The Country I Carry in Sound
by Syed Peerzada Shoib Nazir
If someone asked me to describe my country without showing a single photograph, I would ask them to close their eyes.
Every morning began the same way, although I never realized it at the time.
Before anyone in our house had finished breakfast, the vegetable vendor would turn into our lane. I never knew his name. I am not sure anyone did. We recognized him by his voice instead. It travelled ahead of him, slipping around corners and through open windows until someone, somewhere, would say, “He’s here.”
That was usually enough.
By the time he reached our gate, the neighborhood had already begun assembling itself. A wooden gate creaked open somewhere across the lane. A kettle whistled from a nearby kitchen. Sparrows argued from telephone wires with the confidence of creatures who believed the morning belonged to them. A shopkeeper rolled open his metal shutter, its familiar scrape echoing briefly before dissolving into the sounds that followed.
No one decided that the day had begun.
It simply happened.
One sound made room for another until the silence of dawn became the ordinary noise of morning.
As a child, I never listened to any of this. Not really. The sounds seemed as permanent as the road outside our house. They returned every day with such quiet reliability that I mistook them for part of nature itself. I assumed mornings everywhere arrived in much the same way. It never crossed my mind that another neighborhood, another country, might wake to an entirely different rhythm.
I could not have pointed to every village on a map, or explained the geography of the valley, but I knew exactly how an ordinary morning unfolded. I knew the moment the first bicycle rattled over the uneven road. I knew when neighbors would begin greeting one another across garden walls. I knew that somewhere, before long, the cricket games waiting for the afternoon were already being argued into existence by children who had not yet left for school.
None of these things asked to be remembered.
They simply refused to leave.
They work quietly in the background, arranging life so efficiently that we mistake them for the natural order of things. No one wakes up thinking about the creak of a neighbor’s gate or the scrape of a shopkeeper lifting his shutter. We do not pause to appreciate the pressure cooker announcing dinner in another kitchen, or the chorus of sparrows that somehow returns to the same telephone wires each morning. These sounds do not demand our attention. They ask only to be repeated.
Every afternoon, our lane became a cricket ground without anyone declaring it one. The walls of nearby houses became wickets because they always had been. Rules were invented, abandoned, and reinvented before the next ball was bowled. Every appeal was louder than necessary. Every impossible catch became the subject of a debate that lasted precisely as long as it took someone to bowl again.
The games mattered less than the certainty that there would be another one tomorrow.
Evening arrived the same way. Not all at once, but by accumulation. Birds disappeared into the chinar trees one flock at a time. Radios drifted through open windows carrying songs older than I was. Pressure cookers hissed in neighboring kitchens. Conversations grew softer, as though the entire street had silently agreed that the day no longer needed to raise its voice.
No one conducted this orchestra.
No one had to.
Nothing announced the changes.
There was no final cricket match. No neighbor stood at the gate for the last time. No morning declared itself the last to begin with the familiar call of the vegetable vendor.
They slip away gradually, almost politely.
A conversation becomes a little shorter because someone is running late. The children who once argued over imaginary boundaries begin spending their afternoons elsewhere. A familiar voice misses one morning, then another. By the time it occurs to us to wonder where it has gone, its absence has already become part of the neighborhood.
For years, I thought change arrived through dramatic moments that everyone remembered. I know now that it usually arrives through repetition interrupted. One ordinary habit fails to repeat itself. Then another. The rhythm falters so quietly that we mistake it for silence rather than transformation.
I have tried, more than once, to remember the last time I heard the vegetable vendor.
I can’t. I don’t know whether he stopped coming, whether he chose another route, or whether I simply stopped listening carefully enough to notice.
I remember his voice with remarkable clarity. I remember how it carried into our house before he reached the gate. I remember someone, somewhere, saying, “He’s here,” as though those two words were enough to begin the day.
But I cannot remember when those mornings stopped.
Memory, it turns out, does not preserve endings very well.
It records what repeated.
The final time often passes unnoticed because it arrives disguised as another ordinary day.
You cannot mourn a moment you did not realize was ending.
Only later, sometimes years later, do you discover that the world you thought was permanent has quietly become something you remember instead.
For a long time, I believed memory was a faithful witness.
I imagined it carefully storing the important parts of a life, preserving them until I chose to return. The older I grow, the less convinced I am.
It remembers what we never intended to save and quietly abandons what we assumed we would never lose.
I no longer remember what the vegetable vendor looked like.
Yet I still know his voice.
A person can disappear from memory while the space they occupied in a morning remains perfectly intact.
I used to think memory preserved what mattered most.
Now I think it preserves what happened often enough to become part of us.
That may be why I no longer remember the vendor’s face, yet I still hear his voice turning into our lane.
Not a catalogue of events.
Not an inventory of places.
A cadence.
Sometimes I hear it unexpectedly. A kettle beginning to whistle in another city. Children arguing over a game in a language I do not understand. The scrape of a metal shutter rolling open before a shop begins another day.
For an instant, two places exist at once.
The street where I am standing.
And the one that still continues, unchanged, somewhere inside me.
If someone asked me today to describe my country, I could begin with its mountains, its rivers, or the long shadows that winter casts across the valley. I could point to photographs, trace roads across a map, or name the places that have shaped my life.
All of that would be true.
It would also be incomplete.
The country I know best has never existed entirely in what I could see.
It exists in a morning that continues somewhere inside me.
A vegetable vendor turns into the lane before breakfast. A kettle whistles in a nearby kitchen. Sparrows quarrel from telephone wires. A shopkeeper drags open a metal shutter. Children are already planning the afternoon’s cricket match long before school has ended.
None of those sounds exist together anymore.
Perhaps they never will again.
But memory has gathered them into a single morning that time can no longer interrupt.
That is the country I carry.
Not because it has remained unchanged.
But because it hasn’t.
Years have altered the neighborhood, just as they have altered me. New voices have replaced old ones. Different children now invent different games on the same streets.
Somewhere, another family is waking to a morning that will one day become invisible to them too.
I hope they do not notice it.
Not yet.
About the Author
Syed Peerzada Shoib Nazir is a writer from Kashmir exploring memory, language, identity, and place through literary nonfiction. He is completing a Bachelor’s degree in English literature. His essays examine how ordinary moments shape cultural memory, home, and belonging.
Woman Walking Across Interstate 10
by K. A. McGowan
in the night with a white dress
almost like a gown touching the ground.
She might have been on her way home
from a wedding or a wake
or demanding the right-of-way
or escaping from a tormentor.
She might have been calculating the odds
or testing an algebra word problem,
sleepwalking or thinking of an afterlife,
playing the game of chicken
or just trying to get to the other side.
About the Author
K.A. McGowan – Born and raised in Scranton, Pennsylvania, K. A. McGowan lives 49 feet above sea level near Lafayette, LA. His first full-length collection Pangaea was published in 2022 by Kelsay Books.
A Wild and Distant Shore
by Antonio Sodré
Us, this only us, in this only love.
She picks a book from the shelf. It is political. It always is. She grabs a giant green towel and slips into a small green bikini. I realize she always chooses green whenever she can. She walks straight onto the beach. There is no other house nearby. We are exactly where we want to be. Alone. Us, this only us, in this only love.
I pause at the door, neither inside nor out, just for a moment. This house is measured for us. I tidy the place and place a framed picture on the mantel. We stroll along a windy pier; she wears a thick scarf too big for her. She asks a man to take our picture.
We have just met in a lecture on literature. I glimpse her notebook and notice she writes.
I join her on the beach. I help her with the sunblock. She is already a little red.
“You’ll turn into a giant red pepper,” I joke.
She hits me lightly with the book, laughing.
We swim in the ocean. A rain cloud hovers above us. We compete to catch more rainwater with our tongues. She claims victory, I concede. Back on the sand, the cloud drifts away. We dry quickly. We race to the house to see who gets in first. She claims victory, I concede.
I cook dinner while she lies on the couch reading, glancing at me from time to time. She devours everything, her big eyes fixed on me. Then she comments on something from the book.
“Such an atrocity,” she says.
“There are many atrocities,” I reply.
In the bedroom, I leave the blind open. We can see the moon, always full, always big and yellow, framed by our window. My fingertips rest just below her belly button. She breathes heavily. My hand drifts lower. She moans.
We lie together looking at the moon. Us, this only us, in this only love.
We host a party. She throws a party.
All the women wear flapper dresses, short-haired wigs framing their faces. Glow sticks scatter across the house. Everything gleams neon. The men wear black vests and top hats and speak in a strange language.
I stay in my red T-shirt and khaki shorts.
She floats from guest to guest in her green Wig and green dress, catching up with everyone. She carries an Instant camera. In the photographs, everyone is faceless but her. She photographs the mirror, the camera covering her face. A nice shot.
I slip this print into the notebook she writes in.
I linger at the door, neither inside nor out. People drift between the house and the beach. I smile whenever everyone laughs. I fry to communicate through gestures, warning that it is easy to be carried away by the current and disappear forever.
I tell her about the beach house on a snowy afternoon; her moving boxes still scattered around my apartment.
“It’s a pretty isolated island,” I say. “But it fits us. This only us, in this only love.”
She leaps up and throws her arms around my neck, her big eyes wide.
“Is it beautiful?”
“Paradise on earth. ”
She wants to go so badly that she stops unpacking.
She asks me kindly to prepare colorful drinks, and I am glad to have something to do. I slice fruit of every color, covering the counter. I mix gm with pineapple juice and add a splash of blue curaçao. The drink tums a vibrant green for her. She calls her friends to show it off, then asks for more.
While people dance to remixes of 1920s songs, I keep shaking and pouring. Everyone gets drunk but me.
Some people begin to leave. Others keep dancing the Charleston. I take care of the music now. She stays close to her best friend, not caring. The book, her writing, this only us, none of it matters anymore.
When the last guest leaves, I take her to bed, change her clothes, and remove that strange wig.
“It was a great party, wasn’t it?” she murmurs drunkenly as I tuck her in.
“Yes,” I reply dryly. “It was.”
I begin cleaning the house while the sun rises from the sea through the main doorway. For a moment, I remain at the door, neither inside nor out. I want to mun away, but there is a massive black hole in the bedroom.
She is at the beach again, sitting on a sun lounger, reading her book. It is a beautiful day like all others. The sand is almost white. The ocean stretches out in shades of turquoise and deep sapphire. I sit beside her. She stops reading. “1 want to leave. I feel suffocated.” she says.
I have known this since the party.
“Okay, I’ll make the arrangements,” I say.
She gets enraged, stands up and goes to the sea. I can tell she expects me to fight for us, in this only love. But I don’t. It would be useless to go through all the steps of the ritual of breaking up.
When the last box is inside the moving truck, she hugs me.
“1 will never forget you.”
I close my eyes. When I open them, no one is there. The Wind howls.
The wind howls the next day, and the next, and the next. Sometimes I regret not trying harder, not fighting for her. I spend most of the day sweeping away the sand the wind carries into the house.
At night, when I look through the window before sleeping, there is no moon.
She leaves something behind in the top drawer of the nightstand: a photograph from the party and a fragment of her writing. Perhaps she does not disappear in the middle of it.
About the Author
Antonio Sodré is a student of English Literature and Linguistics at the University of São Paulo, Brazil. He enjoys turning stories into short tales and has been published in several literary magazines, anthologies, and contests in Portuguese, Spanish, and English. Instagram: @acasodre
The Best Advice
by Abby Remer
“I can’t do this.”
I’m crying, no, snotting tears down my cheeks onto my throat.
I am desperately ill, in dire pain, and emanating more fear than this foreign land can hold.
I’m standing in the back of a bus, careening down a coastal road in Turkey on a bright, hot June morning.
“What is going on?” Caren and Laura, two teacher trainers at the spiritual IM School of Healing Arts, are asking with love purring through their voices. I can’t begin to describe the overwhelm.
We arrived 56 hours earlier after a brutal flight, and while everyone else is tired, I can’t see straight because my gallbladder is on fire, my bones hurt, and my upper back is being cranked apart on a rack.
I have a debilitating disease for which there is no name. It began three years earlier. At 34 years old, I came down with a wracking cough that tore at my lungs with every fit, which no carpet bombing of antibiotics could stop. Soon, everything was running through me. I felt each beat of my heart even when I was in bed, and there was a searing, unrelenting javelin piercing every muscle.
“It’s all in your head. There is no such thing,” my first internist insisted when I asked to be tested for Chronic Fatigue, which few had heard of, and the medical profession roundly denied at the time.
“Then give me copies of all my records,” I’d furiously demanded and stormed out of the office as best I could, shaking from yet another bout of coughing.
Doctor after doctor, specialist after specialist, test after test, denied that anything was clinically wrong. I was desperate as each day I got worse. Through word of mouth, I discovered a remarkable holistic physician, Dr. Stoff, who runs a special clinic in Tucson, Arizona.
I completed a twenty-two-page questionnaire delving into my physical, emotional, and spiritual history, faxed over all 127 pages of medical records, and had an hour-long consultation with Dr. Stoff’s medical historian, who went through, blow-by-blow, each detail of my life.
“My team and I have reviewed everything you sent, and we are ready to move forward,” Dr. Stoff embraced me in welcome when I arrived in his office. I burst into tears, feeling both heard and believed for the very first time. Maybe there’s hope? I thought, almost too scared to believe there might be some way to deal with this nightmare.
It turns out, I have five simultaneous autoimmune illnesses. Not lost on me is that among them, I am producing antibodies against my reproductive and digestive systems and, significantly, my own heart. I’m not smiling. God is clearly sending me a message I’ve been ignoring for far too long.
Dr. Stoff and his holistic team presented a treatment plan that bridged Eastern and Western medicine and, to my enormous relief, gave equal measure to my spiritual health. In New York, at the IM School of Healing Arts, I’d already been working closely with its powerful founder, Levent, on my spiritual growth.
I’d been led by a series of God-given breadcrumbs to Levent’s door, seeking something beyond conventional therapy. I’ve learned profound truths about myself that I’m slowly working through: I hold onto grief as an identity, as though my life depends on it. I disempower others from helping me, so strong is my deep-seated need for control. My quick mind often keeps me disconnected from my inner spirit.
Over the years, I have been getting better, ever so slowly. Although I am still pretty ill, Dr. Stoff and Levent agreed that I could risk the two-week trip to Turkey to visit sacred sites and bask in the ancient healing energy. They hoped the visit would accelerate my recovery. And I desperately didn’t want to miss this opportunity to be with my classmates on the culmination of our spiritual journey at the school.
But standing in this bus with Laura and Caren looking on, I know I have made a terrible mistake. The others are fine after no sleep the night before; breakfasting at 8 am; then traveling to a spiritual archaeological site for hours of meditation, contemplation, and “processing,” stretching far into nighttime adventures until dawn, to desolate islands with Roman ruins and ancient mud baths.
Ripped from my health regime that demands tight reins on my food, hours of sleep, and downtime, my body is screaming, No!
Through my hiccupped tears, I try to describe my terror and physical breakdown. “You guys just can’t understand. There’s no way I’m going to make it another hour, let alone two weeks of this. Who did I think I was fooling, believing I could do this pilgrimage?”
Then it strikes. A voice. Not mine, but coming unbidden into my head:
Hold open the possibility that anything can happen.
That split second, that divine intervention, changes the trajectory of the trip…and my life. I intuitively know what these sacred words mean. God is telling me to get out of my own way. Don’t think of any alternative to whatever my fear may be. Leave space for the workings of miracles. It isn’t about the power of positive thinking; it’s about not thinking at all.
I sail through the rest of Turkey. My health soars as I soak in hallowed sites and rituals, fall more deeply in love with my classmates, and am at one with all that is in utter grace. My heart is big, and there is hope. I’d flown to Turkey with an oxygen canister, which helped with the pain, but I told the stewardess to keep it on the way back.
When we arrive home, I crash for a while, but by holding open the possibility that anything can happen, I quickly regain ground. I try out my mantra on all my many, multiple, and myriad fears…and continue to do so. I work this muscle like a triathlete, and though my physical healing takes a decade more, I live in a new paradigm—a before-and-much-better-after.
Thirty years later, not a day goes by that I don’t say those words. It can be when I’m running late, about to have a conversation that’s making me oh so anxious, a relationship that’s going south, a task that feels overwhelming.
The thing about the solutions to my fears is that when I hold open the possibility that anything can happen, what comes about is always, always something I never, ever could have thought of on my own.
Does God give advice? That day in Turkey, it was more like a command. I suppose since I have free will, I could choose not to listen to this wise counsel…but why would I when the words come straight from heaven?
About the Author
Abby Remer is a published author of five previous books and the award-winning lead features writer for the Martha’s Vineyard Times. She is currently writing memoir essays.
Orientation
by Sarah Jean Benvenuti
It turns out, none of them really have it completely right. Susan – she’s three plots over – has been in quite the tizzy about it since she’s gotten here. It’s been all “repent” this and “his time is nigh” that. The only thing nigh is my foot up her…
Pardon. I learned early on that you’ve got to accept your neighbors here. There’s no changing them; that’s for sure, and while we have a lot of places we can go, you always find yourself pulled back to this cemetery eventually. Best to learn how to let go of the little annoyances, because it seems we’re gonna be here for a good long while.
Contrary to what they taught people like me and pious Susan, there certainly isn’t some celestial hereafter awaiting us on the other side; no fat cherubs with harps or even a curmudgeonly angel ready to read off a litany of my sins and good deeds. Don’t get me wrong, this side of the veil ain’t bad – real easy living, honestly – but it’s absolutely not like any heaven that I learned about in church.
It seems to me the others didn’t get it right, either, though. Take Aurora over there; the tall, willowy one with the waist-length gray hair. Well, before she died, she got very into Buddhism. Mind, she did quite her fair share of experimenting in the sixties, so I’m not saying she’s a monk or anything. But the way she tells it, we all just have to be patient, that we will be reincarnated into whatever life we earned next. Except that old Willem up the hillside, the grumpy old coot with the frilly sleeves? Well, seems he’s been here since this little cemetery was founded. If he’s still waiting on his next life, then I don’t have a lot of hope for the rest of us.
At least there’s none of that fire and brimstone nonsense, either, though the way some of the atheists here act, you’d think any kind of afterlife was hell itself. I heard that Jarrel, the young guy near the gate, just stared at the horizon for most of his first year until he accepted that this was truly happening. A few of them have a kind of support group that meets at one of the mausoleums, if you’re interested in philosophical discussions and that kinda thing.
Now, Hao, just down the lane, has seemed the most prepared, honestly. It’s been at least 60 years since he got here and his family still leaves him a lot of random stuff at the gravesite, along with cash. As though we can use dollars or yen in the afterlife! But they’re definitely onto something with all those offerings. Whiskey, food, flowers, little paper furniture – all overflowing from his place. You wouldn’t believe it! Poor Elena, his neighbor, has practically no space at her plot every time one of Hao’s’ descendants visits.
That’s how I got these spices. Hao’s a generous man. Never married, you know. I would kill for a bit of paprika or oregano, but basil and salt will do, and his grandnieces and nephews have brought him plenty of those.
I have to be honest: I was pretty pissed at first when my husband showed up with my dented saucepan and tomatoes from the garden. It was dumb luck; he didn’t know that kind of thing would make it to me. But there he was one day, placing it on my gravestone and weeping about how he missed my cooking. Idiot. As though cooking for him were the greatest joy of my life. It was pretty satisfying to see him there, shirt all dirty and ripped, suddenly realizing all the little things I did to make his life smooth. And now, even when he’s sitting there, begging for me to come back, he can’t even rustle up some flowers? At a cemetery!? I’m not afraid to admit that I would have wapped him over the head with that old pan if I weren’t, well, insubstantial.
Can you believe it, though: now, I’m glad he brought it.
We don’t really need to eat here. No bodies to sustain and all that. But it helps to pass the time, you know, and I do miss the smell of a good pasta.
Oh, don’t worry, Hao has some noodles! Lucky, that. He likes a bit of gossip, too, and is always coming round to jabber. I enjoy the company and we both think it’s hilarious how much it upsets stuffy old Willem. The codger has been here for like 300 years and, with all the changes this city has gone through, still gets bothered by the sight of an Italian woman and Chinese man sharing a meal. And I thought my husband was out of touch!
Ah, here comes Hao now. You’ll like him. I would have never met him when we were alive, even if we had been living during the same times. That’s one of the best things about this place: getting to meet so many interesting people. People whose lives were nothing like mine.
My husband might find his way here eventually. I’ll tell you a little secret, though: I’m hoping he finds another woman willing to clean his house and maybe even give him some kids. Then they can make their hereafter somewhere else, and I can enjoy this little plot all by myself. And keep making new friends, like yourself.
Smell that? Sauce is done. Do you wanna stick around for a plate?
About the Author
Sarah Jean Benvenuti is a writer, musician, professor, and creative entrepreneur. She is the Founder and CEO of Benvenuti Arts; an adjunct professor for Master of Arts Management Programs at Carnegie Mellon University and the Università di Bologna; and a cofounder of the roving artists colony, the Wandering Theatre Collective. She has been published by the online flash fiction literary magazine, Short Beasts, and in The Atlas of Gratitude & Delight by Write Pittsburgh. Her travel writing and other information can be found at sarahjeanbenvenuti.com.
Camp Gaza
by Alison Glick
I needed no clock to tell me the time during those precious Gaza mornings.
Camp Gaza began promptly at 9, and every Sunday through Thursday around 8:30 a murmur of voices floated up from the YMCA courtyard below, swelling in volume as the time approached the top of the hour. A high cement wall surrounded the Y’s grounds and buildings, all secured by a bolted metal gate that opened onto a red clay courtyard — the camp’s center of action. It was the place where campers gathered each morning, a few boys lazily shooting hoops and girls in small clusters, heads bent together, chatting and laughing. The sound of the camp’s ringing doorbell would soon be drowned out by the animated voices of the campers, each one greeted with the scraping of the gate’s bolt sliding along its track, opening the door to their new day. The chorus of excitement wafted up across the street and through the bedroom window, flung open to any hint of breeze that could make its way through the thick Gazan air that thinned only slightly over night. This was my morning alarm in summer 2023, the last time I saw Gaza in the before times.
It was a Gaza I hadn’t seen for thirty-one years. My previous visit, like this one, was to bring my daughter to see her father’s family. That Gaza was one I still knew well. I could flag down a Peugeot 404 taxi with a baby on my hip and navigate the labyrinthine maze of Shati camp’s alleyways, unintimidated by the stares of passersby. Missing then but present now was her father Zayn, my former husband, who had returned from a painful, disorienting exile and was our host, along with his wife.
This Gaza had become almost unrecognizable to me. How could I not know we were on Omar al-Mukhtar Street, the main street I had driven down hundreds of times in the two years I lived there? Was that really Souk al-Fres, once an open-air market with farmers selling produce off the back of donkey carts and now an expanse of well-kept storefronts? Most shocking was not recognizing the house where Zayn and I had lived as newlyweds. Yes, floors had been added, as had a coat or two of paint. A lump rose in my throat when I saw that the garden had been sacrificed to space needed for my brotherin-law’s growing family that had moved in during Zayn’s exile. But what really threw me was the neighborhood. The four-story house built inches away from ours hadn’t existed then. Neither had the cluster of shops across the street. And what had happened to the swathe of sand between the house and Shati camp where every afternoon lithe, raucous boys would careen up and down their makeshift field chasing a soccer ball? Like so much of that Gaza — my marriage to Zayn, countless friends, vestigial memories — it was gone. The question for me now became what is here instead?
From my ninth-floor perch that I shared with our daughter in Zayn’s apartment, I had a bird’s-eye view of the Y, with the camp’s activities forming a kind of soundtrack to our visit. Punctuating the swell of morning voices at precisely nine o’clock was a sharp blast from the director’s whistle. It was time for the good morning call and response followed by daily announcements, and time for us to be up and dressed, ready for the day.
For Zayn, every day included a trip to what he called his farm, a plot of land in the town of Beit Lahia, north of Gaza City near the border. On those one and a half dunums of cherished earth he had created a garden oasis. The gate opened onto a patio shaded by a grape arbor heavy with pale green fruit that sparkled in the summer sun. Behind a small hut that hosted visitors in rainy weather stood a few towering date palms whose clusters of young fruit hung down like yellow feather dusters. Next to those, in a section reserved solely for them, stood several rows of olive trees, whose graceful silver-green leaves and intricate, sturdy trunks were unmistakable. Woven throughout were pomegranate, pomelo, papaya, lemon and fig trees. Stalks of corn and banana leaves waved in a modest breeze to the pepper and beet plants below. Punctuating it all were fragrant bushes of basil, jasmine and mint. The abundance was almost overwhelming. Yet I could not help gravitating to the elegant flowers that dotted the landscape, some in earthenware pots and others in old olive oil tins and plastic buckets: spikes of purple gladiolus and blood-red hibiscus, butter yellow lilies, and lush coral roses. Seeing such delicate beauty take its place among the hardy and stalwart produce was somehow very Gazan.
Zayn weeded and watered, fussing over his bounty like a farmer preparing for the county fair, as our daughter and I watched. Mornings at the farm stretched into early afternoon, when visitors would often arrive. Those who were children thirty-one years ago would bring their children, along with nieces and nephews who hadn’t yet been born my last time here. Tea would be served along with some offering from the garden. Before leaving for lunch, Zayn would prepare a bundle of that day’s harvest — peppers and lemons, potatoes and papaya, a few stems of roses — carefully wrapping it all in a plastic bag that he would stop to give to friends on our way home.
After lunch we would all sleep away what we could of the midday heat. The cheers of the campers’ late afternoon basketball game would wake me, sticky and bewildered, from a hazy slumber. Sipping sweet tea brightened with mint from our morning, I would take my place at the open window, forearms perched on the aluminum frame. Adorned in track suits and sneakers, the players dashed up and down the green court, hijabs flapping behind those girls who were wearing them, everyone sweating and cheering. The boys made up in shooting skills what they lacked in the girls’ height advantage. Players cycled in and out at the signal of the coach’s whistle. At the end, everyone circled together, hands clasped, faces red with excitement and effort. After yelling a chant I could never quite understand, they raised their arms and let out one last whoop! Game over.
One evening near the end of our stay, the basketball court was transformed into a dance floor for dabke, with neat rows of chairs lined up on the perimeter. Twinkling lights strung between the Y’s buildings looked like fireflies from my vantage point. The end-ofcamp party transformed the usually silent night-time courtyard into a celebration buzzing with excitement. Once the sound system was hooked up, the throbbing beat of tablas, dabke music, and Arabic pop songs reverberated throughout the neighborhood late into the night.
The next morning children arrived to collect their remaining belongings, shoving them into backpacks that would go unused for the school year that would not be. In a few short months, those backpacks would carry only the essentials as they fled for their lives, leaving their childhoods behind.
Now Gaza is unrecognizable to all. Miraculously, though, the YMCA stands partially intact, its windowless buildings pockmarked with bullet holes, the grounds strewn with chunks of concrete and metal. The courtyard where campers once gathered each morning is now home to a displaced family living under a tarp. On a wall to which the tarp has been tied, someone has painted a line from a Mahmoud Darwish poem: “On this land there is something worth living for.” Those returning to the north and to every other place from which they have been displaced, and those who never left know exactly what that something is.
Gaza holds for me now what it has always held: love. It’s a love that looks and feels different in ways that have taken time to understand. Like the courtyard of the Y, it has been battered by the forces aligned against it but remains open to those seeking shelter from a loveless world. In the difference there is also a gift. New people to love and laugh with. New people to form memories with. And new people, as I would learn after October 7, to grieve. It’s a familial love, yes, but somehow something more. It’s a love forged and strengthened by its own rending and repair. It’s a love that grows in unexpected ways and places, like the silky roses in Zayn’s garden. And it has become a buoy to which we all desperately cling in a sea of genocidal violence. Most crucially, it is our north star to the future for without it we are lost.
About the Author
Alison Glick lived in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and Yarmouk Refugee Camp in Syria for six years, working as a teacher, human rights researcher, and freelance writer. Her novel The Other End of the Sea is based on her experiences living and working in the Middle East. She now lives and writes in Philadelphia.
When Fog Lifts
by Robert Bradley
Morning tule fog slowed him. Had it always been this thick?
He leaned over to the passenger window, cranked it, and muttered “Niflheim” before turning at the street sign.
The Lincoln’s brakes rasped to a stop under a row of sycamores. Tree sap always guaranteed him a spot. No car wash around got that scum.
This time the drive from the coast took four hours with the valley fog, more than he remembered. He stretched, then pushed the door half closed.
Sam’s house—hers now—was unchanged, only bleached more. The valley spared the wood-frame houses a little. Lawn patches fighting hardpan were still green until summer burned everything. He slammed the door louder to alert her. “Why not sprinkle him here, Cindy?”
Then he saw her at the door.
Inside, they sat at the coffee table. A tarot pack dominated the uncluttered surface, edges frayed to fit her fingers. The top card showed a man hanged by a foot, wearing primary colors mirrored against a smooth, white box…Sam’s ashes, no doubt.
Jeff surveyed the room. “I see his things are gone.”
“I should have kept the fly rod,” she said. “Do you remember how to string one?” Her jab made him look harder at the box and remember the times he and Sam waded Sierra creeks.
Crystals waited in a window, ready to cast a spectrum across the hardwood when the sun broke through. “It’s like Norse hell in this town,” he said.
“Odin’s realm.” She studied the hanged man, then shuffled the deck. “We got stuck here.” She kept shuffling, like thumbing a rosary.
She and Sam had spent summer evenings on the back porch, planned to fix it up the house, maybe travel some. She still heard him when she fell asleep.
He asked, “So, it finally got him? Emphysema?”
“After the army, he kept smoking and drinking. He’d mess with the rod and reel. But never went after you left. Can typing reports in an air-conditioned trailer in the jungle do that to someone?”
“We weren’t there,” he said.
She brought up teaching.
He admitted boredom came with tenure, but it beat sleeping in cars like some grad school friends. She laughed her low laugh and suggested he keep the big Lincoln just in case.
He asked her about the veteran cemetery near the coast. “You knew him. He wouldn’t like that.”
“The ocean then? I can send photos….”
She shrugged and nodded to the fence post in a corner. “His conversation piece.” It survived the yard sale. Woodpecker holes, some still holding acorns, lined it from top to bottom. He remembered when they liberated it, driving back from a day on the streams. Ranchers left them to rot near the road.
“It’s about all that’s left. You want it?” She lifted her fingers away from Sam’s ashes. When he nodded, she picked up Sam’s ashes and said, “I guess you want to get back.”
He followed her to the car, post hoisted over a shoulder.
The moon roof opened wide enough to slide it behind the seat, like when they brought it back from the hills.
He swept away textbooks, papers, and sandwich wrappers to make room next to him.
Her touch stopped him. He looked at her but only saw the sun burning through her linen shirt sleeves.
“Do you…?” he asked.
“No.” She cradled the box momentarily before handing it over.
He considered her laconic answer before replying, “Take care.”
She called over her shoulder, “Don’t get hung up. It’s a long drive.” He nodded and fished for keys. She was inside before the engine caught.
On the way out of town he traced the coast range along the valley edge. It always felt different after the fog lifted. “The hills will stay green a while,” he thought. Growing up on the farm, he had imagined emeralds must glow like that.
Something made him slow and turn off. The post scraped behind him as he aimed east into foothill cattle country. His grade school appeared, windows boarded, weeds breaking through packed soil next to the basketball court. He and Sam drew circles there for marbles and tops. How long before they tore down the fence and built tacky houses?
The road to the farm came next. Someone had told him the new owners had pulled the vines. He kept heading toward the Sierras until the backcountry snow filled the windshield.
When he entered the foothills, they felt to him like a vast, familiar library.
About the Author
Robert Bradley – Bob earned at Ph.D. in German Literature at UC Santa Barbara. After some years teaching, he left academia for a career in IT. Now retired in the Pacific Northwest, he returns to an earlier love.