Not Here to Stay | snippet

prologue

Days to Amani's death: 0

Chaos erupted on the seventh floor of Tawau Hospital as a woman escaped from her ward and bolted for the stairs. They would tell you that she was a woman. But she was merely a girl. Nineteen. Bruised. And she had just gotten a call saying her father was leaving this world forever 3,806 km away.

The girl ran, her vision blurred by tears. The back of her left hand was bleeding from where she had ripped off the needle feeding fluid into her veins. She gripped her phone in her bloodied hand as the other pressed the clean stitches across her stomach. Stitches that held together the gaping hole where the stillborn baby had been taken out of her uterus a few hours ago. She was just a girl, screaming at her sister on the phone to make her father stay.

"I'm going home, I'm going home right now," she shouted. "Tell Abah to hold on!"

The drugs they had administered to numb her post-surgery pain fed her glimpses of Abah every few seconds. Even though she needed to focus on her escape, she swallowed every hallucination like a starved lion.

She was six again, abandoning her first mission to play in the field in front of her house. She sat in a pool of tears and dead grass after realising she had turned everything gloriously green into a horrid brown. Her father kneeled beside her and smiled.

"Why does everything die when I touch it?" she professed gloomily. "I don't want this knack."

"Just because we don't understand how something can be good does not mean it's bad. Especially when Allah has destined it for us. There is absolutely no reason for the Greatest One to burden us with something that does not benefit us."

"I want your knack. You can cut watermelon with your hand."

"When I was your age, I never had clothes that were not cut in half by the end of the day. Nobody would give me books because I would slice through them with my bare hands. Not on purpose of course—I would just end up tearing the pages to shreds by accident, especially when I was angry. I didn't understand when I was young either."

The little girl looked at her father, still frowning.

"Knacks are not superpowers, my Amani. They're exaggerated talents. Talents can be a curse or a blessing, or both. And we've got a whole life to figure out which one they are."

"I want to know now."

"I know," he chuckled, ruffling his daughter's hair. The view– two souls bound by love and blood in the dimming light of day, surrounded by grass cut just to cushion their feet as they walked to find a suitable spot– became clearer as evening turned to night. The two stayed a little longer to watch the stars on their backs. They prayed on the grass, the father on the dead patch his daughter had furiously grabbed earlier and the girl on a pink prayer mat she fetched from their house.The prayer mat had a cartoon mosque on it, pink in all its glory.

Amani was ten when her father was diagnosed with a rare heart disease. His arteries would convulse and shake, disrupting his blood flow and forcing him awake with the pain. After a few months, they finally went to the hospital to put a name to the discomfort he had dismissed as "just my midnight strains".

Abah was diagnosed with Prinzmetal Angina.

He was thirty-five and healthy, but the doctor said it was just the way things were. His sickness never stopped him from being her Abah.

She was fifteen when her high school friends' cruelty got to her;they made fun of her knack. She went home professing her hatred for her friends, promising that she would be successful one day and put them to shame.