Lines

A short story by Joel A. Vicars

January 14th, 2014, at 6:41am, 117 km from Turkey:

The sunrise was dark red, but not like blood, more like a hibiscus petal. The same as the day his daughter Jala was born, which was the same as the day Ahmed joined the mujaheddin. Both days changed his life. He stared into the carmine twilight and felt the growing suspicion deep in his gut that this day would, too.

Ahmed loved his daughter, Jala, more than anything. They left at dawn that morning. The rest of the family would follow by plane and meet them. He and Jala had to drive. Her passport might already be flagged.

She was sleeping in the back of their old Toyota, laid out across the bench seat. He adjusted the mirror so he could see her face. In these, her most peaceful moments, he could still see the face of his baby girl. He could see the parts of her that were her mother’s, his, and those most precious parts that were unique to her. He looked too long and drifted off the curb slightly, which made her stir. The face she made was her mother’s.

Ahmed thought of the night before, when she was brought to his door weeping. Soldiers had caught her leading a book club. The new regime didn’t tolerate clubs run by women, and they certainly didn’t approve of them learning unsupervised. She could’ve been beaten, raped, or killed, and very likely that’s what some of them had in mind, but she was spared by Commander Ali Moussa al-Tunisi, the most powerful man in Raqqa. The girls in her book club never covered their faces when they were together, and the moment Commander Ali saw her face he restrained his men and brought Jala home to her family personally.

He was standing in the threshold of their family home when Commander Ali told them Jala would be his new wife. He stared deep into her eyes, forcing her chin up when she dropped her gaze to the floor. He ran his fingers through her hair, which he never offered to cover, and - thank God - he gave her back alive.

As his mind returned from the past Ahmed listened to the tires hum along the sandy asphalt and felt his eyelids pressing down. He’d only slept a few hours that night. He lit a cigarette. Galousis brand, careful to usher the smoke out the open crack above his window. The smell would bother Jala. With every puff he was more awake and less anxious, or at least that’s what he kept telling himself.

He turned north onto Route 712. If he sped, the journey to Tell Abyad would take less than two hours. He wasn’t sure what he’d say to get them across the border, but he had two hours to figure something out.

7:24am, ~ 76 km from Turkey:

Forty minutes had passed. So had three cigarettes and the remainder of his lukewarm morning tea. His wife made him give up coffee when he started having blood pressure issues. It was that or his cigarettes. He’d chosen the less painful loss. 

He resented the tea. It barely had any kick at all, and he still had a long drive ahead. After that he would need to charm his way across the border, which was bound to backfire if he was so decaffeinated, he forgot what country he was trying to enter. 

The scenery changed from the green fields that surrounded Al Raqqah, to an empty expanse of dust and short shrubs. Jala was still asleep. So far, they’d beaten the crowd, but that was doomed to change. They were less than ten minutes from the M4 intersection. Traffic would get much worse there.

He opened the glovebox and removed his Makarov nine-millimeter from its leather case. He examined the once familiar weapon. It was heavier than he remembered, or perhaps his hands had gotten weaker with age. 

He made sure the safety was on before he chambered a round. Even with all his stealth, the metallic CA-CHINK of the chamber closing woke Jala with a start. In that initial panic, common to all who get startled awake, she asked, “What was that?”

“Hit a bird,” he lied with the ease of a father who needed to shield his child from a terrible truth, “nothing to be afraid of.” He slipped the pistol into its at-the-ready hiding spot between his seat and console. All the while praying that he wouldn’t need to move it again until he was placing it safely back in its hiding spot in the mouth of an attic entrance.

“Hmm. Gross. How much farther?”

“We still have a while to go.” He couldn’t help but dwell on every word she said. He remembered the first time she spoke. Her first word had been “mama”, of course, but she looked at him when she said it, and he knew. That line of thinking made his heart weigh heavily, and he transferred the extra weight to the accelerator. There was no time to waste.

7:46am, ~ 57 km from Turkey:

He could see the surge of traffic merging with the M4. His heart rate rose as the car slowed. He lit another cigarette, and Jala fussed at him. “Abu, those are bad for you. And they stink!”

“I’ve been smoking my whole life. I never had a problem.” He took the criticism in stride, concerning himself instead with the stopped traffic ahead. But she did make him consider the irony of being killed by American grown tobacco after the life he lived. Maybe he would quit, but after today. Too stressful to start today.

Dust clouds were kicking up along the sides of the road ahead. It was too thick for it to be anything other than trucks driving along the edge of the highway. Someone had set up a traffic stop. He hoped it was the old government screening for rebels. He wouldn’t have any trouble from them, but if it was Daesh they might be in some trouble.

Minutes ticked by and the line of cars behind them stretched out into the horizon. Still, they sat, occasionally lurching a car length forward. A Toyota Hilux ahead began to honk. When that yielded nothing, it pulled off the road and took off across the roadside.

The sound of a belt fed rifle split the air. Bullets cut a crooked line of red stained holes through the cab windows of the rogue truck. It sped ahead; curving left into an embankment where it crashed to a halt. Two pickups sped across the dirt toward the wreck. Both flying the black flag of Daesh.

Time slowed. It had been a long time since he felt the horrible invigoration of war. But here it was, waiting like an old friend. 

He heard Jala gasp. He hammered the clutch and threw the car into reverse and back to drive so fast it nearly killed the engine. The back wheels peeled out as he took off through the stampede. He told Jala to get down, instinctually looking back at her in the mirror to see if she was safe. A car crashed into their front fender during his lapse in attention. He turned the wheel, tearing the fender off as he took off down the roadside opposite where the truck had been shot. A mass of other cars converged there, and he hoped they would cover his escape. More trucks waving the same Black flags swarmed toward them from the East. They cut down one car after another for trying to escape, but by some miracle of God’s will, he and Jala made it through.

The car shook and roiled fiercely. Its suspension, which wasn’t meant for anything rougher than a level gravel road, did its best to crawl through the rutted dust. The trucks were outfitted with off-road tires and with them they ran down car after car, filling them with bullets or ripping the occupants out and pressing them face down into the cold desert dust. 

He felt perfect adrenaline-driven clarity interrupted by the all-consuming distraction of his daughter screaming in fear for her life. 

A scream is different when it comes from your child. It pierces more than air. The mind has space for nothing else and the heart feels like it’s being lowered into acid. It was during one of those screams that he hit a just-too-jagged rock and the front passenger tire tore open. The car rolled to a stop. He was going for his Makarov when a man shot an AK-47 over the top of the car.

“Come out! This land belongs to the caliphate!”

Jala looked at him through the rear-view mirror, a look on her face he hadn’t seen since she believed monsters were hiding under her bed. 

In the driver’s side mirror, he could see the armed figure draped entirely in black, except for a sand brown vest strapped over his chest, walking toward the car with his rifle at the ready. If he hesitated, they’d take Jala. If he killed this one, the others would shoot him and Jala, both. She was looking for her father to have an answer and he felt ashamed that he didn’t have one to give.

The man ordered them out of the car, again. Ahmed slipped the trusty Makarov out of hiding as he went. He looked at Jala one last time and told her to wait there. They’d catch her if she ran, but if they believed he was alone they might not search the car. He passed the weapon back to her and she took it with the same reluctance she might’ve a blazing hot coal. “Keep down and keep quiet. If one of them sees you, use that. If they’re going to take you…” he left the thought unfinished. He refused to spend his last moments with his child thinking of horrible things. “I love you, Habibti. Stay quiet.”

Ahmed felt the ache of the crash in his lower back as he climbed out of the vehicle. It wasn’t a good sign that getting out of the car was hard on its own.

The armed man was still shouting, “Stop there and turn out your pockets!” Ahmed was complying, unsure what would come next. Someone else fired a shotgun from the back cab of a maroon sedan. The blast knocked one of the other Daesh fighters off his feet. Without another word, Brown Vest turned his rifle and ran toward the sedan, firing in bursts as he moved.

Ahmed didn’t wait. He retrieved Jala and they ran the other way. A nineties model pickup stopped ahead and let out a double honk. He and Jala jumped in the back without hesitation, and the truck escaped into the thick fog of dust. He was relieved to find the windshield mostly intact, just one bullet hole on the passenger side. Their rescuer didn’t bother pulling over to introduce himself. He drove in a broken line for about ten kilometers, the same amount of time it took for Ahmed's heart rate to get back to normal. A short time later they changed trajectory and started heading back toward the main road. 

Jala hadn’t said a word, she just wrung her hands around the Makarov, eyes wide, trying to process how fast her world was coming apart. He pulled her close, and they waited.

8:18am, ~ 29 km from Turkey:

Overhead a flock of bombers roared by. They could’ve belonged to anyone, going by the reports on the radio. These were probably Russian or Assad’s government, but they could also be Jordanian, Israeli. The list went on. Ahmed had no idea. One thing he knew for sure was that Americans would have used drones. 

His home was the newest battleground for the imperial powers. He and the rest of the people who spent generations making lives here would be forgotten in the wreckage. There wouldn’t be anything to go back to when it was over. He learned all about that in Afghanistan, years ago. What the imperialists can’t own, they erase. Now, thanks to Daesh, their eyes and their weapons were aimed at Syria.

They finally met the truck owner when he shouted out the window that he needed gas and that they should be prepared to stop. The first three stations they passed had been bombed. There was nothing but shrapnel and fire left. The last station was occupied by Daesh. They spent the next five kilometers holding their breath, waiting for one of the black-flagged trucks to speed up behind them and run them off the road. 

None ever did. Ahmed had almost convinced himself they were home free when the truck sputtered and drifted to a stop. The driver climbed out cursing the engine and delivering a few kicks to the front tire.

Far ahead, they could see more trucks approaching. At this distance they could see flags waving but couldn’t see them clearly. 

It was kilometers to the next road. 

  They had nowhere to run.  

The driver leaned his head back into the cab and emerged holding a Nagant M1895 revolver. He asked Ahmed, “Do you want me to take care of you, too?” 

He stood confused for only a second before he understood. He saw Jala, frozen. He shook his head, no. The man said to Jala in a calm, kind voice, “Turn away please. I’d like this to be a private moment.” 

It takes months to get used to the sounds of gunshots, years to go a long time without losing the tolerance. When the streak of red sprayed across the road, Jala leapt. She started breathing in sharp broken breaths. He wanted to comfort her, but there was just no time. The trucks were getting close. Close enough to hear the tires on the pavement, and close enough to see that the flag was Daesh. Ahmed didn’t jump when the gun went off, but he wondered if he should have told the driver, yes. 

He was struggling to come up with a plan when he remembered a story from his time in Afghanistan. He rushed over to the dead man and hoisted his head up, spread blood carefully onto his clothes, and called Jala to him.

~ 8:30 am, ~ 25 km from Turkey:

They were laying in the sand, faces going numb against the winter chilled gravel. The dead man’s blood was drying against their skin and staining their clothes. 

One. He counted the trucks as they passed by their corpses. 

Two. They were playing loud music as they passed. 

Three. He prayed they wouldn’t stop. 

Four. If they did, he had five bullets for twenty men. 

Five. They weren’t stopping. He felt overjoyed. Then he heard brakes screech to a halt behind him.

The gun was already in his hand, laying loosely in his open fingers, leading anyone who might wonder to think he’d killed the others when the truck broke down. At least he prayed that's what they thought.

The engine cut off and two Daesh fighters climbed out, shoes sliding lazily through the dirt. 

They were tired, and that was good. 

Ahmed could feel his insurgent instincts coming back. He listened, trying to hear Jala before they did. He couldn’t let them get the first shot if she gave herself away.

One man went to the other side of the truck and began to rummage through the cab, humming all the while. Ahmed recognized the tune, Michael Jackson’s Billie Jean. Billie Jean continued corpse robbing, finding only a half-eaten banana and a flashlight from the eighties. Ahmed snuck a peek at the other man. He masked his face with a keffiyeh that was red emblazoned with a floral pattern that looked like jasmine flowers. He looked silly, and yet somehow, he didn’t inspire much laughter. He pissed into the dirt between the trucks, moaning with relief as his bladder released.

  Jasmine chuckled to himself for a second and shouted to Billie Jean in a language Ahmed didn’t recognize. Once he had an audience, he raised his stream to piss on Jala’s legs. Ahmed’s chest tightened and he listened to see if the rest of the convoy was still close enough to hear gunshots. 

They were.

Billie Jean didn’t laugh. Instead, he responded using the same unknown tongue in a tone that sounded stern. Jasmine’s piss stream died down, trailing off into the dirt. Then he walked over to Jala and lowered his ear down to her nose. He slung his rifle over his back as he crouched. 

That’s when Jala shot him twice in the chest with the Makarov. Ahmed forgot he’d given it to her. It took one horrible moment, worrying Jala was the one who’d been shot, to register what she’d done. Once he did, Ahmed rose up like a zombie and fired four more shots through the chest of Billie Jean. The gun felt wrong because it was sighted for someone else, but at this range it didn’t matter. Bullets passed through Billie Jean in a loose cluster. Sloppy as it was, it did the trick. He slumped down leaving bright red streaks on the cab of the truck before collapsing face down in the dirt.

  Ahmed and Jala piled hastily into the Daesh truck, but there was no sign of the keys. They tried searching the bodies, but everything was covered in blood. Jala shouted, pointing to the dust of the Daesh convoy. Ahmed immediately realized why. They were turning around. 

As the convoy was bearing down on them, he heard a dull roar overhead, and then suddenly the air was sucked away as if by the world's largest vacuum. The sound fell flat without air to move through. Ahmed barely even saw the flash of flames behind the shrubs before the shockwave came rushing the other direction knocking him flat on his back a half-dozen meters from where he’d been standing. The detonation erased the Daesh caravan with a mind rattling boom. It was so loud he never even heard the plane that dropped it fly past.

He had to find Jala. 

He had to do it now, because bombs rarely fell alone. 

He managed to lift his head, which was how he learned his back wasn’t broken. The truck that had just been right in front of him was now flipped on its side, laying on top of where he’d just been standing. 

He found Jala facedown, not moving.

He shook her gently to wake her up without hurting her.

Nothing.

He shook harder and said her name.

Nothing.

He knelt there shaking her and calling her name. He was pleading for her eyes to move, or to feel her take a breath, but she just kept laying there.

The blast had knocked her head covering loose. Her hair was filthy from the blanket of dust that fell on them. He tried to brush it out and cover her, but his hands were covered in blood, and he couldn’t seem to get them dry no matter how much he wiped them on his clothes.

His eyes started to fill as he remembered all the times he’d looked at her with disappointment because of how she dressed, or what she said, or who she loved.

He realized that he’d trade his place in heaven for the chance to feel her move. He wept because no matter how much he wanted it, he could never take back those mistakes, not any more than he could trade paradise for a breath.

He let his face fall into the dust, and for a moment everything else disappeared. All that was left was him and his baby girl, cold and breathless. 

They had to pull him off her. He hit the first man that touched him and tried to shoot the second. The third didn’t wait. He knocked him back down with a swift strike from the butt end of an MPT-76. Then he pinned him down with a knee to the neck and tied his arms. Ahmed screamed and thrashed because anger was all he had left in him.

  Whoever they were, they dropped the bomb that killed his little girl, and in that moment, he hated them much more than Daesh. As he was cursing them from the dirt, one of their medics arrived and pushed a needle into Jala’s chest. The needle summoned up the miracle sound of his daughter coughing and breathing.

Jala was breathing!

In that moment he loved that sinful medic more than he loved his own mother, because she was the one who answered his prayers.

Jala was still breathing, and now her eyes were open.

Her eyes were open, too, and he was crying. The dust and sand were rough as they stuck to the congealing blood on his face. His ears were still ringing from the bomb, but through it all he could hear her. She was alive!

He watched two men carry Jala away and for the first time he cared who they were. On their shoulders he could make out a patch bearing the yellow shield and red star. They were Kurds. People’s Defense Units. The Westerners called them YPG. He knew they’d take them north toward the border, exactly the way they needed to go. 

A short while later two Kurds picked him up and threw him into the bed of a pickup where he bumped and rattled for kilometers. It didn’t hurt until the shock of the bomb wore off. Then his adrenaline crashed, and he started nodding off between bone shaking bumps. When he roused, his whole body felt like a giant had picked him up and whipped him like a dusty floor mat. All that was fine, because Jala was alive. She was alive and the Kurd medics were going North with her toward the border, toward safety. It was all fine. 

They were going to be okay. 

Jala was going to be okay.

 ~ 9:00 am, ~ 10km from Turkey:

They arrived in a camp that couldn’t be far from Suluk. They took him straight to the clinic and he got a good view of \ short buildings and tent tops peeking over the truck bed.

Ahmed asked the man who helped him out of the truck how to find Jala. He didn’t answer. Ahmed wondered if he even understood. He probably only spoke Kurdish or Turkish, and Ahmed only knew a few words of either. He provoked a reaction with his limited Kurdish.

The soldier seemed to be calmly explaining everything with words that Ahmed couldn’t understand. He tried to ask for someone who spoke Arabic, but the man just explained again using the same words.

Frustrated, Ahmed started asking every soldier he could find if they could speak Arabic. Once he was away from the YPG staging base it didn’t take long before he found a young man named Rahim, who was a skinny boy with a small black goatee and an Al-Shark Lager t-shirt. He confirmed that this was indeed Suluk and agreed to translate Kurdish for him. 

They searched for hours. The few people who would bother talking to him said they hadn’t seen her. He felt his heart pound harder after every dismissive look. He started asking faster, barely waiting on Rahim’s translations before moving on. He had no time left to waste. The longer they were separated, the more chance she was in danger. Commander Ali could catch up with them soon. If he found her alone then Jala, the light of his life, would be doomed to abuse and humiliation. He would not allow that.

He was grabbing people now, and barking at them in Arabic while Rahim struggled to translate his shouting. Then, almost to his surprise, a nurse simply pointed at a tent near the end of the dirt trail running through the clinic.

They found guards at the tent. It didn’t take long to convince them to let him see her, but the rest of the conversation went much worse. They insisted that he speak with their commander Immediately. Ahmed wanted to say no and storm past them to his daughter to see if she was alright, but they had rifles, and rifles were a useful tool for stopping a debate before it started.

The officer they spoke to had a lisp that sounded as though he were doing a Donald Duck impression. He claimed that Ahmed and Jala owed them fees for Jala’s treatment, safe transportation, and to pay off the fighter Ahmed punched. All of that would’ve been fine, except for the fact that he hadn’t seen the bag containing his money and passports since the bomb dropped. Ahmed told Donald Duck about this via Rahim. 

Rahim leaned over to translate, saying, “He says they have your Passports, and your bag.” He took an extended pause as Donald’s tone turned grave. Then Rahim continued, “He says they didn’t recover any money. He says you owe them two-hundred and thirty thousand Syrian pounds.”

“You dropped a bomb on us,” Ahmed said growing furious that their fighters stole all his money, and terrified that their passports were being seized. “I have family in Turkey who can pay,” Ahmed lied, too desperately to be believed.

Donald quacked out his response and Rahim translated, “He says they must pay first. Then you can cross.”

He thought of Commander Ali’s serpentine eyes slithering over Jala while he decreed she would be his wife.

He imagined all the Daesh fighters chasing them out of Raqqa.

He thought of that dog wrapped in Jasmine pissing on Jala.

He thought of all the times he tried to make her change.

He thought of what they might do if they knew how she was.

  He thought of her hanging from a crane, or tied to a post to be stoned, and he knew that unless he could get her across that stupid line, unless he could get her to a place Ali couldn’t follow, that’s exactly where she would end up.

He promised Donald something, “That isn’t going to happen. We’re crossing today.”

Donald shook his head and mumbled wistfully at Rahim who reported, “He says, not today.”

Ahmed grabbed Donald by the arm and said with focused certainty, “You will give us our passports! We will go to Tel Abyad! Then we will cross today!”

Donald calmly gave orders to two armed guards who forced Ahmed to let go before escorting him away. Rahim didn’t follow, and Ahmed couldn’t blame him.

The fighters let go of their death grip on his arms a dozen yards away, shoving him just a little as they let go. They issued what he had to assume was a warning, again in Kurdish, and again wasted. He walked away, trying his best to reassemble his dignity. They had come to a line they couldn’t cross. Worse yet, it was one drawn by a man who sounded like a cartoon.

He forced himself to go to Jala’s bedside, praying to Allah before he saw her that she was alright. The reveal broke his heart. Huge parts of her skin, the same that he cradled when she was a baby, were bruised in huge patches of purple and slashed in deep gashes along the surface. Red scabs filled the wounds and reminded him how much he’d failed her, and how close she’d come to —

Ahmed looked away from her broken body, quickly drying his eyes before this display of weakness broke her spirit, too. Her head rolled carefully to face him, and the derelict bed whined even at that gentle motion.

Purity, once the guiding virtue of his life, he now saw for the cruel trick it had always been. She smiled and he had to choke back tears again. He felt a wave of relief that equaled his shame. Despite all his mistakes, look how much God had given him. He sat holding Jala, experiencing that hurricane of guilt and love, and wishing he’d understood sooner how much it could mean not to reap what he’d sown.

Hanging over all that was the border, the last test. The last place that threatened to make him reap what he’d sown once and for all. He held Jala’s hand in his, wondering how to tell her they couldn’t get across.

Wondering how to tell her they’d be trapped here when Daesh came to take her away.

 Wondering how to tell her they wouldn’t see her mother and the others again.

He had so much that needed saying but he couldn’t seem to find his voice, much less the right words. All he managed to assemble was a confession of the facts, “They took our passports.”

“It’s ok, Abu” she said, trying to be brave, “We’re safe for now.”

Ahmed’s heart swelled with pride, and he drew his courage from her’s. “Do you need anything?”

“I’m hungry.”

The nurses had managed to keep her hydrated, but food was scarce and even clinic patients had to fend for themselves.

Ahmed was leaving the tent to steal whatever he could for her, God forgive him, when suddenly Rahim was standing inches ahead of him. Ahmed was surprised to see him, but his jaw fell when he saw what Rahim was holding. In his hand was Ahmed’s bag, complete with two passports.

“How?”

“I convinced him you’d be trouble, and that you were too broke to give them anything else. It’s true, isn’t it?”

Ahmed ignored the question, because he was too relieved to hear anything but the sound of weight falling off his shoulders. When he finally landed back on his feet, he asked, “Why do this for us? Who are we to you?”

Rahim shrugged, “Why not? I had time and it wasn’t that hard.”

Ahmed laughed. To him it had seemed insurmountable. Funny how a little help could make mountains into mustard seeds.

He wrapped Rahim in a hug. He planted a kiss on the young man’s cheek, thanking him again and again. Rahim repeated, “It was nothing, nothing at all.”

1:16 pm,  0.8 km from Turkey:

  This was the last push. One more threshold to cross and this nightmare would be over.

  He sold the Markarov that Jala kept hidden in her clothes for much less than it was worth, but it was enough to buy them a meal and a ride to the border crossing in Tel Abayed. It was enough.

Ahmed had to fight to stay awake on the road. The exertion of the morning caught up to him and now his whole body felt like it was under a sandbag. Every part of him hurt. He didn’t know which aches to blame on the car accident and which ones to blame on the bomb. He was cold, heavy, and desperate to sleep. Soon, he told himself, but not yet. 

Jala’s ribs on the right were cracked which made it hard for her to move. Not that they were doing much of that in a packed truck bed, smelling the unwashed bodies of their fellow refugees as the cool winter air breezed past.

Far ahead, barely audible over the combined engine noise, were the occasional sounds of dogs barking at contraband and stowaways. Then suddenly all the dogs were barking louder than before. Behind them Ahmed heard the sounds of another helicopter coming toward them fast. Ahmed knew the make from the buzz of the blades, a Soviet Mi-24. He’d taken down his share in Afghanistan using stinger missiles. What he’d give to have one of those now.

The helicopter fired a missile that put a hole in the road ahead with another deafening boom. Traffic came screeching to a stop as they crashed into the crater.

A Turkish soldier opened fire with a Korkut thirty-five millimeter anti-air gun. A chain of shots trailed the helicopter, forcing it to maneuver away.

People in the crowd took the opportunity to run, but with Jala’s broken rib, she just couldn’t keep up. Trucks waving Daesh flags arrived through the open desert. They’d followed the helicopter around the Kurds in Suluk. They raced ahead of them, making a perimeter around the crater they’d just blasted into the earth.

Then he stepped out, hair slicked back, looking more like a serpent than ever. Commander Ali Moussa al-Tunisi had arrived, and he was looking through the dust cloud, staring right into Jala’s eyes. “Did you think you could dishonor me?” His face was red and twisted with hate, “Did you think your sin would go unanswered?”

Jala met his gaze this time. The scared girl from before was gone, replaced with the woman he raised. 

A dozen or so fighters piled out of the trucks and ran toward them. The gun was still firing overhead making every effort to bring down the helicopter which seemed perfectly content at the edge of their range, outmaneuvering their guns and wasting their ammunition until a second Turkish gun sprayed a volley through the hub where the blades met.

The machine came crashing down at the edge of the crater, annihilating two of the trucks and sending soldiers scattering into another cloud of dust. Soot filled the air, forming a cloud so thick you couldn’t see your own feet, much less anyone else.

Ahmed scrambled to find Jala, but the dust clawed at his eyes every time he tried to open them. He felt his way forward through the roiling cloud of gray, calling her name.

He heard her voice ahead, calling him forward, telling him she found a way through. Then she screamed, and Ahmed’s eyes shot open, daring to suffer the dust to see what was happening.

Between the wreckage of a crushed pickup and a burning helicopter was a badly burned Commander Ali, with Jala’s arm gripped viciously in his hand. Her veil was torn back so her hair waved in the wind. Ali brought the back of his other hand down across her face, and she slumped in his grip. He let go of her arm and let her fall to her knees before he brought down a second slap across the back of her head.

Ahmed ran forward and dove to tackle Ali, but he was younger, quicker, and stronger. Ahmed grabbed his leg, but too far up to use it to topple him. He grabbed Ahmed by the back of his clothes and landed three painful punches on his ribs.

Ahmed let go and tried to back up, put up his guard and catch his breath while Jala got away. Ali didn’t allow that. He stayed on Ahmed, grabbing him by the shoulders and hurling him into the hot bent metal of the truck. Ahmed tried to get his guard up again, but Ali didn’t give him any distance. He hit him three more times in the gut before pulling him off the wreck and throwing him down into the dirt.

Ahmed tried to get back on his feet, but his body was ablaze with pain and he was having trouble getting his legs underneath him. He got a moment's rest when Ali was distracted by several Turkish trucks that arrived and opened fire on his remaining fighters.

He pushed up onto his feet but by then Ali’s attention was back on him. He hit him over the head and hurled him down again. He kicked him in the ribs over and over, beating his lungs empty repeatedly until Ahmed felt himself starting to lose consciousness. Then a small gun went off nearby and the kicking stopped. Ahmed peeled his bleeding head off the road long enough to see Jala standing behind the smoking barrel of a dusty pistol, looking at a vertical split in the head of her tormentor.

Turkish soldiers emerged through the wall of dust barking orders they didn’t need a common language to understand. Jala let the pistol fall back into the dust. The world grew dimmer as blood pooled in the back of Ahmed’s eyes. Jala ignored the soldiers, running over to kneel beside him.

“Abu,” he heard her call him. His mind rolled back through all his favorite memories and the common thread was that voice saying that name. Abu. Ahmed loved that name. She held his hand as his eyes went dark. She leaned over him, and he could hear how sad she was. He told her not to cry. 

“It’s ok, Habibti.” Ahmed wasn’t sad. He kissed her on the cheek. He held her hand tight in his, and he knew in his heart that she was going to be ok. “You did it,” he told her.

“I love you, Abu!”

“I love you too, it’s going… to be —

August 13th, 2021, at 9:37 am, Istanbul, Turkey:

Jala had just finished teaching. She left the back storage unit the local grocer leant her to use as a classroom in a very good mood. Her students were doing well with their math and Arabic lessons, and the older kids had developed enough that she could start teaching literature, too.

She went to her job at a nearby cafe. She worked there for tips at night while she studied for her law degree in the mornings, and taught her lessons in the afternoon. Waiting for her on the ledge of the bay window was her favorite neighborhood cat, Kedi. She rose to a seat as Jala got close, and began her usual preemptive purring. Jala gave her a quick scratch behind the ears and heard the usual thump of Kedi dropping to the floor to follow her as she went through her shift change routine.

She flipped on the television in the corner and heard the familiar sound of CHP politicians blaming her and all the other Syrians for the problems they didn’t know how to solve. The man swinging his hate around on the TV behind her was Mayor Tanju Özcan. He was midway through some xenophobic rant about extra taxes for Syrians and the importance of legislation to limit the overuse of Syrian spices. Arguing that they assaulted the sensitive airways of real Turks and made their neighborhoods unlivable.

Jala had to smile at that. She could tell him a thing or two about what made a place unlivable, and one day she would. She cracked open her Immigration law textbook and got to work.