The Year's Best Science Fiction, Volume 1

Song of the Birds SALEEM HADDAD

The unravelling began on the beach. Since Ziad hanged himself the year before, Aya had felt haunted, saddled by the weight of things. The violence of his death only reinforced how unreal everything seemed, like she was trapped in someone else’s memory. But as she stood on the shore under the late-afternoon sun that day, the haunting had felt much closer, like it had crawled under her skin and decided to make a home for itself there.

Behind her on the sand, Aya’s father was dozing under a giant yellow umbrella. Like all grown-ups, her father slept a lot, although no one slept as much as her mother, who was barely awake these days. Whenever life got a bit complicated, it seemed that all these grown-ups could do was just drop off to sleep.

Taking one final look back, she walked into the water, leaving behind all the business of the beach: the loud, cheesy music blasting from the drone speakers in the sky, the smell of shisha and grilled meat, the screaming children and half-naked bodies running up and down the sand. Just another headache-inducing summer day in Gaza, she thought to herself as the waves softly lapped at her shins.

She made her way deeper into the calm blue waters, her feet navigating the occasional piece of coral on the otherwise sandy seabed. The sea was so blue, the sky so clear. When the water reached her stomach, she turned around in slow circles, her fingers gently grazing the surface.

Time passed more slowly by the sea. She learned that in physics class: the hands of a clock placed at sea level run a fraction slower than those of a clock placed on a mountaintop. Sometimes, she thought that she should go up and live in the mountains. That way, she would stop being fourteen more quickly. Time would pass faster and she’d be a real grown-up, do all the things she wanted to do. By the sea, she felt herself a prisoner of both history and time.

But the good thing about time moving slower by the sea was that, if she stayed there, she would remain closer to the last time she saw Ziad. Maybe, if she descended deep enough into the water, she could find a way to grind time to a halt and then push it back, back to the period before he left. Maybe then she would find a way to stop her big brother from dying.

She lay back and closed her eyes, allowing her body to float in the water. She could hear the song of the birds in the sky, the slow, familiar chattering: kereet-kereet… kereet. She dipped her ears below the surface, listening to the rumble of the sea. The sea, warm and inviting, seemed playful that day, licking the sides of her face. But underneath this playfulness she felt something more sinister. She imagined the blue waters swallowing her, dragging her deeper, until her body hit the seabed to join the thousands of bodies that had drowned in these waters throughout history.

She wasn’t sure if she fell asleep, but a sudden putrid smell overcame her. She sensed something cold and slimy wrap itself around her neck. She opened her eyes, took in a gasp of breath. The stench made its way down her throat, and her body shuddered in response. She reached for the thing around her neck and pulled it off: a soggy piece of yellowed toilet paper, disintegrating between her fingers.

She flung the paper behind her and stood up in the water. Her feet found the seabed, which now felt spongy and slick. The water around her was a brownish-green sludge. Sewage and excrement bobbed on the surface. A rotting fish carcass floated by her right arm, casually bumping into an empty can of Pepsi. To her left, white foam gathered and bubbled on the surface of the water.

Her body contracted as a giant retch escaped her. A crackle of gunfire erupted on the horizon. She turned to the noise: four or five gunboats bobbed further out in the sea, as if warning her not to advance any further. She turned back to the beach. The beachfront was unrecognisable. The string of hotels and restaurants were replaced by decrepit buildings wedged alongside each other, aggressively jostling for space. Smoke blooms hung in place of the colourful beach umbrellas, the music and chatter drowned out by gunfire. Above her, the sky was a furious grey.

“Baba,” she shrieked, wading through the dirty water. She pushed aside bottles, soiled tissue paper, plastic bags and rotting animal carcasses. Her body jerked and convulsed continuously with what was something between a gag and a sob. A sharp stabbing pain tore through her body, like someone twisting a knife deep inside her stomach.

Stumbling onto the shore with seaweed in her hair, she looked like a deep-sea monster emerging from the depths of the waters. The sand was littered with plastic bottles, burning tyres and smouldering debris. The sunbathing bodies had disappeared. Above her, jet planes roared, leaving in their wake trails of black smoke like gashes in the sky. A thundering explosion threw her to the ground. Her tongue tasted sand and blood.

“Baba…” she whimpered, barely hearing herself. The pain in her belly intensified. Up ahead, three people were lying on the sand. She crawled towards them. The bodies were small, too small to be adults. As she got closer, she realised the bodies were of three children. They looked asleep but there were pools of blood, limbs contorted into impossible positions. A punctured football lay beside the lifeless bodies. There was a loud screaming in her ears, and she realised the screaming was coming from her.

She stood up, looked down at her feet. A trickle of blood ran down her left leg.

“It was likely the shock of the blood that caused her to faint,” the doctor said. Aya was vaguely aware the doctor was placing a bandage on her forehead. “Sometimes, in young women, their first menstruation can be scary. Has her mother not prepared her for this?”

Aya’s father hesitated.” Her mother is… not well.”

The doctor did not press further. “These bio-therapeutic bandages should heal the wound by tomorrow.”

“Habibti Aya,” her father said, stroking her hair. “You’re a woman now.”

“Do you remember what happened before you fainted?” the doctor asked.

“I was thinking of Ziad… I was in the water, thinking of Ziad…”

“Ziad is my son,” her father explained. “Aya’s brother… He… he passed away last year.”

“There were these three boys…” Aya said, suddenly, recalling the bodies on the beach. “Little children… their bodies…”

“Habibti Aya,” her father interrupted.

The doctor looked at Aya. “Three boys?”

Aya’s head moved in a vague resemblance of a nod. “There was dirty water… rubbish everywhere and burning tyres and… and the bodies of three boys… next to a football… their arms and legs were twisted and…”

“That’s enough,” her father interrupted. He turned to the doctor. “It was a hot day yesterday… It must have been the heat…”

The doctor nodded. “Trauma can lodge itself deep in the body, emerging when we least expect it…”

“I understand,” her father said. “It’s just… first her mother, then her brother…” His voice trailed off.

The doctor prescribed some pills, which he said would help her rest. That night Aya quickly fell into a deep and dreamless sleep. In the morning, she woke up with the feeling of having emerged from a dark cave of infinite blackness. The doctor was right: the bandage had disappeared overnight and the deep gash above her forehead had healed. She took a long, hot shower and tossed the remaining pills down the toilet.

She got dressed and put on the pad the doctor had given her. She recalled her father’s words: You’re a woman now. Something inside of her felt changed. It was an awakening of sorts. She felt it in her body as much as in her mind, a strange disquiet that had settled inside her, a tingling sensation.

Returning from school that afternoon, she found her father in the living room listening to the news. He seemed to be in a dreamlike state, sitting down on a chair and staring out of the window, barely listening to the newscaster, who was reporting on the spike in teen suicides across Palestine.

“Baba?”

Her father jumped in his seat, his hand pushing over the glass of tea next to his chair. The glass crashed on the floor and shattered into pieces.

“Aya, you scared me!” he said, irritated. The robo-cleaner—responding to the sound of the crash—emerged from the cupboard and began to clean up the glass on the floor.

“I’m sorry…”

He sighed and anxiously picked at the skin around his fingernails. “I should probably take a small sleep.”

Aya nodded. Her father stood up and went to his bedroom. He was always so absent-minded, as if he lived in another dimension and was just trying this world on for size. She didn’t blame him. From that moment last year, when she saw Ziad hanging there, she had felt as if a hole in her chest had opened up, leaving all her insides to tumble out like a spool of thread. Since then, some days she felt okay, and would wonder whether the worst of the pain was over. Then, when she least expected it—when she’d be sitting in class or else walking along the corniche—that image of Ziad would flash before her eyes: his limp body swaying, his head leaning lifeless to one side.

Aya shook her head to erase the image from her mind. She walked to her mother’s bedroom and opened the door. Her mother was asleep, as usual. The last time Aya had seen her awake was perhaps twelve days ago. She had emerged from the bedroom for a brief moment to grab a couple of figs. She ran into Aya in the hallway and they spoke for a few minutes. She asked Aya how school had been, and whether she was happy. Aya said she was, and her mother smiled.

“Good,” her mother said, giving Aya a kiss on the cheek. Then she returned to bed.

That night Aya dreamt she was walking through an enormous field of olive trees. The sky appeared much closer to the earth, the moon so large and bright the entire field twinkled like a sea of diamonds. Sounds had an intense clarity: she could hear the rustling of each olive branch in the wind, the crickets chirping at a deafening volume.

There was shuffling behind her. Turning around, she recognised the familiar figure—tall and lanky—and the unmistakable tangled mess of brown hair.

“Ziad?” The name caught in her throat.

“It’s me,” he said, in that voice that was so deep for an eighteen-year-old.

He was wearing a black T-shirt and jeans. He looked tall and strong, not like the last time she saw him. She ran up to him and threw herself against him, half-expecting his body to disappear, and for her to simply fall through him and onto the ground. Instead her body crashed into his solid frame. His arms wrapped themselves around her and she sunk into his chest.

“Ziad, it’s really you!” She looked up into his face. He smiled down at her, that familiar half-smile, the bottom two front teeth slightly crooked.

She hesitated. “But you died?”

He shrugged. “In your world, death isn’t really dying. In a way, I guess it’s more like waking up.”

“But I saw you! If you didn’t die, then where have you been?”

“I’ve…” he paused, considering his words carefully. He had always taken his time to find the most precise way to describe his thoughts and feelings. “I’ve been… outside of things. There are… responsibilities…”

A sudden fury exploded from inside of her, a rage that had been building for the last twelve months.

“Why did you do it? Didn’t you love us? Didn’t you think about Mama and Baba? Didn’t you think about me?”

Her anger amused him. He began to giggle, his eyes forming tiny slits.

“You’re laughing! You’re laughing too, you donkey!” She smashed her fists against his chest.

“Stop, stop!” he protested. He grabbed her fists and held them in front of him. “It’s okay,” he whispered in her ear as she began to cry.

They walked through the olive grove for a long time. She was happy to be near him, to feel the warmth of his body and succumb to his gentle teasing. She told him everything that had happened, things she had been doing. She updated him on the neighbours, on friends and on the other kids in school. She did her impersonations of all the people they knew. She had forgotten how much he laughed at her impersonations, and it occurred to her that she hadn’t done any since he died. After a while, when she had run out of sentences, they simply walked side by side in silence. Finally, she asked the question she had been avoiding.

“Does this mean you’re back now? Or is this just a dream?”

He was quiet for a moment. He stopped walking and turned to face her. A hardness settled in his features.

“Have you heard of the allegory of Plato’s Cave?”

She shook her head.

“Never mind.”

“Why?” she insisted.

He looked up at the sky. “Do you think a fish knows it’s swimming in water?”

She shrugged.

“We live in the world like a fish in water. Just swimming, oblivious to our surroundings.” Ziad sighed, then poked her arm. “Aya, are you not planning to ever wake up?”

She woke up. Outside her window, the birds were singing: kereet-kereet… kereet. Daylight streamed through the shutters. The olive grove returned to her. If the whole thing was just a dream, it felt more real than life.

Getting up, she snuck down the hall to Ziad’s room and opened the door. The room was as it was on the day he died. His shelves still held his basketball trophies, a few stuffed toys from his childhood. In the wardrobe, his clothes were still on hangers, bearing faint traces of his smell, which seemed to weaken with each passing day. Next to his bed was a novel by Franz Kafka, with a receipt from the arcades operating as a makeshift bookmark. On his desk there was a photograph of the family taken five years ago. All four of them were having a picnic on Mount Carmel, the port of Haifa in the distance.

Aya remembered that day: they had a large barbecue to celebrate the beginning of spring. That was before Mama started sleeping a lot, before the weight of things began to bear down on them.

Next to the photograph was Ziad’s journal, a simple black notebook. Ziad had liked to write by hand, even though it took so much longer than just dictating thoughts to a tablet. He had said he enjoyed the material aspect of writing, the physicality of ink and the slow movement of pen on paper. He never did like technology, was always so mistrustful of it.

Her father had insisted no one was allowed to touch any of Ziad’s things, as if Ziad had just gone to buy some vegetables and would soon be back. Against her better judgement, she picked up the diary and opened it to the final page. In his neat handwriting, she read the last entry, dated one day before he died:

The heaviness returned, the choking sensations. She closed the diary and stumbled out of the room.

Closing the door behind her, she made her way to the bathroom. She examined her tired face in the mirror, marvelled once again at the disappearance of the large gash on her forehead. She turned on the faucet and began to brush her teeth. It took a moment to register the gritty sensation of dirt and the taste of soil on her tongue. She spat the toothpaste out. She noticed the water coming out of the tap: sandy brown, bursting out of the faucet in exhausted sputters, leaving light brown splotches on the white porcelain sink.

“Baba!” She ran out of the bathroom and into the hallway. Her father emerged from his bedroom, half-asleep. “The water coming out of the tap is brown!”

Her father followed her into the bathroom. She had left the tap running, but now only crystal-clear water ran through.

“I swear it was brown.” She caught her father’s eye. “I swear I wasn’t imagining this.”

Her father sighed and rubbed his forehead. “Aya, what’s going on?”

She took a deep breath. “I dreamt of Ziad last night,” she confessed.

The look on her father’s face unleashed a flood of tears from somewhere deep inside her.

“I miss him,” Aya said.

Her father pulled her into him. “I know, habibti,” he whispered in her ear.

Ziad appeared in her dreams again that night. They were sitting in a clearing on top of a mountain. She recognised the view: they were in the spot where that photograph was taken, of the four of them on Mount Carmel. Ziad spoke in a slow and assured way as he picked at the blades of grass by his bare feet.

“Everything seems so still. You would never think that we are hurtling through the universe at a crazy speed.”

“What’s with all these riddles?” she asked.

“All I’m saying is that things aren’t always what they seem. You know what they taught us in history books. That stuff, about how we liberated Palestine, how the occupation is over now?” Aya nodded for him to go on. “It is so advanced, the occupation. They have all these technologies… technologies of control and subjugation. And Gaza—our home—is like a laboratory for all that experimentation.”

“But that’s all in the past…” She picked up a dark blue flower, cradling it in her palm. “We’re liberated now. Look around. We are free.”

Ziad snorted. “You know how us Arabs are. We are trapped in the rose-tinted memories of our ancestors. These cached memories wrap themselves around us like a second skin.”

Ziad uprooted a blade of grass and began to break it apart into smaller pieces until the blade was nothing but a tiny stub, which he then squashed between his fingers. Aya watched him without saying a word. He appeared furious—it was a rage that far surpassed regular teenage emotions. The anger was darker, deeper than anything she had seen before. She saw it etched into his features, felt it radiate from his body.

He tossed the squashed remnants of the blade of grass behind him. Finally, he looked up at her.

“We’re just another generation imprisoned by our parents’ nostalgia.”

She looked at the flower in her palm. She had picked this flower off the ground only moments earlier. Now, examining it more closely in her palm, something appeared strange to her. The dark blue petals reflected the sunlight in a peculiar way. She brought her palm towards her face to get a better look.

The petals were made of hard steel, the edges jagged and sharp.

“Fragmentation bullets,” Ziad said, noticing her shocked expression. “They blast from a gun and explode inside your body, blooming like flowers inside the flesh.”

The bullet rolled out of her palm and fell to the ground with a soft clink. The sound felt so far away. The world was spinning.

Ziad chuckled bitterly. “Tools for murder now masquerading as life.”

She looked at him. “What does all this mean?”

Ziad didn’t hesitate. “It means you have a decision. You can stay here, cocooned in these memories of a long-lost paradise, or you break free of this prison.”

“Is that what you did?”

“Yeah.” He nodded, looking her straight in the eye. “That’s what I did.”

Persistently, he came every night. She looked forward to sleep, to being with him in her dreams. Her dreams began to feel more real than waking life, and infinitely more important. Through her encounters with Ziad she felt herself awakening to something, although what this was, she could not yet put into words.

In waking life her father watched her, concerned. She brushed aside his worries. She tried to play the role of a normal teenage girl. One afternoon, she overheard her father talking to someone on the phone.

“She has withdrawn,” he whispered to the mystery person on the line. “I can hear her talking to him. I’m worried she’ll do what he did…”

One night she woke up to find the wall of her bedroom torn down. A picnic blanket hung from the ceiling to cover the gaping hole where the wall used to be. It was the picnic blanket her father often brought to the beach. Using the blanket to cover the destroyed wall was almost comical, like a man trying to protect his modesty with a leaf. A strong gust of wind blew through the room. As the blanket blew up in the air, Aya caught a glimpse of Ziad silhouetted against the starry sky.

“It’s getting harder now,” he said, stepping in from behind the blanket.

“Harder?” She sat up in bed, wrapping her duvet around her to protect herself from the wind.

“The more you know, the more the logic of the simulation breaks down.”

He motioned for her to get up. She put on her slippers and followed him through the hole in the wall.

Ziad hopped from one piece of concrete to the next, swiftly grabbing on to the steel foundations that jutted from the concrete with the ease of a seasoned acrobat. She followed suit as best as she could, and they landed on the ground with a soft thud.

Their once-picturesque Gaza City neighbourhood, with its wide leafy streets, exquisite limestone buildings, quaint cafés and vintage furniture shops, now looked like a war zone. Most of the buildings on their street were destroyed. The supermarket next door to their house had collapsed on itself. Some buildings had missing walls or half-caved-in ceilings, partially covered by colourful cloth in a desperate attempt to reclaim privacy. She saw families cooking out in the open, people brushing their teeth in exposed bathrooms.

“What happened?” she gasped.

Ziad grabbed her hand and led her in the direction of the beach. They arrived at a beachfront hotel with its many layers of security. Ziad led them towards the back of the building and through a hole in a barbed-wire fence. From there, they made their way to a coffee shop in a garden overlooking the sea. There were plastic tables and chairs, and hanging plants that seemed so thirsty they looked like they might just get up and crawl to the sea.

“We’re at the hotel where the media stay. It’s safe here. Too many foreign journalists for them to bomb,” he said matter-of-factly.

Aya felt self-conscious, dressed in her pyjamas and slippers. Ziad ordered a Pepsi for himself and an orange juice for her. When their drinks arrived, he lit a cigarette.

“You smoke now?”

He shrugged, took a drag from the cigarette.

“Aya, the world you’re living in is a simulation.”

She stared at him, speechless.

“Think about it. Only a few decades ago Israel had in its arsenal the latest in digital technology. The primary use for this technology was to shore up and further advance the occupation. How is it logical that Palestine was so easily liberated?”

“Ziad, you’ve lost your mind.”

“Those who keep resisting are seen as insane by those who cannot see the prison walls.”

“Where are we now?”

“This is the real Palestine,” Ziad said, gesturing at their surroundings. “What you’re living in… everything you think you know… it’s all just a simulation. They’ve harnessed our collective memory, creating a digital image of Palestine. And that’s where you live.”

She reminded herself that she was in a dream, but at that precise moment she couldn’t remember when she had fallen asleep.

“Once I realised all of this… once I put the puzzle pieces together, I realised that I needed to get out. So I took a leap of faith.” He paused. “When you kill yourself, you exit the simulation.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You know how grown-ups always sleep,” he said, getting more animated. “For those who weren’t born in the simulation, memories return more easily. That’s why grown-ups sleep a lot… they need to be reset. As for us… we are the first generation to have lived our entire lives in the simulation. We are at the frontier of a new form of colonisation. So it’s up to us to develop new forms of resistance.”

“And Mama?”

Ziad hesitated. He looked like he was holding back tears. “Mama’s not sick, Aya. No matter what anyone says. She is torn: she wants to resist… wants to exit… but she also doesn’t want to leave you and Baba. So she stays there, drifting in and out of consciousness. She knows that this ‘right to digital return’ isn’t the same as the real thing…”

Aya felt the orange juice crawl back up her throat. Ziad noticed the expression on her face.

“What are you thinking?” he asked.

“I’m thinking that you’re telling me the only way I can be free is to die.”

“You have to trust that what I’m telling you is true.”

“And if you’re wrong?”

Ziad was silent for a long time. Finally, he put the cigarette out and looked at her.

“Pay attention to the song of the birds.”

Once she noticed the pattern, it became impossible to ignore.

Kereet-kereet… kereet.

In her head she counted: One. Two. Three. Four.

Kereet-kereet… kereet.

Two chirps followed by a third a few seconds later. Four seconds of silence, then the pattern repeated itself.

That morning, she spent an hour lying in bed listening to the song of the birds. The pattern repeated itself over and over again. A slow feeling of dread spread over her.

You’re a woman now.

Kereet-kereet… kereet.

A simulation. Her brain tried to imagine it, but it was like trying to visualise what happens after the world ends, or else trying to imagine the full force of the sun. The answer felt beyond anything her brain could conceive. Trying to think about her imprisonment in a simulation was like trying to imagine her own death. It was unfathomable, the experience too all-encompassing.

Later that day, as the teaching hologram droned on and on in class, Ziad’s words echoed in Aya’s mind. If what he was saying was true, then all of this was just a simulation.

She pinched herself. There was pain. But was the pain real?

She grabbed her e-pen and pressed the tip of it against the soft flesh of her wrist. She felt the sharp pain as it pricked her skin. She pressed the e-pen deeper, until with a pop it pierced her skin, and a drop of blood emerged from the puncture.

Kereet-kereet… kereet.

Sirens sounded all around her. She looked up. The teaching hologram was shining a beam on her. The entire class turned to look at her. She glanced back at her arm, at the e-pen jabbed into her wrist.

“Urghha—” Noises emerged from her mouth, but she wasn’t sure whether they made any sense. The door burst open and four nurses ran in. Her wrist was burning with pain.

“I don’t even know what to say,” her father said on the drive back home.

“Are we real?” Aya asked him as she sat in the passenger seat, staring out the window and absentmindedly tugging at the bandages on her wrist.

Her father stopped at a traffic light and turned to her. “Look at me. Your name is Aya. The year is 2048. You are fourteen years old. You live in Gaza City. Your favourite colour is purple.” He paused. “You are a real person.”

“Why do the birds have the same chirping sound?”

“What?”

“The song of the birds. It’s a loop.”

Her father was quiet for a long time. Finally, he spoke.

“When I was your age, I was very close to two boys about my age. I lived in Gaza, one of the boys lived in Tunis and the other lived in Beirut. We were all Palestinians, all from Haifa, but we had been scattered around the world like shotgun pellets. Laws and borders made it impossible for us to see one another. We would sometimes wonder to each other: if our grandparents had never been run out from their homes like cockroaches, would the three of us have been neighbours? Would our personalities have been different without this weight inside our souls? What would it have felt like, to have a home and to belong to that home unquestionably?”

“Why are you telling me all of this?”

“Sometimes, home is simply a matter of changing your perspective.”

The traffic light turned from red to green and they were moving again. Aya turned to look out at the park, where young mothers normally pushed their baby carriages for exercise, and teenagers played football on the grass. Now, all she could see was a large dirt field, where a group of limbless young boys hobbled on makeshift crutches. Her breath caught in her throat.

“Aya…” her father began.

She started to speak but then stopped. “Nothing.”

Her father looked at her, holding a seemingly infinite sadness in his eyes.

That evening, Aya walked into her mother’s bedroom. She was asleep on her back under the covers. Aya sat down on the floor beside the bed.

“Mama, can you hear me?” she whispered.

Her mother did not stir. Aya studied her face, the way the soft hairs in her nose gently swayed with each breath. She reached under the covers and grabbed her mother’s hand.

“I miss you,” she whispered.

For a moment, Aya could have sworn that her mother squeezed her hand.

One evening, Ziad came to her in a wheelchair. Both his legs were cut off at the knee, his jeans neatly tucked under his thighs.

“Ziad, what happened?” she asked, panicked. He looked thinner, his fingernails dirty, his jeans stained.

“They’re creating a nation of cripples out there,” he spat the words out with a violence that surprised them both.

“Who are ‘they’?” she asked.

He looked at her bitterly. “Who else?”

He pulled something out from behind his wheelchair: a rock and a long piece of rubber. He placed the rock in the centre of the strip of rubber and stretched the rubber back, testing out the elasticity.

“This should work.” He looked at her and smiled that half-smile of his.

“What’s wrong with you?” she yelled. “Why are you doing this? Were you not happy before all of this? Even if none of this is real, it’s better than the real prison.”

Ziad glared at her. “You can keep living in a dream if you want. But I’m done. It’s one thing to live in your dreams by choice, but once you realise you’re a prisoner, there’s no way to live without suffocation and despair.”

“But look what it’s doing to you. You’re a cripple.”

“My body is crippled but my mind is free. And I’m going to keep fighting until I’m completely free: body, mind and soul.”

That was the last time she saw him. Thirteen days ago. Every night she went to bed, hoping he would return, but he did not come back. Perhaps he was angry with her. She wasn’t sure. If he wasn’t angry then maybe there was another more sinister explanation for his absence. She tried not to think about that. Whatever the reason, there was no way she could keep living like this, not knowing what was true and what was false, what was reality and what was merely an enforced dreamland.

Without Ziad, she found herself unable to navigate between dream and waking life. She felt stuck between two radio frequencies. The two worlds were merging, and what emerged wasn’t one or another but a third dimension, a nightmarish new conglomeration.

That’s why she is back here. Back to where it all started, by the sea. Standing on the shore, the salty air forces its way down her throat, into her lungs. If they’re right and there is nothing after death—if she has just simply lost her mind—then perhaps that’s not a bad thing either. What is it that is driving her actions? she wonders. Is it a cynicism born out of loss and betrayal, a cynicism so deep it courses in her veins? Or is it something else—a yearning to be free that exists like an itchiness under her skin?

Inching forwards until the waves kiss the tips of her toes, she stares down, teasing the waves, offering them a bit of her body. The sea and her are like two cats carefully examining one another. Slowly, she moves inside the sea’s embrace. The waves reach up to her ankles, then her knees and then, as she wades in farther, up to her hips. The water is cold; her skin breaks out in goose bumps. The backpack she is wearing is heavy on her shoulders.

Just when the water becomes too high to stand, she tries to swim but the stones inside the bag pull her down and her body plunges under the surface, quickly sinking to the depths of the sea. The remaining air in her lungs escapes from her mouth in sad, lonely bubbles. Her head shakes from right to left as her body tries to fight back. Her hair twists itself around her neck like the bony hands of an old woman. The roar of the sea is deafening. Her throat spasms, the pain of the constriction, tightening, overwhelming, her legs kick fiercely, trying to swim back up, but the stones are too heavy.