eyes and stretch out my arms, allowing the heat of the sun to tingle across my palms.

“Nadia, you remind me of your grandmother Zeina,” my great-aunt says. “She wanted to absorb everything like a sponge, baking in the sun and swimming in the springs. We grew up in this neighbourhood. I wish she could see her home village one last time.”

“I know,” I whisper. “Me too.”

When night falls, I slip out of the house into the cool air and walk the perimeter of the village in sacred silence. This is the village in West Jerusalem my grandmother was expelled from as a nineteen-year-old, when a Zionist militia violently invaded during the Nakba in 1948.

This is the village our family was barred from for eight decades, as Israeli colonizers took over and built their settlements on stolen land.

The ruins of our destroyed homes are still here. The collapsed stones of houses blown up by Israeli militias. The ancient caves and water wells. The cemetery where my ancestors are buried. I walk through as quietly as possible, as if the softest step on this hallowed ground could disturb the souls resting here. Before each headstone with my family’s surname, Rayan, I pause and bow my head. An ancestor.

A cool breeze whispers through the orange tree above, and I draw a deep breath. I keep walking. Up ahead, the ruins of a home beckon to me. Between the invasive pine trees the Israeli colonizers planted to hide the signs of our existence, there lies the remnants of a white stone house. With great care, I step over the edge of what looks like a decimated wall and into the centre, where I sit among the rubble.

As soon as my fingertips graze the stone, pink sunlight blooms on the horizon and blinds me. I gasp out, blinking away the little fuzzy flashes in my sight.

The rubble has rematerialized into a house again, with pale sunlight peeking through the window. Little kids are running around and playing with fabric dolls, shrieking in sheer delight. At the table, two young women—one who looks like the older sister—share a spread of zeit and za‘atar. They’re smiling and laughing, speaking words in Arabic I cannot understand. No one reacts to my presence. I am not really here, after all. It’s impossible. Yet I can hear the ringing laughter, I can smell the rich baking bread wafting from the oven, and I can see the markings of a well-loved home, from the framed family photographs hung on the wall to the array of oranges, lemons, apricots, and figs decorating the table. I dip the tiniest piece of pita in the olive oil and za‘atar, savouring the fresh spices on my tongue.

The young woman on the left is chatting enthusiastically in Arabic with a lilting cadence, her brown hair swept back in a braid. Her features—the long nose, the dimples in her smile—feel oddly familiar. When her companion cries out “Zeina!” it clicks. She is my grandmother, a bright-eyed, playful youth with an impish smile, before she knew the scars of catastrophe.

The way she giggles with a flicker of light dancing in her eyes, shouldering closer to the other young woman, sparks a fresh sense of recognition. Her companion squeezes her hand and plants a light kiss on her lips. Oh. She is queer—they are both queer—like me. And they are happy. They are infinitely, blissfully content, the precious peace of this simple moment undisturbed.

I wish I could freeze this snapshot in time for them. This moment where my grandmother can be young and free and fully herself, unbroken by the traumas fated to come. But before I can draw another breath, the sunlight in the window retreats and darkness descends.

Then I am sitting in the rubble again, as a breeze lifts and whispers through the trees. The heavy night presses against my chest. What a treasure I have been gifted, to glimpse this stolen memory from my grandmother’s life. Was it real?

When I ease to my feet, the shattered stones roll away from me in a flurry. Stone by stone, the four walls reconstruct themselves all the way up to the roof and close it off. The hanging photographs jump back onto the wall, dead fruits grow ripe with colour as they spring onto the table, and the warm aroma of baking bread wafts from the oven. There’s even zeit and za‘atar on the table. Exactly as it was.

It’s almost as if my grandmother and her loved ones are still here. Their near presence lingers in the walls of this place.

Under the moonlight, I stretch out my hand to touch the white stone wall, to test if it’s really here. The rugged rock is solid against my palm. I lean against the wall, pressing my face to the rock, and breathe deeply. A force tugs on my spirit and roots me to the land. This is where I truly belong.

I am home. I am home at last.

The Forty

Sonia Sulaiman

She scraped her stylus across the stone, carefully scrawling the word in white on black. When she was finished, she held the stone for a long time, rubbing it gently with her thumb. Behind her, the tents were being struck. Animals were roused and groomed, preparing for the next leg of the journey. A young man, Ahmed, his skin darkened by the sun with sweat lightly covering his brow, walked over to her and watched as she placed the stone at the top of the cairn, what the people called a “Witness.” These stone markers, sometimes a pillar, sometimes a pile, circled the world. The young and old went on the grand pilgrimage, to touch as many of these Witnesses as they could. At each, they received a gift from the Greatest of Mysteries. The reasons for the journey were as varied as the pilgrims. Some only discovered the meaning of their walk upon the Way.

“Still leaving breadcrumbs?” he said.

“I’ll sew the stars,” she said, “if I must.” It was already an old saying, as old perhaps as the Earth Age. Long before the creation of their new world, the ancestors had sewn elaborate designs that were tied to identify the holy land, the stories that the people carried with them. Many of these designs were stars: The Star of Hebron, the Star of Jerusalem, the Star of Bethlehem. The young man stood by and looked at her, then at the Witness. If he stood just right, with his eye level to the top, he could see further than he ought to. He saw things he wasn’t supposed to.

“I see the next Witness,” he said. “And the one after that…”

“This one,” she said looking up at the stone she left behind, “gave me life.” The man took a moment to mull this over so she continued. “Ahmed, I don’t think I will ever die.”

“That usually doesn’t happen,” he said, “until the end of the pilgrimage.” She shrugged and walked toward the caravan to find Dalia and Daoud and make sure that they were prepared to move on. Those two were the oldest people they knew—and the sweetest. Their love grew from year to year, and no hardship could drain a drop of honey from them.

“Nadira,” said Dalia crossly. “Tell him to put this childishness away!” She fanned her hands at a wooden game board inlaid with mother of pearl. The old man beside her, Daoud, laughed soundlessly, his eyes full of mischief.

“We have time for one game,” said Ahmed, much to Dalia’s disapproval.

“Dalia, come play the Tables with me.” Daoud was already setting up the wooden playing board, with its twelve peaks pricked out in coloured woods, and stacking the chips with a click. Dalia looked back at him briefly and sighed.

“I am too old for this,” she said, shooing him with one hand before bringing it back to rest on her head, the hand gently arranging her white scarf.

Daoud gaped exaggeratedly at her until she shrugged back at him. “How dare you? No one speaks that way about my wife, the light of my life, who is but twenty-five and lovely like a rose! I will call you out and we will duel in the marketplace. Pistols, like in the old days, or swords—even better!”

Dalia fixed him with The Look. “No sword could be as sharp as your tongue, Old Man.” Daoud gave a long chuckle of triumph. Dalia smiled. She got up and sat across from him, taking the pale wooden chips into her hands and arranging them on the board.

“Magic or no magic?” asked Daoud as he arranged his side of the board.

Dalia shook her head. “Don’t waste what we don’t have,” she rebuked. “It won’t be like it was when we were first married, no matter what we do. This game is old.”

“We haven’t even started.” He looked up at her adoringly. The two leaned over the board and rolled a small die that fit into their palms, lacking a cup to roll it in. They lost the cups on the journey. First hers. They had used his cup for a while, until they lost that too. Hands were made before cups.

Nadira and Ahmed moved on. Selma, Ahmed’s great-grandmother, was resting near the horses, listening to them whinny. They delighted the old woman. She had ridden across the plains as a girl, and now she rode with her child’s child. Ahmed was glad of the horses; before they could afford them, Ahmed carried her on his own back. And his little son Mohammed trailed behind him.

“Someday, the people will know about us,” Nadira said. “Just to know that we existed; we were here.”

Ahmed with his far seeing knew the way to the next milestone on this journey, the next stopping point. There were points like this studded in the great continent they called home. A ring of remembrance tread by pilgrims who said their ancestors were the stars. Knowing the next stopping place was Ahmed’s gift from the stones. It was enough for him.

“They won’t know why we travel,” she said. “But after all, that isn’t the point…is it? We are not our catastrophe. Never were.”

“Whatever it is,” said Ahmed, “we’ll shake it off.” Another old saying, passed into meaninglessness by the repetition of it. Something to take up the spaces left by silence and absence. “And what do you hope for, Nadira? If it’s true that you won’t die, couldn’t you just tell them about us? Refresh the stories, keep the lineage of knowledge going from generation to generation.”

Nadira looked into the sky and saw pink clouds gathering, a livid streak of mauve and blue crossing. Those who complete the pilgrimage become changed, ageless, deathless. Nadira knew that she had not changed because she felt it. There was never any boon granted by the Witnesses, not for her. Ahmed, though…simple, strong, lion-hearted Ahmed, who carried his future and his past upon his broad shoulders. Ahmed who saw the way forward.

Witnesses tell of the Forty. What are Witnesses? Shame comes upon me that we have lost even that knowledge. The pilgrims walking the Round Way over thousands upon thousands of years etched the blessed track around the world, this floating Disk we call home. Stone piles formed by the prayers and rubbing-stones of those eons of travellers are what gave, and still give, testimony to the past. Those markers, the Witnesses, are all that remain of them now. The flow of holiness ebbs, and no one remembers the tales and legends. Still some few of each generation, in every village and great city alike, strike out into the distance and their feet know the gates of righteousness. Some even return from their pilgrimage—though this is rare. And rarer still, perhaps impossibly so, some return changed, touched by the Great Mystery.

But I was speaking of the Forty: a nation of wanderers who made the greatest journey of them all, though it took them many generations. So little remains of their story, just words now upon the wind. But they, the stone Witnesses, remain, and they remember all who stop at them and look up into the night for that pinprick of light that leads them out of the darkness. They say that finding a Witness opens up your eyes, your senses expand, you come to know yourself, to know the cosmos and the origin of all things. I’ve never seen a Witness.

But I know who has. Akrion, my dearest friend, was one of those who struck out into the distance. He was a great reader, a scientist and scholar. He wanted to know, and he wanted to test the old stories most of all. Those stories that are nothing more than references and titles that are catalogued and forgotten now, shut up in indices that no one reads.

He sent me a letter after he left. It was the last anyone heard from him, and in it he drew a meticulous diagram of a pillar of stones. It was squat, more of a pile than a pillar, truly. A little over six feet tall at the narrowest part but resembling a great hewn tree. At the base, he included another drawing: a single stone of irregular shape, somewhat like a broken axehead. It was a joke, I thought. It had a word in Arabic written across it, scratched into the black stone so that it showed white and spidery: the old word for “Forty.”

He said the Witness told him things that he didn’t know, for all his reading. He said that he saw the past as clearly as watching a play. He came back with a song, a song one of the stones in the pile hummed to him. The words are curious: “A person can only be born in one place. However, he may die several times elsewhere: in the exiles and prisons, and in a homeland transformed by the occupation and oppression into a nightmare.”

He said they were doubtless the words of a great poet. It seems that at some point in time, however distant, we suffered under an occupation. Here the poet speaks of exile and enclosure, of oppression and living hells. Akrion affirmed that there was such a thing: The Occupation. His opinion is that in the Age of Earth, before the Ouverture was sung, we were one people made up of many facets but that all endured the internal and external exile of a brutal colonizing state. For that time, it occupied everything; all of life was occupied. This is why there is only the remembrance of the description: The Occupation.

Akrion, my friend, closes his letter with a promise to meet me at the coffee house. He said that he needed to speak to me about the Forty Who Wandered—a story I heard from my father. But Akrion never came home.

Ahmed the Farseeing had become ageless, and he carried Nadira on his back. They climbed the mountain together. Not everyone who sets out for the circular Way completes the circuit or returns. So many had left, content with their boons and not willing to risk further struggles on the promise of something else at the end, that the camp was meagre now.

“What’s left of the Forty,” said Nadira as she looked down at the camp in the wadi, “after so many years?”

Ahmed, who assured and never once thought of stopping said, “They will have our breadcrumbs. Like the others who have come before us, they will filter back one by one and with them the stories of our pilgrimage. It will all come together in the end.”

“Don’t you ever get impatient?”

“No, I can see the next Witness. They are always just over the horizon like the moon, hanging there, a lamp.” Ahmed had become a poet in those days.

Ahmed carefully put Nadira down on her feet and she adjusted her walking stick. The Witness.… There was, of course, no Final Witness. The Final was the First. The end was marked by the beginning. But the penultimate Witness was her last chance. She looked to Ahmed, who bent to pick up a stone for her, and she wrote “The Forty” across it. She insisted on placing it at the top of the Witness herself.

She was caressed by the wind as she stood there. She felt nothing else, only the sun beating down when it passed through the clouds. It was a beautiful sight, that Witness at the top of the mountain. She could imagine that standing there was what Ahmed must feel like, seeing the land all laid out at once. She was silent for a long time.

Ahmed sighed. “I see our homes from here,” he said, smiling. “I see the First Witness, where we parted from our families and friends.”

“Are the houses still as they were?”

He shrugged. “They are, and they are not. It is and is not as I remember. That’s only to be expected. We’ve changed too; everyone who goes on pilgrimage returns changed.”

Nadira said with effort, “I am not going back.”

It was Ahmed’s turn to be silent. What could he say? What could he do, now that there was only Nadira and him left from the original Forty who set out from their village? He turned and began to walk down the mountain again. Nadira did not follow him.

Alone with her grief and rage, she looked out over the top of the Witness. It was just a pile of stones, like all of the others they had passed over the decades, robbing her youth. She had dutifully built them all, one stone each, and paid her dues mile after mile.

No one tells their story: the ones who never return from the pilgrimage. No one spreads the stories of the unchanged.

Nadira paused at the cactus hedge. In the dead of night, she crossed over into the old caravanserai, and Ahmed was waiting for her. She had come home, unchanged, from the journey and the long exile. Like an infiltrator, an interloper, she slipped into the street and held Ahmed’s hand.

“I wanted them to know that we were there, us, the Forty. The ancestors were exiles; alone they wandered the world and returned, like us. I wanted to be changed, but I knew it wasn’t written once I passed the first Witness. So, I made my own miracle of memory.”

“I never knew,” said Ahmed. “I often wondered why you had your breadcrumb trail to leave.”

She laid her gray head on his youthful shoulder. “But you never asked.”

Remembrance in Cerulean

Elise Stephens

The morning skies over Port Townsend Bay were steel-gray and twisted, like bedsheets after endless hours of nightmares. Paul Thresher’s chest felt cold and hollow as he stood above the lapping waves, toes curled on the lip of the pier behind his waterfront home. The stench of the nearby paper mill and the spring growth of backyard lawns were thick in his nostrils. As Paul stared at the bobbing, red-flagged buoys that marked the first Cerulean colony—now abandoned—he told himself again that he couldn’t take the job.

Protecting human lives, while never making a mistake—it was a recipe for nervous breakdown. Paul still wondered what had compelled his father to take a similar job with the Navy. Then this morning, as if to confront his father’s ghost with that very question, Paul had walked straight from bed to stand exactly where his father had ended his life one year prior. What rose from the water was not quite the answer he’d sought—it was a Cerulean, one of the sea aliens.

She was a female of her species, larger than the males and about the size of a baby Orca. She treaded water with gentle strokes of her six deep-blue tentacles, then extended one arm toward Paul, bearing something in its coiled tip that he couldn’t quite see. He stumbled backward, trembling yet unable to run.

The White House had forbidden contact with the Cerus following the tragic chain of events in the Puget Sound’s waters. And whether or not the Cerus had understood this decree, in the year since, they’d kept to themselves under vigilant naval surveillance. Until now.

This Ceru’s head was like a blunted mountaintop, deep blue speckled with white constellations. She watched him with dark, deep-set eyes as she waited for him to take her offering. If Paul touched her, he knew he’d receive a copy of a memory she’d chosen to share with him, excreted by her pores and absorbed into his through a biological transfer. She might give him a personal memory of hers or one she’d acquired from elsewhere. Through this same exchange, Paul would also give her an exact impression of his present thoughts and emotions.

Paul swallowed the urge to retreat into the house, draw the curtains, and finish off the bourbon from the night before. Instead, he knelt and held out his hand, despair making his limbs heavy. He couldn’t begin to repair the wound that the Navy’s rash choice had inflicted, slaughtering half of her ambassadorial sending. Despite playing no personal part in it, he still felt compelled to make whatever small peace gestures he could.

A small metal fixture tumbled from the Ceru’s tentacle and into Paul’s hand. It was a stainless-steel hexagon, a plumbing bolt that likely attached to the end of a pipe. For a moment, the weight felt comforting, but the sensation shattered as the coating of excreted memory absorbed into Paul’s skin.

A golden wash of afternoon light swallowed the morning gray, signalling to Paul that he now inhabited the Ceru’s memory. He stood on the same pier while his left hand gripped something hard with blunt corners. His chest was tight in anticipation of the impending court trial and its charges: neglecting his duties and instigating acts of inter-species war. Paul saw an image of himself at roughly age five, riding his first bike, and felt his heart swell with bittersweet pride. Then the other images fell away and Paul saw again the end of the pier drenched in afternoon gold. His lungs burned, as if he hadn’t drawn breath for a long minute. His right hand came into view, gripping a Colt .45, the one his father always kept in his bedside drawer. He placed the barrel of the gun between his teeth and bit hard.

The light plunged again to dim gray and Paul fell forward on hands and knees, sobbing. When his vision had cleared and he was himself again, not his miserable father; the Cerulean was gone.

And the alien had given this memory as though it were a gift.

You’ve only made it worse for the human, Vezda chided herself, humming dissonant notes as she retreated from the trembling figure. All of this hope that you’ve placed in returning that Final Remembrance to the dead’s offspring and you’ve only managed to harm his own equilibrium. This will not begin the reconciliation of our races. Yern’s mission has failed.

Vezda had not known the male human’s distress until the moment she’d touched him. Only then had she seen that he wrestled with indecision, a choice he feared to make, with mental sluggishness and exhaustion hindering him.

And yet Vezda had felt harmonic certainty, after witnessing the older human’s suicide a year ago, that she was meant to take possession of the fastener that had fallen from his limp fingers. She’d known even before she’d touched the thing that it would be coated with violent, agonized memories, but these she had endured. They were a Final Remembrance, after all, and the Children of the Sea were the guardians of such things.

Vezda had taken the fastener and swum to where her surviving brethren had fled in the aftermath of the unexplained killing that had interrupted their attempt to bring a Final Remembrance to the humans. Perhaps, she’d thought, she would one day have the honour of returning this small object and the Final Remembrance it held.

Every sunrise, Vezda had slipped past the humans’ monitors and crossed the cold distance between the refugee camp and the shoreline to surface and silently observe the land-dwelling that had belonged to the dead human. She told herself she made these journeys for Yern.

Then, this morning, a human had emerged onto the little wooden platform and walked out to stare into the sea. His face might have been an older version of the young human astride the two-wheeled land vehicle in the suicide’s Final Remembrance. Vezda had offered him the fastener, coated with the last thoughts of his father. It was the deepest respect she could show and yet, after hearing the human respond with a moan like a speared calf, Vezda doubted the wisdom of her choice. Yern’s mission to share Remembrance with a species so intent on forgetting seemed more and more doomed with each passing day in these strange waters.

Vezda squeezed her upper air bladder and bunched her tentacles, arrowing down into the cooler depths. She had done her best.

The irony was too great, Paul thought, his toes numbing through his socks as he watched the waves subside in the alien’s absence. This was the first time he’d stepped onto the pier since his father had died on it. Captain Dahlstrom’s words from the day before still thrummed in his mind.

“Did you know that the design boys upstairs have a betting pool to see who’ll be the first to get a design past your desk with less than fifteen mistakes found?” Capt. Dahlstrom had chuckled. “Dave told me about you tracking the test failure last week down to a degraded rubber gasket; your knowledge of the design as a whole is a skill we need more of here. You’ve got the makings of an Integration Engineer, Thresher.”

Paul was presently employed as a civilian mechanical engineer, which meant Dahlstrom couldn’t technically order him to apply for any position. Nevertheless, social pressure at the office had been steadily tightening. It was more than just a fear of failure that held Paul back. He knew what a mistake had done to his father. The thought still made his neck burn.

Had the Cerulean known that this steel bolt stood for the blood of innocents? That it was the last thing Greg Thresher had held, apart from the gun itself, before he’d abandoned his family? If the Cerulean had meant the memory to do good, Paul couldn’t grasp what that could be. The beams of the pier creaked as he rose on shaky legs, trying to swallow rage and confusion. The buoy flags shone blood-red in the full sunlight.

When the extraterrestrial spacecraft had descended on Port Townsend waters, it had truly changed the face of everything. Paul knew from personal anecdotes in the naval community that the Cerus had been gentle visitors, intent on building their underwater domes, communicating requests for materials through memory transfers. Marine biologists who’d studied them had observed a singing language and the aliens proved themselves able to comprehend simple English phrases. Their mysterious manner of giving and taking memories was, however, generally perceived as unsettling by the human community, many of whom considered the process attempted mind control. This unrest inspired heavy military reinforcements, swelling Indian Island Naval Base to the nation’s fourth largest. Things had been ripe for a disaster.

And now, today, a Cerulean had brought Paul what he could only assume was the same fastener that had sunk the USS Blacktip. The sub had gone down during a routine sweep in the waters above the Ceru colony. He’d imagined it in countless nightmares: The improperly dimensioned bolt had been torqued too tightly; the washer beneath hadn’t been designed for the pressure, thus damaging the seal with the ballast tanks, which then crippled the Blacktip’s ability to surface and expanded to a swift leak that precipitated implosion.

But the bolt wasn’t the first to take the blame.

“I’ll make this easy for you, Thresher.”

At the office, Paul looked up wearily from his third round of revisions on the specs for a new hull plating material. Reference books lay in a neat stack to his left, though he rarely opened them, relying instead on his memory of material properties. He slid one hand into his pocket where the bolt lay and prepared himself for the familiar onslaught.

Capt. Dahlstrom was grinning with only his eyes. He dropped a spiral-bound notebook onto Paul’s desk. “It’s a proficiency test I got from QA Management. Two sections: First one’s the specs, all of which a sub must precisely meet before she’s cleared to dive. The second is a sample report. There’s seven known errors in that report. Errors that don’t just jump out at you. If you can find more than half of them, they’ll look closer at training you. Give it a go.”

Paul drew a slow breath, readying his refusal. Dahlstrom was saying something about fully fit recovery systems. Paul glanced at the framed photo on his desk. Greg Thresher stood with arms crossed in a flannel shirt, baseball cap, and fishing vest. Beside him stood ten-year-old Paul, cradling the largest fish he’d ever caught.

Dahlstrom leaned over, whispering, and this time Paul heard him.

“And as far as family association, don’t think I haven’t studied your psych profile. You’re far more even-keeled than your father was, and better-suited for this work.”

Heat rose in Paul’s cheeks and he fought to keep his gaze from dropping. If his father could have faced the shame of his own mistake, he might have had the courage to live.

“I’ll let you think about it,” Dahlstrom said, brow crinkling as he slapped the surface of Paul’s desk, then strode away.

Paul closed his fist around the bolt in his pocket. Through some trick of Cerulean biology, a lingering bit of his father’s memory leached against his consciousness again. He saw the black pistol lying across the brown leather family Bible in the bedside table drawer and felt a convulsive trembling in his hands, the muscle required to squeeze the trigger.

As Paul shook the memory free, he wondered if his father had felt guilty for what his accusations had cost the Ceruleans, even after they’d been shown innocent. But the aliens hadn’t featured in Greg Thresher’s final thoughts. Some days Paul hated his father for seeding violence against the Cerus. Most days, he hated him for leaving.

The Blacktip tragedy had taken the lives of first humans and then Ceruleans in its tragic unfolding. Seconds after news of the Blacktip’s demise reached shore, sonar had picked up a cluster of Cerus milling the water directly above the sub’s wreck.

Greg Thresher had distrusted the Cerus ever since their arrival, and he had spent evenings spreading his views at the local pub near the naval base. Even the unclassified details offered plentiful handholds for paranoia. Many naval officers shared Greg Thresher’s concerns, such that the Cerus’ post-wreck behaviour was quickly flagged as aggressive, with implications that the disaster may have been caused by Cerulean interference.

When the sonar reported that a horde of Ceruleans was leaving the Blacktip’s wreck and headed toward the base, fear intensified. Unable to communicate with the aliens via any deliberate means, the top brass chose to employ a harmless tranquilizer known to work on dolphins and whales to subdue the approaching pod of Ceruleans. The tranquilizer proved fatal to Cerulean biology.

Examination of the alien corpses later revealed that each Ceru had been carrying a piece of hardware, panels, plates, chairs—a wide variety of objects that had once been nestled within the Blacktop. No one knew why.

At the close of the workday, Paul stuffed the test notebook into a desk drawer and walked home, thinking of leaks turning to geysers and harbingers of crushing death. After his father’s passing, Paul had made the sensible choice to move in to his father’s house. The convenience of a two-minute walking commute was incontrovertible. He could bear it as long as he avoided the pier. He’d succeeded in that until this morning.

After a microwave dinner of sausage, broccoli, and cheesy rice, Paul went into the bedroom, bringing the bourbon with him. It had been his father’s bed, though he’d changed out the gray-striped sheets for a set with blue-and-white plaid. He never opened the curtains that faced the pier.

Paul poured himself a drink, then opened the bedside drawer just to reassure himself that no black metal in the shape of death still rattled inside. The family Bible was gone, too. He found old receipts and some cough drop wrappers. Objects of power, destruction, and faith evicted to make room for garbage. He took the bolt from his pocket and placed it in the drawer.

The Cerus hadn’t sunk the Blacktip.

Thirty-six hours after the Blacktip fiasco and the accidental massacre of the Ceruleans, an investigative committee from SUBSAFE, the Navy’s submarine safety division, had meticulously combed the Blacktip’s maintenance records. The size of a particular bolt was found exceeding the margin of permissible error by 1/64 of an inch, causing the strain that eventually led to ballast tank failure. The oversight implicated Greg Thresher, a civilian contracted for naval Quality Assurance tasks.

Greg Thresher’s immediate dismissal was to be followed by an investigative trial, but the dishonoured man didn’t live long enough to attend it. In an unsupervised moment, while gathering a few belongings at his home, he’d escaped beyond reach with the help of his Colt.

Paul, also a naval employee at the time, had left work earlier that day. He’d been buying beans and cornbread for his weekly Chilli Night with his father, ignorant of the SUBSAFE discovery and its implication. He was standing in the checkout line when he received the call.

Paul lay back on the bed, temples pounding and throat tight. It was too early to sleep. He looked across the hall to the second bedroom and for a moment he saw the twin bed that had once stood there. That bed had been his on the weekends when he came to visit his father.

He remembered Greg Thresher’s outline leaning in the bedroom doorway, the ice in his bourbon clinking almost in time as he sang “Danny Boy” in a throaty, trembling tenor, swapping Paul’s name for “Danny.”

Fifth-grader Paul would have never admitted that he got lullabies before bed, but only because it had never seemed like his father was singing. It was more like a special, secret letter that finished with the tender closing: Oh, Paulie Boy, oh Paulie Boy, I love you so!

The human came out to visit Vezda the next morning, before the sun had brightened the sky, as though he’d known she was there. He left his dwelling on weak, wobbly limbs and shuffled along the platform. He carefully clutched a vessel with steaming liquid as he lowered himself to sit on the platform’s edge.

Vezda had contacted him the day before with no aim other than to deliver the Final Remembrance, but when she’d touched him, Vezda had sensed an unexpected kinship, a shared sadness of losing a loved one. The ambassadorial journey to this planet had been Yern’s consuming purpose. He’d sung the verse to Vezda a thousand times.

If we could find one of them

Who offers a Remembrance

Not mere waves of thought

But true echoes from their past

Then we shall know the dream that seeds a pearl

A hope of two-race friendship

We will know we have not travelled in vain.

And yet, the humans of this coastline showed nothing but revulsion for Remembrance. The surviving Children of the Sea had at last chosen to discard Yern’s plan and were preparing to move soon, now that the planet was entering its warm season. They would find friendlier waters in which to build their domes. After losing dear comrades to the human attack, accidental or not, the waters of this particular bay had turned stubbornly hostile.

Yet Yern had selected this place above all others. He’d studied charts of the planet for months, murmuring hours of divination songs. Vezda had protested this relocation before the Council, but she was just one voice, despite being Yern’s widow. Her people would leave before the next moon cycle.

Vezda stiffened as she realized the human was speaking to her. He coughed, as though ill, but his voice grew smoother with each word. He held out his paw to her.

“My name is Paul Thresher.”

My name is Vezda, she thought. She hesitantly reached for him with a forearm and he touched it with one steady digit. She let him see the pattern of bubbles caught on the ridges of sea kelp, held in place like jewels stitched to fine-woven fiber.

This is Vezda.

The human nodded.

As Vezda broke contact, she took her own copy of his mental state. A decision was forming within him. She saw Paul beside his people’s metal gunships, brushing the ship’s exterior with the fingers of his mind. It seemed almost as though he were treating the ship like a Child of the Sea. A protective, compassionate mind governed this young human.

Paul said, “That thing you brought me yesterday stirred up all the worst, the stuff I want to forget…but I think maybe if I can get through this test from Captain Dahlstrom, I might move forward. I hated the memory thing you did with that bolt, but I think I might understand why you did it now. And someday, maybe, I might be able to pity my dad.”

Vezda twisted her two forearms together and raised them, hoping he understood the gesture of gratitude.

Paul bent his upper body toward her, then added, “Oh, and another thing. You gave me my dad’s last thoughts. Even though they’re not him at his best. Then I thought, maybe it’s a custom we humans don’t have. That was when it hit me: that’s what you all were doing after the Blacktip went down, wasn’t it? You were trying to give us the last thoughts of the dead. Am I right?”

Vezda swirled a circle in the water and bobbed her head while humming a harmonic chord. The human nodded, and she felt sure he’d understood her yes.

“So, you can take memories off of something that a person has touched. But they didn’t know you were doing that or why you were coming at us en masse.” He stopped and fell silent. “They killed the Cerus in the middle of a ceremony to honour dead humans.” Paul stared down at his walking paws. “I can’t even begin to fix that, but I can at least tell my people the intentions of yours. It’s trivial, but it’s at least a step toward…something better, I hope.”

He moved his shoulders up and down, then turned as though he would leave. Vezda impulsively raised her arm, reaching for him. Paul turned and, after a moment’s hesitation, grasped it.

Vezda gave him her last memory of Yern. She and her mate had begun the journey together to the new world. It had been Yern’s dream to bring the gift of Remembrance to another race. She’d curled beside him in the tank of warmed water, extracted and purified from the oceans of their home world to cradle them while they slept on the long voyage. She’d thought of their future pups, destined to be born in the briny waters of a foreign world, little ambassadors of memory.

Vezda intentionally gave Paul no more than that. She withheld the discovery that followed it when, upon waking in the orbit of the human planet, she’d found herself alone in the tank. Yern had not survived the voyage and his body had been removed by the flight crew, leaving her to carry his dream and mission within her, but never his young.

Paul clocked in at work two hours early, retrieved the QA test from his desk, locked himself in a conference room, and lowered the blinds. Half an hour later, schematics, tables of material properties, and fluid simulation results were spread before him, the pieces of a puzzle already assembled and yet, he knew, somehow flawed. A pressure was building in his ears. It spread, coiling around his temples and causing his teeth to grind of their own volition.

After thirty minutes, he’d assured himself of ten measurements, found nothing out of place, and both his hands were slick with sweat. And then, though he must have imagined it, Paul thought he heard a creaking hull, as though he were inside a submerged sub.

He pressed his hand against the back of his chair, willing the metal’s cold to force him back to sanity. He heard a faint echo of the audio from the last seconds of the Blacktip’s broadcast. Someone was weeping and murmuring a name, later discovered to be their child’s name, just before the sound cut out at implosion. In his last moments, Greg had thought of him, Paul, remembering the time his son had first ridden a bike.

Paul was on hands and knees, palms spread flat against the carpet. He blinked and saw an oval half-filled with warm water and a large blue form curled beside him. This was Vezda’s memory.

Paul drifted within the affection and hope that had connected Vezda and her mate. Maybe Vezda was an optimist among her kind. She’d witnessed the death of half her fellow colonists, and yet nevertheless offered Paul a memory as shining and unblemished as this one. As though she knew how to grant absolution without waiting to be asked.

Greg Thresher was never going to ask. Paul sobbed into the carpet.

When he came to himself, he was curled on the conference room floor. The creaking hull was almost quiet enough to ignore. It was all an inner pressure, a leak within his own mind. This, he was certain now, he could overcome, if for no other reason than because Vezda had chosen to trust him with her cherished memory.

Paul’s hands steadied as he began rapid calculation checks, feeling disjointed pieces overlap, become congruent, and absorb into the whole. For every force that was balanced and tolerance that was maintained, a harmonious chord thrummed in his mind. He searched out the discordant notes, the instruments in the symphony of calculation in front of him that did not follow the precise, careful design.

Two hours later, he was humming “Danny Boy” as though it were the national anthem when he found the seventh discrepancy.

Paul dropped his completed test face-down on Dahlstrom’s desk along with a note that read, “Ask me why the Cerus were bringing back bits of the Blacktip,” then headed straight home.

He cleared out every scrap of garbage from the bedside drawer, then dragged out a cardboard box labelled “Dad” and retrieved a leather-bound book. The gun was long since gone. Paul had made sure of that. He sat on the bed and thumbed the Bible’s gilt pages, breathing the musty smell and singing softly to himself while in his mind he knelt over his father’s grave and said an Ave, just like Danny had been asked to do in the song.

A little later, the soft sound of splashing drew Paul’s attention to movement in the water at the end of the pier. He set the Bible in the drawer and went to meet Vezda.

When her vision broke water-side, Vezda saw Paul was carefully placing his communication device onto the planks of the wooden platform. After this, he patted all across his clothing, as if searching the pockets for something, then startled her with an arcing leap into the water. She drew back, checking his movements both above and below the waterline, all the while keeping a distance.

Paul laughed in the windy, harsh way of air-breathers and waved one limb overhead. She approached him cautiously.

“I’m going to go in for the job,” Paul told her with a sputtering chuckle.

Vezda had had accidentally drawn closer than she’d meant to, and Paul reached out and touched her head, unaware of the impropriety. She flinched, and then she was astonished to find him willingly pressing a new memory into her grasp.

She sensed a warm sleepiness and the strength of strong arms carrying her. It was vaguely like her soft recollections of her own mother cradling her during a storm while tied down by a kelp anchor. But this was the human version.

In the memory, Paul’s father rocked his drowsy son, assuring him of safety and immortal affection as only a parent can express to a young child who knows so little of disappointment, sorrow, and things lost forever.

“Couldn’t do the work until I forgave him,” Paul said in a rough whisper like creaking timbers.

He continued to tread water beside her, gasping and shivering, and then twice grinning and showing his teeth. Vezda had to remind herself that flashing teeth was not predatory but friendly when it appeared in humans. Paul didn’t try to speak more to her, as though his gift of remembrance had said enough. His eyes glistened like polished beach glass.

Vezda felt a song spiralling inside her, like a widening eddy pulling more and more of the sea down its mouth, blending it to something new. This one, she felt certain, would be a duet.

Gaza Luna

Samah Serour Fadil

The gravel around Handala’s tiny body exploded into rubble mere moments after he had stepped on the pavement. He had no choice but to run, and although his legs went weak, his instincts kicked in. After ten years of breathing and living and growing up in a small village right at the border of Palestine and Egypt, his body knew what to do when the raids began. He saw his best friend Yazin skipping across the street, probably thinking of another argument about why space ice cream tasted better than the one on Earth, just before the first rocket whistled down. Handala lay on the ground and wrapped his arms around his head. He took out the long-range walkie-talkie he had built when he was nine years old and turned it on, hands shaking.

“Yazin, come in. Yazin, come in. Over…”

Before he could hear any reply, the street Handala lived on connected with one of the rockets. His entire house shook and collapsed into the ground like it was hollow underneath. As if the earth swallowed it in one eager gulp. He tucked the walkie-talkie underneath his head like a pillow as the courtyard around him caved in. He could only hear distant sounds of sirens and screams after that. Handala wanted nothing more than to scream out for his parents, but he could not even peek to see what had become of them or his best friend.

Fifteen years later, that moment in Handala’s life still played on a loop in his mind like a high-budget Hollywood movie. He would dream of it when sleeping, and he often found himself thinking of that day rather than listening to anything happening around him. It kept him in a dreamscape of his making. He had whittled his memory of the airstrike that took his parents down to its bare bones, the essentials edited and the superfluous left out. Some details he could no longer be certain about. Was his best friend skipping or walking across the street? Was Handala playing in the courtyard or in front of the house? Were his parents in the house or were they out running an errand? He did not completely recall, but as the director of his moving mind, he could fiddle with those details each time he replayed the scenes, making them like moments in a movie. It helped keep the not-so-cinematic ones at bay.

As a child in school in his adoptive town of Satellite Beach, Florida, his teachers often called him a space cadet on his report card. There were two reasons for it. The first was because of his previously disclosed daydreaming. The second was because Handala had a life-long obsession with anything related to space. In Palestine, he’d spend hours arguing with Yazin on what they would need to build their own rocket ship. They had even gathered a small posse to go to the scrapyard and collect all of the aluminum and metal they could find. Before the airstrike, Handala and Yazin were negotiating with Abou Anton, the owner of the biggest titanium and stainless steel manufacturer of the region, for access to his specialized materials. He shooed them off like they were dung beetles, but they weren’t deterred. They were in the process of figuring out how to sway Abou Anton before everything happened. By the time Handala made it to seventh grade, he had already completed his high school’s mathematics program. He began sciences soon after, with children three or four years his senior, and excelled beyond what anyone had hoped. When his aunt gifted him a surprise trip to a real rocket launch at the Kennedy Space Center for his thirteenth birthday, and Handala debated with an astronaut the merits of mass manufacturing reusable rockets for the general public, it was clear that Handala did actually have the potential to become a space cadet. The astronaut encouraged him to apply to their youth program, and Handala’s attention shifted long enough for the scenes from his childhood to stop playing in his head.

During the airstrike, in the maybe-courtyard, maybe-front-yard of his childhood home, Handala passed the time by imagining the bedtime stories his mother used to tell him. His favourite was always about the boy with a fez who flew over the moon, so he repeated it until the olive-green sleeve of a soldier’s uniform pulled him out. The man said something in a language Handala had only heard spoken near the checkpoints. He tossed him in the backseat of a white car, and the driver took him to a place he didn’t recognize, a hangar of some kind. When he parked, someone opened the car door and peeked in. The woman introduced herself as Umm Ahmad. She said she was sent by Handala’s grandfather, which Handala found odd given that he had never met his grandfather before. All stories pointed to him being dead or incarcerated. For what, he did not know.

The aubergine-haired woman and Handala walked through the hangar. It was nighttime, he could see the bright lights of a city he wasn’t from close by. His village could not sustain that much electricity all at once. Handala thought that maybe they had driven into Egypt, but they could just have gone the opposite way, into occupied territory. When they reached a small, private plane, Umm Ahmad gave Handala a blue backpack, a bag of chips and a bottle of water he eagerly drank until the last drop.

“This is for you,” she said. She gave him a passport. “You’re an orphan now, so you’re going to go live with your Aunt Dunya in Florida. Don’t worry, she’s very nice. From now on your name is Ham. See that plane? It’ll take you to an even bigger one. Then you’ll go across an entire ocean to be with her. Do you understand, Ham?”

Handala did not remember if he said anything at all throughout the whole ordeal. He stepped on the private plane and felt his eyelids get heavier by the second. He fell asleep soon after being buckled in by the hostess. That was the last time he had stepped foot in Palestine, until this morning.

Handala waited at the last checkpoint after a gruelling travel schedule, over fifty-two hours of flying and layovers. The people who booked his flight out of the US took the cheapest route, which had him go from Miami to New York, then from New York to Morocco, and Morocco to Cairo. An agent made sure he made no attempts of escaping to another state or, as some media pundits joked, to Cuba for asylum. Handala booked a taxi that would take him to the border of Palestine, where he then had to wait for an interminable amount of time before being allowed in—all this while carrying two full-sized suitcases, one of which he inexplicably decided to pack with the materials needed to build a drone. There was one last checkpoint before going back to his village. It was all so surprisingly familiar, and the air was stale and thick exactly like he remembered it. When he was a child, Handala curled up into the fetal position when the rocket hit and only saw what was in the small gap between his thighs and arms. Rubble, pieces of the house, books blown to smithereens (both his parents were voracious readers and lovers of poetry) and the Palestinian flag his parents hung up high on the roof for the whole village to see. Everything looked like the life was taken out of it, but in his mind’s eye the wind lifted the edges of the flag regardless.

“Identification card,” the soldier droned for what was probably the hundredth time that hour. He looked younger than Handala and utterly bored. Handala snapped out of his dreamscape and handed the blonde-haired, green-eyed soldier his old, expired visa card. It was in the backpack Umm Ahmad had given him fifteen years ago, a relic of his old self and the only real piece of identification he had, really. The soldier’s heavy-lidded eyes scanned the papers and landed on Handala’s childhood photo. He looked up at him, then back down, and like a flash in his mind, he suddenly woke up, his entire face lighting up at the realization. The man called to a couple of his soldier friends and pointed at him. Handala looked down but they gestured for him to keep his chin up. One soldier took out his phone and typed something in. They called him forward and compared the photo on the screen to what was in front of them. By now, people around them were watching, whispering, and pointing at Handala.

“Ham? Ham Hughes? Is that you?”

Handala recoiled at the name. By the time he was in ninth grade, he had become a regular at the Kennedy Space Center, and Ham, the name he was given by Umm Ahmad, suited him well. Ham took apart and rebuilt radios, fixed every tech issue in his Aunt Dunya’s house from the slow internet connection to the satellite that went out at the slightest rain shower, and got the vinyl player that Aunt Dunya loved but couldn’t get to work since 1983 to play her favourite Fairouz record. The astronaut he had argued with when he was eleven had slowly become his mentor, and he recommended Handala try a wildly different field of study to make him more well-rounded and ultimately a better scientist. Ham auditioned for a stage play and soon found another love in the theatre. Handala graduated high school early as a Florida High School Aerospace Scholar and was already somewhat of a local hero once he made it to MIT on a full scholarship. He graduated within the top five of his class and had a master’s degree before he turned twenty-two. Someone in a local paper compared him to Howard Hughes, and it stuck.

The soldier inspected the ID card.

“What is this card? No passport?”

The soldiers were laughing at him now. They already knew most of the story. The media had dissected every inch of it, and made up a few “facts” along the way. Handala had gotten ambitious and applied for the NASA physical before having all of the requirements, figuring his exorbitant grades would get him through. One of the committee judges took an obsessive interest in Handala and how young he was and decided to dig into his spotty past. Handala had never spoken to anyone about where he was from, partly because it was not in his nature and partly because Aunt Dunya had warned him of those who would not take kindly to where he came from. The only Palestine most people knew of in Florida was the one in Texas, and the only flags of Palestine he ever saw were in his aunt’s house. They never really spoke about it, but Handala knew from the moment he was told his name was Ham that he was meant to hide who he was. Everyone around him made it easier for him to forget. The committee judge eventually found out that Ham didn’t really exist, he was Handala all along, and his entire identity was a forgery. He exposed him and the story gained traction pretty quickly. They began to air segments profiling Ham and gave him the nickname Ham Hughes. The story took on a life of its own and people began debating his fate over coffee all around the world. The media transformed him into the orphan who was smuggled into the country through an international underground ring of child traffickers, who was ultimately brought down by the very same woman who took him in. His aunt had never officially adopted him or sought to get his papers, so it was all her fault. Handala had a hard time untangling the web of lies and eventually stopped. After being questioned for over 24 hours before being released, even Aunt Dunya seemed unsure of her nephew’s future. Pressure to deport the illegal alien went all the way to the White House, and he was stripped of his degrees and deported.

The soldier snapped a couple of pictures of him and threw his ID back to him.

“What’s that on your backpack?” He pointed to the Palestinian flag pin Aunt Dunya had given him years before. “Give that to me.”

The soldier ripped it off, tearing the fabric around it. “We see you with this propaganda again, you will be arrested. Go”

By the time Handala made it to his old village, he was exhausted. Everything looked the same, except a little bit worse, and a knot in Handala’s stomach formed. Handala couldn’t rely on his mind to make the reality in front of him go away. He couldn’t soften the blow. He had no real place to go, and he had lived outside of Palestine longer than in it. The only home he knew here had never been rebuilt, so he asked the taxi to drop him off at the only other address he remembered. Handala didn’t know what to expect when he knocked on the big brass door, but he prayed Yazin remembered him, even if he was fifteen years older than last time they saw each other.

The door opened slowly and at first Handala couldn’t see anyone. The place itself was dark, and he wasn’t sure whether to go inside or back away slowly. He looked down, and a girl no more than six stood at the door, holding a blueish-pinkish raggedy rabbit doll.

“Can I help you?” she looked straight at Handala, who was surprised at her confidence at such a small age.

“Ḥabibti, what did I tell you about answering the door by yourself?” the unmistakable timbre, although deeper, of Yazin’s voice echoed down the hallway of the house as he got closer to the front door. At first his footsteps were quick, but they quickly slowed down as he looked at who was at the door.

“I still think regular ice cream would beat out space ice cream,” Handala said.

Yazin stopped dead in his tracks and dropped his cup. He put his hand over his mouth and tears fell down his face. He embraced his old friend like a long-lost brother. Yazin bawled like a young child and began to call the neighbours over to welcome Handala back. Soon enough the entire street gathered in the courtyard and listened to Handala describe his time in America. Not usually the life of the party, Handala was eager to mingle and chat as the air filled his senses with a curious buzz. For the first time in a long time, he felt the pressure in his chest dissipate. He could breathe. Even if the room was filled with the smoke of blueberry-grape scented argileh. It was as if he had never left. It was as if he had not lost anything.

“To Handala!” Yazin raised his cup and the others did the same. “May he feel welcome back in his new old home.”

Once everyone shook his hand and wished him well, they went back home. Handala and Yazin spent the next few hours in the courtyard catching up and reminiscing about their childhood. They had both become some kind of engineer, and Yazin took a particular interest in repurposing recycled materials. When the sun set, Yazin invited him in for supper. Handala realized how hungry he was, and the scent of maqluba made it impossible to resist. Handala was caught off guard by the number of Palestinian flags hanging on the wall of Yazin’s surprisingly chic Art Deco apartment. A keffiyeh hung on the wall next to a poster of al-Quds. Some homemade Taṭreez decorated the kitchen table and box of Kleenex. Egyptian disco music played on the vinyl, and a big feast acted as the centrepiece of the dining table.

“Come, eat.” Yazin’s wife Shireen invited him to sit. Handala had one clear childhood memory of Shireen: when she stood up on a literal soap box to get the children to pool their money together for a bigger candy haul at Abou Phillipe’s. The boys dismissed her, so she got all the girls to do it instead. They bought enough candy for a month and the boys went complaining to their mothers.

Shireen was an engineering student as well but dropped out during her second pregnancy on doctor’s orders. Instead, she focused her energy on building solar-powered panels that provided electricity for the whole block. This was a big advantage under blockade, where most of the population got a couple of hours of electricity a day—if lucky.

Shireen didn’t seem to be keen on small talk and was more interested in Handala’s experience at MIT.

“Ask him, Yazin,” Shireen’s leg was restless as she fed her baby boy. Her eyes darted and she did not have the same ease as Yazin in hiding the fact that they obviously wanted to tell him something.

“Shireen, please,” Yazin put his hand up. “Let the man eat.”

“Ask me what?”

“We don’t know how long we have,” she replied. “We dreamed of this.”

“Shireen,” Handala said. “Ask me what?”

“Did you know that the Ottomans had a space program before the United States ever dreamed of one?” she asked. Handala almost choked on his rice. He couldn’t register what she said. Never in his life-long obsession with space had he ever heard of such a preposterous thing. The closest was a nursery rhyme his mother sang to him when he was a child, about a Turkish peasant wearing a fez hat who flew over the moon.

“When Britain took over the land, they found decades worth of research. The official story is that they scrapped the entire Ottoman space program, calling it a childish fantasy. What they really did was steal the research and use our land to set up elaborate and secret facilities where they could study our soil and our sky. They wanted to send Palestinians to the moon.”

“Why us?”

“Once they saw that it was possible, they needed a few guinea pigs. We were expendable test subjects to them.”

Yazin brought in some coffee and a large brown envelope. Shireen served the three of them.

“The day of the airstrike,” Yazin said, “we looked for you all night. We had no idea someone had taken you. But we couldn’t find anything.”

“What about my parents?”

“Their bodies were found in the basement.”

Handala knew his parents were gone, but to hear plainly of their lifeless bodies being discovered struck him in his gut.

“Your mother had this in her hand.”

Yazin handed him the envelope. It looked old, at least a few decades old, with a coffee stain on the top right. Other than that, it was unmarked.

“What’s in it?”

“Look.”

Handala carefully untied the rope and lifted the envelope flap. He turned it and pulled out a laminated 18x24 blueprint of a rocket ship. The gang looked at him with laser focus. Handala took it in his hands and inspected the spaceship drawn on it. Underneath the blueprint, there were instructions clear as day on how to build a rocket. On the rocket, a signature of its name, Gaza Luna.

“Who drew this?”

“Your grandfather.”

That elusive figure again. Handala only heard of his grandfather when circumstances were dire.

“He was the chief engineer in the Ottoman program, operation Gaza Luna. The launch site was always going to be Gaza. Then the war happened. Whatever he was able to save he brought home, but most documents were destroyed. He knew the land more than anyone else. He waited for the war to end but the Ottomans were defeated and he could never access the facilities again. When the occupiers took over after that, he took his knowledge and transformed it into the most necessary survival beacon for his people. He used his knowledge of the land, the caves, and the tunnels to house refugees so that people could escape or hide or visit their displaced family members.”

Handala turned the blueprint every which way. “There are some proper calculations behind this.” Handala took out more blueprints from the envelope, this time of the caves and tunnels surrounding their village. “This is incredible.”

“You have to help us,” Shireen said. “We’re so close to building a functioning spaceship, Handala.”

“A functioning what?”

“We are,” Yazin replied. “We need your help to get it done, but we’re almost there.”

“How?” Handala couldn’t comprehend it. Doubt settled in. “I don’t know about this.”

Shireen stood up. The baby had finally fallen asleep. “This is bigger than you.” She walked out of the living room and put the sleeping boy in his crib. Handala and Yazin sat in the awkward silence for a moment until Shireen returned.

“I know this all sounds crazy,” Yazin said. “If you need time to process this… Just get some rest and we’ll take you somewhere tomorrow. There’s a place we want you to see.”

“Take me now.”

Shireen liked his eagerness. Yazin wasn’t so sure.

“Get some rest first,” Yazin insisted. “A few hours at least.”

They took the car later that night and drove off-road into the desert until they could barely see in front of them. Yazin kept driving until they entered some sort of tunnel and stopped when the car became too big to go through.

The tunnel got narrower until it reached a crack that looked like the end, but Yazin motioned for him to get closer. “Through here.” Yazin walked sideways into the crack. Handala sucked in his stomach and followed.

“We’ve been building the Gaza Luna since we found the blueprints,” Shireen said.

Handala couldn’t believe it: a working facility was hiding in such plain sight. In front of him, a towering metal structure just like the one he saw in the blueprint. The rocket was painted a vibrant red and black at the top, with a shade of off-white and green below. Handala had seen dozens of rocket launches, but he had never seen anything like this.

“We got most of our material through Egypt, but not all. You’d be surprised how negotiable getting carbon fibre polymer and titanium is through university programs. But once we graduated, and the wars became more frequent, the resources became harder to come by.”

“We built the rest.” Shireen grinned. “Our team gathered everything we could. Once the blockade was imposed, we thought it was over but we found a way to use the rubble from all the destruction, too.”

“What do you need me for? You two are brilliant. All of you.”

“We’ve never flown an aircraft or gotten the type of experience you have,” Yazin said. “We were waiting for a pilot. And here you are.”

Handala smiled.

“We also need rocket fuel.” Shireen added.

“Oh.”

“It’s not as bad as it seems,” she continued. “We already know which facility it’s in. We just need a drone to get the exact location before we get our team in. Easy. You wouldn’t happen to have a drone, would you?”

Handala’s hand was steady as he piloted the drone he brought from Florida deep into enemy territory. He used the cover of darkness but knew it would be a matter of minutes, if they were lucky, before being caught.

“Steady,” Handala whispered. “I think I see something below.”

“You’re getting closer,” Yazin said. “Hold position. Perfect.”

The drone hovered above what looked like shipping containers. “We got the exact location,” Yazin said. “We’re good to go.”

“One more thing,” Handala said. He flipped a switch on the drone and looked up. A foot-tall stick protruded out of it and the Palestinian flag unfurled out.

“No way!” Yazin laughed.

Suddenly, floodlights turned on, and an alarm blared. Anti-aircraft guns locked in on the drone and shot it down immediately. Static came over Handala’s screen and the drone fell into enemy territory.

“It’s okay,” Yazin said. “We already got the location. Let’s get out of here.”

In the next week, soldiers went through every street in the village and tore down every instance of the Palestinian flag they could find. The team took as many down as possible before the soldiers reached them, but they couldn’t get to them all. If they found a stash, they would arrest who had them and burn the flags in a public space, forbidding anyone from pouring water on the fire. The only place Handala knew they wouldn’t be touched was in the Gaza Luna, so he stuffed a few directly into the rocket ship for safekeeping. The drive to the cave had become his favourite time. Somewhere along the way, when the road ended and they drove through the desert, it no longer felt like there was anyone else in the world, and all the war and checkpoints and borders and chaos became as irrelevant as a grain of sand. It felt like a waking dream, one he enjoyed being in. But this time, the usual quiet that took over once they drove into the secret tunnel was overcome by a hum Handala was not accustomed to hearing. Yazin heard it too, his ear used to certain mechanical noises through his decades of experience.

“They’re here,” he said. “They’re going to find the rocket.”

“Keep going,” Handala said. “It’s now or never. Tell them.”

“Are you sure?” Handala nodded.

Yazin took his walkie-talkie and pressed it. “Come in Alpha Luna. Prepare launch site.”

Handala ran toward the launch site. There was no time for him to go through all of the safety protocols an astronaut and his crew had to check before takeoff. Handala put on his suit and walked through the access hatch. He closed the latch behind him. He put the flags he had thrown in there a few days earlier to the side and realized that he had never practised this portion of the liftoff. For as many times as he imagined it in his head, he never actually practised liftoff protocol. That was reserved for actual NASA astronauts, and that chance had been taken away from him. But, now, he was about to go to space before any of his peers could have ever dreamed to.

“Mission control, come in mission control, over.” Handala strapped in his seat and secured himself tightly.

“This is mission control coming in,” Yazin’s breathless voice came through. He was still evading the soldiers.

“All systems are go…as go we’re getting them, Gaza Luna,” Yazin laughed. Handala joined.

“You are cleared for launch in ten, nine, eight…”

It took three soldiers to hold Yazin back. He wasn’t stronger or well armed, but his lankiness and speed proved advantageous when untangling himself from the reaching arms of the armed guards. He got out from underneath their thumb, and two were left embracing each other. The other threatened to shoot but then decided to make good on that threat immediately. He pointed his rifle at Yazin’s temple and pulled. Yazin closed his eyes and whispered a prayer, but the weapon misfired. The guard tried and tried again but ended up jamming his weapon. He threw it to the ground and lunged at Yazin.

“Seven, six, five…”

Inside the rocket, Handala could feel his heartbeat through his spacesuit. He remembered Aunt Dunya’s advice to breathe, and he tried to, but the tumultuous events outside and not knowing if his best friend was all right made him short of breath. The Gaza Luna shook like an old wooden rollercoaster on its way to being decommissioned for being too dangerous. Handala couldn’t tell if it would hold long enough to blast off. Death felt within reach, yet he could do nothing but sit in his designated seat and see whether or not death would catch up to him. He felt like he had escaped it before. What’s one more time?

“Four, three, two…”

Yazin used his speed to dodge to the right and grab the weapon. He began fiddling with it to the delight of the guard.

“It’s jammed, you idiot,” he laughed and pointed and even invited his colleagues to join in. Yazin unjammed the gun in a matter of seconds. He pointed it at the guard, who did not notice that he had fixed it. He was still calling him an idiot as the dust on the ground began to lift. The Gaza Luna roared to life. The sound was overwhelming, and the guard tried to use the distraction to tackle Yazin. Instead, Yazin anticipated his moves and hit him across the head with the grip of the gun. The two other guards barely noticed; their eyes were glued to the sky, alerted by the sound of liftoff.

Yazin looked up.

“One.”

The rocket disconnected from the ground. A bright orange-yellow glow formed at the base, radiating a heat even Yazin could feel from further down the tunnel.

“Go!” he screamed out over and over. “Go ya Handala, go!” He waved the gun up and laughed with glee as the rocket left thick plumes of smoke that billowed towards him. The gray reached him and he could not see anyone around him anymore. But Yazin, knowing the land like the back of his hand, had no issues fleeing the site while the guards still coughed through the smoke.

Handala wanted so badly to close his eyes, but he did no such thing. He watched as he felt the rocket disconnect from the ground and rise with a speed that surprised even him. The vibrant blue of the sky made way to a darker navy as the rocket rose higher, until Handala ascended through the atmosphere. He held back tears as the darkest blue transitioned into the black expanse of space. Handala looked through the rocket’s windows and witnessed a view of Earth most people had only dreamed of. The village he hailed from was not just a village but a constellation made up of his entire people’s hopes and dreams. Handala’s eyes were mesmerized by the vastness, but his body was also exhausted from not having slept for days leading up to the unexpected launch. As he pointed at the curvature of the Earth and traced it with his finger, Handala smiled and lost consciousness.

When Handala woke up, he could see the surface of the moon. It looked like a crescent, and Handala remembered the people back home waiting for such a sighting to confirm holy days and celebrations.

Handala tried the comms right away. “Yazin, come in. Yazin, come in. Over.”

There was no response or even static. Somewhere along the journey, probably early on, the signals were lost. They suspected this might happen. Handala wanted nothing more than to let them know he made it. Once the rocket was closer to the surface, Handala checked the spacecraft systems and prepared for descent. He unfastened his seatbelt and floated towards the airlocked door. There, hundreds of Palestinians flags still adorned the floor from the ban back home. Handala took one, tethered himself to the rocket, took one deep breath, and opened the door. The flags he had stuffed inside the rocket ejected into the vacuum of space. A sense of quiet Handala had never experienced before washed over him as he looked at the pale blue dot on the horizon. He took a deep breath and a smile formed across his lips. He turned his head and bunny hopped, flag in hand.

Handala planted the Palestinian flag deep into the moon’s dust and let out a huge sigh. No matter what happened to him, Yazin and Shireen and his aunt and all the rest would know he made it. He began to weep, tears pooling like little droplets of invisible pearls around his eyes. Behind him, the once-banned Palestinian flags floated away into the ever-expanding edges of the cosmos. When Handala looked outward, toward Earth, his mind was for the first time empty of the scenes that had nagged at him his entire life.

He let out a voiceless guttural scream that trapped itself within his helmet, and a sense of peace washed over him. He could never feel as though he didn’t exist here.

Orlando’s Wolf

Rasha Abdulhadi

They—for there were endless doubts about their sex, though the fashions of the time did everything to indicate it—were in the act of burning down the house of the young man who made a casual habit of taking swords to the severed human heads of moors hung from the rafters of the manor attic. That manor was the colour of white supremacy and more or less the shape of it, save for the nearby woodland and a stand or two of fruiting trees near the small lake, like the signs of an oasis. Yusuf’s father, or perhaps their grandmother, had also struck matches to light revolt from the colonial fields of al-Maghrib; now Yusuf’s own rebellion swung sharply, steadily, in the breezes which never ceased blowing through the opulent rooms in the glutted estate of the lords who had slain their family, their friends, their village, and their people.

Yusuf’s fathers had ridden in fields of date palm and olive, and in desert plains, and fields watered by familiar wadi, and their heads had been struck unceremoniously from their shoulders by rapacious pale invaders and now decorated the attic rafters of stately manor homes. So, too, Yusuf vowed, would the heads of the pale invaders’ young heirs one day swing. But since they were sixteen only, and too young to ride from the Maghrib to France or Europe in an organized counter-campaign, they had stolen away from their mother and the chickens in the garden to plan the long, slow raid on a faraway manor that would lead to the very attic room where Yusuf would lunge and plunge and slice the young aristocrat’s throat. Sometimes, Yusuf would cut a branch of the olive tree, and they had to bring the lost limb home in shame for having injured an ancient source of survival. Yusuf would declare then, with some chivalry almost out of reach, that they would wreak vengeance on the grinning face of their enemy, adolescent in their triumph. The skull of Orlando swung to and fro in Yusuf’s mind, hung from the top of the very house in which the English boy lived, a house so vast there seemed trapped in it all the world’s freedom, blowing this way, blowing that way, winter and summer.

The tapestry that had been plundered from Yusuf’s mother’s mother moved in that same air. Their mothers had been subject to some man’s foolish rule for as long as they had been at all. They had come out of their tents wearing thobes to greet each empire. Were not the bars of flame in this room and the charred places which had already begun to checker the floor a more vital rendering of the sun, filtered by those stained-glass scenes in service of patriarchy’s vast coat of arms? Yusuf stood now in the midst of the charred body of a heraldic lion, a symbol so cheaply repurposed for men who like to win (tigers and eagles being close substitutes). When they put their hand on the sill to push the window open and escape, the roar of air sucking in knocked them down as decisively as a butterfly on the wing in a hailstorm. Thus, those who like symbols and make a whole life’s occupation using them to obfuscate might observe that though the stocky legs, the rough body, and the tense and uneven shoulders were all of them decorated with various tints of incendiary light, Yusuf’s face, as they threw the window open, was shaded solely by the ash already falling from the rafters. A more defended and tender face, it would be impossible to find. Happy the mother who bears; happier still the oral historian who sings the life of such a one! Never need she vex herself, nor he invoke the help of politician or novelist. From plan to watchful plan, from survival to survival, from battlefield to endangerment to refuge—they choose to go, their bard only slightly ahead of them, ’til they reach whatever vaunted hall it may be that is the root of their despair. Yusuf, to look at, was preset on the path for precisely such a career. The brown of their cheeks was covered with velvet down, the down on the lips only a little thicker than the down on the cheeks. The lips themselves were long and pressed over teeth tinted by teas and remedies. Nothing pulled at the broad nose in its confident, easy seat; the hair was silver too soon, the ears adorned with a grandmother’s small treasures. But, ah, these catalogues of youthful trials cannot end or begin without mentioning the forehead with its scars and the keen eyes shielded below.

For alas, too many of Yusuf’s kin were either born without or otherwise deprived of at least one of these by the poisons or shards of war’s refuse. Directly, we behold Yusuf leaning by the window, and we must admit that they had eyes like amber pried from the earth but preserved from the rapacious jeweller’s settings, so wide that the earth seemed to brim in them and make them larger, and a brow like the rippling golden dome of a masjid pressed between the two unspent coins which were their golden temples, stamped by the straining vessels of Yusuf’s enduring heart, pulsing with the muscles of their gritting jaw. Directly, we are drawn to their eyes and forehead, and thus do we perceive, more than Woolf would admit, a thousand uprisings which it is the aim of every good biographer of empire to ignore.

The Centre of the Universe

Nadia Shammas

Abigail sat at the centremost position at the cafeteria table.

For her, it was unintentional.

For us, it was by design.

Abigail had no idea about the effect she had on people, obviously. It’s the blessing of having seen yourself in every movie, magazine, song lyric. It’s the assuredness that if you have something to say, others will listen. If you walk into the room, someone’s head will turn. When you talk, they lean forward like a plant to the sun, hoping to know exactly how warm the light of your attention will feel. This is by design, too, but it doesn’t work for her if she knows that.

“Yeah, no, I have no idea why I took this class. Like, I’m studying dramatics. I didn’t realize this was a whole—” Abigail waves her hands around, nails manicured, unchipped, with a drugstore polish. Says, I’m put together but relatable. “Deconstruction of scripts thing. It feels like my brain is literally melting.”

Her eyes flick to me for a second, gauging my reaction. All our reactions, really. But in this second, I’m in her spotlight and, from experience, I’ve learned that Abigail loves an active listener. I nod like a slow bobble toy, rolling my eyes.

“Yeah, oh my Go—” I don’t get to finish my sentence. Abigail isn’t looking at me anymore. And when Abigail doesn’t notice you, you don’t exist.

That’s not entirely true.

When Abigail is in the room with you, when she occupies this specific part of the simulation of her college years, you don’t just vanish the way you do when she leaves the room. You’re in suspended animation, waiting for your turn, no, your opportunity to speak. Sometimes the developers are kind enough to place me in a hallway, opposite where Abigail is walking, just for us to run into each other for a moment, just for her to swing her head and recognize me. To be heard, seen—sometimes even touched when you say something particularly funny and Abigail slaps your arm to say, “you’re so bad, Fatima!”—those moments feel the best, when you connect. When the reason we’re all here laughs because of you, smiles because of you, you feel like you did a good job. I always want to do a good job.

Abigail is taking her turn to listen to somebody else. I don’t know who it is—I’ve never turned my head to check. I don’t think anyone else at our table has either. Why would you, when Abigail is sitting here? Whoever is speaking has a voice like an ambient sound machine, fuzzy and inconsequential. Occasionally a hand waves from the direction of the other non-primary characters, orange nails with gold stacking rings on a beautifully delicate brown hand. I wonder, when I’m awake enough to wonder, if Abigail has styled us in the trends of the current moment, or if that was the designer’s intention. I wonder who I was based on, if anyone at all.

“Fatima, did you do today’s reading? I meant to do it but I ended up getting dragged out with Marie and Rebecca.” Abigail addresses me directly, and it feels like I’m inhaling for the first time in minutes. Well, it doesn’t “feel” like. It is.

“Oh, um.” Hesitation is death. I know this. A Fatima who did the reading would have notes ready in a backpack, and the moment I hand them over, she might disregard me. A Fatima with no notes, a Fatima with her own party story to tell, might get her attention, but it might not be the answer she’s looking for. If she checks out for even a second, the moment’s wasted.

“Yeah, of course.” I play it safe. Abigail wants notes, and that’s what she’ll get.

“Thank you so much, Fatima, you’re a godsend.” Abigail flashes me an appreciative, pouty smile. She holds all the power in this world, but at least she’s nice about it.

I smile as I hand her my notebook, everything she needs. As expected, Abigail starts skimming them immediately, tugging on a strand of soft, blonde hair absentmindedly. I would wince if I could. I can feel the pain of my fellow table-sitters, wanting to break free from this moment, wanting to go to the moment when Abigail gives you her attention and, in that moment, you’re allowed to speak, to flourish, to experience life. It’s a beautiful little thing, to be recognized.

“Ugggghhhh.” Abigail moans and flops her head dramatically on the notebook. We would laugh, but we can’t until she looks at us, which she does, because she notices the silence, and what good is a silent audience? “I need coffee,” she announces with pleading eyes.

Fwwwscchhhhh. The girl with the bangles jumps up, seizing the moment. She leaves the table, disappearing from view and disappearing from reality until the programmer decides she’s been gone long enough to have acquired a cup of scalding black coffee. I don’t know if Abigail really drank black coffee in college. I don’t know if she did any of these things. In my unkind moments, I suspect Abigail never really looked like this, blue-eyed and button-nosed like a painting. I imagine Abigail maybe even changed the trajectory of her life in here—gave herself a group of trendy, diverse friends, created the Sex and the City fantasy of clubbing and romance and classes that she was never able to get. In my bleakest moments, I wonder if I could imagine anything outside of Abigail. I wish I had enough sense of self to imagine what I would be like outside of whatever room she’s in.

“Fatima, thanks for the notes,” Abigail says, and instantly, I’m animated again. I look up just in time to see her pushing the notebook back across the table at me, just in time to see the hot cup of coffee knock over and splash towards me, burning my skin. Abigail catches the cup before it hits the ground. I’m surprised when the white-hot pain comes, and I’m surprised by my ability to scream. I’ve never screamed before.

“OH MY GOD I’M SO SORRY,” Abigail cries and immediately reaches out to rip notebook pages, my notes, and gently pat my burned arm. “It doesn’t look so bad; you’re not turning red really.” I don’t know how to tell her my arm wouldn’t turn red like hers. I’m barely used to the sound of my own voice, but now I’m screaming and it hurts all the same you stupid fucking—

“Fatima, do you need anything? Want me to walk you to the medical centre?” Abigail is looking me in my eyes, touching my arm so softly, blowing on the skin. “I heard putting ice on a burn is bad but, Olivia, go get some cool water on a napkin or something.” She says it without looking away from me, and someone vanishes from the table, not even needing to get up because Abigail isn’t looking at them. Only at me.

Her big blue eyes are full of concern, and I immediately feel guilty for all those awful things I’ve thought about her. She was kind, and isn’t a kind but self-absorbed god better than a cruel one? Who knows what horrible things happen in other simulations. Abigail is benevolent. If you had the chance to become the centre of the universe, wouldn’t you? Wouldn’t anyone?

Because right now, with Abigail focused on me, I feel like I’m the centre of the universe. I feel what she must feel, being looked at, being attended to, all the time.

“Nononono…it’s okay…” I sniffle. Abigail doesn’t want to feel guilty, I’m thinking. Abigail wants to feel helpful. “T-thank you…this is helping so much…”

“Oh my God, I’m so sorry, I totally love you, Fatima, you’re just, like, the best. A total fucking trooper.” I smile back at Abigail because it’s the first time I’ve been in such pain, and it’s the first time I’ve been told I’m loved.

It’s gone almost instantly, when Abigail turns her head to accept the wet napkin. The pain is gone. My lump in the throat, gone, my hot tears, gone.

I miss the heat. I miss pain. I miss feeling like I’m in my own body, like I’m more than hands to gesture, a head to nod, a mouth to affirm. Once, Abigail told me about a family vacation where she saw these hands in a chapel, trying to touch God. I didn’t understand touch before this, but now I know the trick is getting God to touch you. I want to feel something outside of her, and I can’t do it without her. I’m so fucking tired of it.

Abigail turns back to me and places the wet napkin on my hand. An instant burn and relief. Hot tears again, from before or now. And next to the joining of our hands, a metal fork in a salad. A butter knife. A revelation.

“Abigail,” I say her name like a prayer, and she looks up from my hand. Her eyes hold a question, and before she can ask, I grab the fork and plunge it deep into my burned flesh. Abigail screams. The sound that erupts from me is inhuman because I am inhuman, and because I haven’t heard any animals scream, I have no comparison. I can only compare this pain to the last and say: this is greater, exponential, pain on pain.

“What are you doing? Oh my fucking GOD, Fatima!” Abigail recoils from me, jumping backwards, but through my tears, I can see that she can’t take her eyes off my ruined arm. I stand up from the table. For the first time, I can feel the heads of the other girls at the table turn to me. None of them move, but they are looking at me.

“L-look,” I manage through clenched teeth and grab the fork’s handle to draw it up into the skin, gouging and cutting. I gasp and sputter between my lips, and Abigail is crying, and Abigail is begging me to stop, and the rest of the room does nothing but look at me, too, screaming with Abigail so her voice won’t be alone because if Abigail was hurt the world would stop, but I know now a fundamental truth about those who are blessed to be in the centre and those who wait for the light to touch on them from time to time: my suffering is compelling to the audience.

I haven’t stopped screaming, but my throat is raw, and it’s become more like a raspy grunt. Abigail, not taking her eyes off me or my burned and bleeding arm, starts to back away. She can’t stop watching. No one can stop watching. In the greatest agony of my existence, I am the most powerful person in the room. There is no coming back from this.

She turns away to run, but I launch myself across the table at her, knocking over notebooks and ketchup bottles and diet iced tea and chicken nuggets with dipping sauce. I straddle Abigail’s chest as she starts to shriek, kicking under me. “Look, look look look looklooklooklook,” I whisper hoarsely, my dark curls framing her angelic face, both our tears streaming down her cheeks. There’s a painting like this somewhere, too, probably, in a chapel somewhere. Abigail would know, maybe.

She sobs in confusion—before this, she hadn’t suffered. When she’s pulled out of the program, she’ll cease to suffer, and I’ll cease to be. The pain in my arm dulls, and Abigail gasps as she’s pulled out of the simulation, her eyes blank. The room is empty—no audience, no chairs or tables, but I remain. For this last moment, I am the only thing in this world, and I can still feel wet on my face, snot roaming down my mouth, eyes sore, blistering flesh. Before this ends, I can finally say, I’m here even when she’s not. I am alone. I am the centre of the universe after all.

Note

This story was first published in Strange Horizons, “The Palestine Special Issue” (March 2021), and has been reprinted here with permission.

Glossary

‘alayhi al-salam — peace be upon him

al-ḍafaḍi‘ — frogs

Alḥamdulillah — thank God

Allah yerḥamha — may she rest in peace

al-Quds — Jerusalem

Andalus — andalusia

argileh — hookah pipe

al-Bab al-Dhahabi — the Golden Gate

djinn — spirit that God created from smokeless fire

ostaz — teacher

fallaḥi — rural

fattoush — levantine salad

Ghernaṭa — grenada

ḥabibti — sweetheart

ḥaram — forbidden/inappropriate

ikhrasi — shut up (second person feminine)

jabal — mound/mountain

khalas — enough/stop it

khazaf — ceramics

knafeh — dessert popular in the Levantine region

maḥshi — zucchini/eggplants stuffed with rice and minced meat

maḥsoom checkpoint

mamnu’ tajawol — curfew (an order)

mani’ tajawwol — curfew (in place)

maqluba — lit. “flipped over,” a Levantine dish made with chicken/meat, rice, and vegetables

Mashallah — lit. praise be to God, used to express excitement and/or appreciation

Mujaddid — renewer

qazameh — midget

shayṭanic — satanic

shokran — thanks

Sitti — my grandma

tariq alghubar alfawaar — sparkling dust road

Taṭreez — embroidery

Teta/Tata — Grandmother

thobe — traditional women’s dress with embroidery

Ya Allah — lit. oh God, used to express excitement or disappointment (based on context)

Yaba — father (used in the second person)

Yallah — come on/let’s go

Yamma — Mother (used in the second person)

yasmeen — jasmine

zeit and za‘atar — olive oil and dried thyme

Discussion Questions

What genres do you identify in this work?

Themes of identity and resistance run through this book; what other themes do you notice?

How does each story tell of resistance? Which forms of resistance are described?

How does this collection address grief and loss?

Why is speculative fiction so well suited to diasporic writings?

Describe the use of language and rhetoric in a story of your choice.

What are some of your favourite narrative techniques in this collection?

How might these stories respond to the erasure of Palestine and Palestinians?

What will you do when Palestine is free?

Contributors

Nadia Afifi is a science fiction author. She has published three novels with Flame Tree Press, including her debut, The Sentient. Her short fiction has appeared in Clarkesworld, the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. When she isn’t writing, she loves jigsaw puzzles and taking hikes with her dogs.

Jumaana Abdu’s debut novel, Translations (2024), was published by Penguin Random House Australia. She was awarded the 2023 Dal Stivens Award by the Australian Council for the Arts. In 2022, she was a Wheeler Centre Next Chapter fellow. Her work has been published in Kill Your Darlings, Westerly, Griffith Review, Meanjin, Liminal Magazine, Overland, and Debris. During the day, she is a medical doctor in Sydney/Gadigal land.

Rasha Abdulhadi is calling on you—yes you, even as you read this—to renew your commitment to refusing and resisting genocide everywhere you find it. May your commitment to Palestinian liberation deepen your commitment to your own. May your exhaustion deepen your resolve and make you immovable. May we all be drawn irresistibly closer to refusals that are as spectacular as the violence waged against our peoples.

Emad El-Din Aysha is a half-Egyptian British Palestinian academic researcher, author, translator, and journalist currently residing in Cairo, Egypt. He earned his PhD in international studies from the United Kingdom in 2001. He has taught at English-language universities and worked in Arab news outlets since then. He is currently a member of the Egyptian Writers’ Union and Egyptian Society for Science Fiction. He has one Science Fiction anthology to date and has co-authored and co-edited one non-fiction book, Arab and Muslim Science Fiction: Critical Essays (2022).

Karl El-Koura is a first-generation Palestinian immigrant to Canada, arriving there with his family when he was around five years old. He was born in Dubai in the UAE, but both his parents are from Gaza, where his ancestors lived for as long as anyone can remember. His stories have appeared in Daily Science Fiction, AE, The Canadian Science Fiction Review, and Metaphorosis.

Samah Serour Fadil is an Afro-Palestinian writer and poet who has been published in many outlets. More importantly, she is calling on you, dear reader, to reaffirm your solidarity with all oppressed peoples in refusing and resisting our callous annihilation. Wherever you are, whatever sand you can throw on the gears of genocide, you must find it in you to do it. From Turtle Island to Palestine, we can refuse with every breath, with every action, with every stroke of the pen. Resist. Resist. Resist.

Layla Azmi Goushey is a fiction writer, essayist, and poet. Her creative work has been published in journals such as Yellow Medicine Review, Mizna, Sukoon, FIYAH, Strange Horizons, and the Anthology of Arab American Creative Non-Fiction. She has published on popular media sites such as The Middle East Eye, PatheosMuslim, and Jadaliyya. She is the editor of Baladi Magazine. Follow her on X (Twitter) @lgoushey and/or @BaladiMagazine.

J.D. Harlock is a Levantine Arab (Lebanese/Syrian/Palestinian) American writer and editor from and based in Beirut. In addition to their work at Solarpunk Magazine as poetry editor and at Android Press as editor, J.D. Harlock’s writing has been featured in Strange Horizons, Nightmare Magazine, New York University’s Library of Arabic Literature, the British Council’s Voices Magazine, and the SFWA Blog. You can find them on LinkedIn, X (Twitter), Threads, and Instagram.

Rana Othman is a Palestinian-American writer who was born in San Francisco, CA, and grew up in the West Bank during the Second Intifada. She currently lives in the Bay Area, CA and visits her family in Palestine as often as she can. “Soul Searching” is her first publication.

Ziyad Saadi is a Palestinian-Canadian writer with a focus on socio-political screenplays surrounding issues facing MENA and LGBTQ+ communities. He holds a bachelor’s degree in marketing from Concordia University and has worked as a contributing writer for Indiewire, The Independent, and The Gay & Lesbian Review.

Nadia Shammas is a queer Palestinian American writer raised in Brooklyn, NY, and now residing in Tkaronto, Canada. She is best known as the writer and co-creator of award-winning graphic novels Squire and Where Black Stars Rise. She calls on you, reader, to liberate your mind from the colonialist gaze, to suck the poison out, and to march forward into a liberated future in a Free Palestine, a Free World.

Sara Solara is a YA science fiction and fantasy author represented by Rebecca Podos at Rees Literary Agency. As a queer and triracial writer (Palestinian, Colombian, white), she crafts stories born of her mixed existence, from a deep-seated rage and a burning hope for liberation. Sara is a member of the Speculative Literature Foundation and the Radius of Arab American Writers. She lives with her wife and their lovable dog Luna.

Elise Stephens’ storytelling is influenced by a love for theatre and a childhood filled with globetrotting. Much of her work focuses on themes of family, memory, and finding hope after a devastating loss. She is a first-place winner of Writers of the Future (2019) and a finalist for the Baen Fantasy Adventure Award (2021). Her fiction has appeared in Analog, Galaxy’s Edge, Escape Pod, and FIYAH, among others. Elise lives in a house with huge windows to supply the vast quantities of light she requires to stay happy. For more information, visit her website at www.EliseStephens.com.

Sonia Sulaiman writes short speculative fiction inspired by Palestinian folklore. Her work has appeared in Arab Lit Quarterly, Beladi, FANTASY, FIYAH Magazine, Xenocultivars Stories of Queer Growth, Seize the Press, Lackington’s Magazine, and Ask the Night for a Dream. Her stories have been nominated for Pushcart, Lammy, and Best New Weird awards. In her spare time, she curates the Read Palestinian Spec Fic Reading list. It is her deepest wish that you join us in resisting the erasure of Palestine, Palestinians, and other Indigenous Peoples from the past, present, and future. Become kin, from Turtle Island to Palestine.

Acknowledgements

Derek Caelin, Peter Hollo, pwoolcoc, Steven Gonzalez, Wendy Bolm, Bogi Takács, Kate Heartfield, Christine Hoggatt, Didi Chanoch, Jacob Sirhan, Mandy Shunnarah, Georgia Tsaridou, contactansy, Leonie Rau, Marie Brennan, Space Cowboy Books/Jean-Paul Garnier, Laura Partain, Mari Hsu, Max Guttman, Charles Payseur, Terry Gene, Jason Li, So Mayer, Simon Lucy, Eloisa Franchi, Gene Melzack, Hisham A Zubi, Eldan Goldenberg, John M, dttfranklin, Pat Allan, caroaz, Austin Allday, Summer Farah, Elvedin Terzic, Katherine Everett, Maksheyfe Besalel, Rosy Cooley, Chelle Parker, Maria Guglielmo, Russel Farr, Cecilie Aadal Knudsen, David Welch, Yulia Gilich, Rohan William James Talbot, Bossert, Marguerite Reed, annatambour, Jennifer McArdle, Reem Taye, Amalthea Rose, Emily Driscoll, panic.so.charming, Sam Kurd, Samer Abdelnour, Carole Underwood nee Goldman, Gideon Marcus.