❝ That last day in the bunker, I knew I'd never be able to leave. My heart didn't want to leave. Even as I dragged it along with me, it kept finding a way back to you. So I did what I had to." Your voice grew heavy. "Fled to the city, gave away ever...
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You, Elaf Asfour, were anything but Durrab Isa.
You had a roughness about you that I never knew Durrab to have. A little jagged around the edges, a little worn out, almost as if you'd been forcefully ripped away from what used to be your home.
I wouldn't deny your presence was intimidating, but so was mine-for in that bunker, five feet underground with the ground shaking beneath us and rumbling above us, with the water pressure on the iron bunker door rising by the minute, with just a lousy lightbulb accompanying us-you didn't exist to me.
I didn't want you to.
I sat with my legs drawn up to my knees, my back against a cupboard while simultaneously glancing at you tweaking with a radio you'd found on the floor. It wouldn't work or ever start up again but I didn't have the heart to tell you that-I didn't have the heart to do anything,
Because mine was left in an unlocked stable, victim to a storm that wouldn't let me see him ever again. My Wazir.
"Next time," the old woman chuckled, her voice piercing through the silence. "I am never not paying heed to the forecast."
I hadn't paid much attention to her presence, simply because it was as negligible to me as yours. But as the overhanging lightbulb flickered on for just a few seconds-I drank in her appearance. Gray hair that glowed under the light, seemingly leather skin that drooped down her face, and hands decorated in wrinkles.
She reminded me of my father's mother, but then again, all grandmothers were the same, weren't they?
And then, at the same time as you, I saw it.
A round, ever-growing patch of dark red liquid a few inches above the hem of her cream-colored dress. I pushed my braid behind me as I stood up and carefully walked over to her. You followed close behind.
Your cologne, of course. You wouldn't be the hero of a 1950s vintage love story if your cologne couldn't even have survived through a storm.
I sat down next to her at the same time as you did. Would you stop copying me?
I lifted the hem a little to reveal a ghastly gash all across the length of her calf. A gash that wouldn't stop bleeding. Amani would have turned away in disgust-blood nauseated her-but I stayed put. This woman, old enough to pass for my grandmother, smiled down at us despite the blood that continued to stream down her leg. I noticed my own flowery summer dress drinking some of it in.
You reached over and untied the white cloth the woman had tied around her head. You jumbled up the cloth before lightly pressing it to the wound.
Catching me off-guard, you held my hand in your free one as you pressed my fingers to the cloth. "Apply pressure. I'll get the medical kit."
I nodded, my eyes on the woman. Sympathy rose up in me.
I turned around to watch you swing open the doors of the cupboard I was sitting against. You pulled out a couple of weary blankets, cans of beans and soup, and a small box with two lines over it whose color resembled that of the liquid running down the woman's leg.
