The sound of metal bending, cement breaking, a world falling.
Already she’s on the ground—Delan’s arm around her—before she realizes he must have pushed her down. She stays bent, hunched, and through the ringing in her ears, she hears the muffled sound of her breathing mix with the sound of rain falling after thunder. But it’s not rain. Of course it’s not rain. It’s glass, falling like rain, like ice, like every chime in the world had hovered in this spot and been released. Her fingers press white into the cement, and there is a jagged cut on her wrist, from what she’s not sure.
Time no longer has a hold. It might be seconds that she stays like this or minutes. Sounds grow louder, voices and cries in another language, even the radio that had been playing in the stall begins again, and with this, she realizes the sounds have been there the whole time but her hearing has not. When she turns to Delan, he’s looking over his shoulder. Another cloud of dust billows toward them but stops, like anger without the fuel to continue. People who were on the ground get up, scrambling, moving closer to the buildings. No one wants to be out in the open. A primal instinct.
And then Delan is lifting her at the waist and Soran is beside her, and they’re moving through the shambles of the market, past the shoes on the ground, past spills of beans and spices, through the tangles of prayer beads. What wasn’t knocked over from the blast must have been pushed over by people trying to get away, and when they get to the opening of the bazaar, she pauses, trying to focus, to find the men with the hookah pipes in front of the restaurant, but all she sees is dust. She waits for it to settle, and when it doesn’t, she realizes it’s because the restaurant, for the most part, is not there. Sirens bloom. And then she sees the rest.
Blood and dust. Shoes in the street. A man crawling. A woman gagging. People are slumped at strange angles—over chairs that have been tossed, over the sidewalk and into the street, against a wall but with legs up like children playing a game. Stomachs are exposed from shirts that have been pushed or blown away. For an irrational moment, she wants to go to a woman on the sidewalk whose abdomen is fleshy and pale and cover her, because she feels her embarrassment, to have her stomach bared like that. But with another breath, she realizes the woman feels nothing, of course.
A man passes by, covered in powder, staggering as if drunk, murmuring Yallah over and over. Olivia stops. This is one thing she can help with, to find this Yallah, but when she slows the word down in her mind, she hears the separation. Y’allah: Oh God. Now a different man passes by slowly, as if he has all the time in the world, with someone short flung over his shoulder, head and long hair swinging. Someone short. Her mind will not think child.
Then there is a synchronicity with a new sound—a wall coming down—and everyone flinches at once, shoulders tensing, hands on ears. They’re in this together now, a sick choreography. Beside her, a man stands against a light pole, rubbing his temple back and forth, smearing blood as if painting his face.
“Do we help?” Olivia asks. She might be shouting. She’s not sure. But help is what you do. There is an accident and you help, though she knows, even as she thinks this, that this was not an accident and that new rules apply and that really she does not want to help, that in fact the last thing she wants to do is help because she wants to be gone and safe and somewhere the air doesn’t make her eyes sting. She wants to not be out in the open.
“No,” Delan says. “Help is coming. We go.”
“Delan, we have to help.” She’s trying to convince not just him.
But he grabs her arm and looks into her eyes. For a moment, she thinks it’s to check if she’s all right, to look for pinprick pupils or signs of a concussion. But then he’s talking. She watches his mouth moving before registering his words.
“We were seen leaving that restaurant with a full table of food right before. We go.”
With that, everyone looks different. Every man’s face becomes one who could’ve been there, who would’ve left to find them and now needs to find them even more.
He pulls on her arm, with Soran on her other side. “This way, through that alley.”
They walk and with every step shed the event. At first they pass people who reach to them, offering to help, handing towels or water. Arms gesture them inside; mouths move with foreign words. But farther along, the concern fades and becomes curiosity. People watch them, wondering. And then there is disinterest. A perimeter passed, normal life breached. People in bright windows. Men playing dominoes. Life, quite simply. An evening like tonight will be endured, and people will go to work tomorrow. They will tuck their children into bed and find smiles for them in the morning. Even as she breathes in the dust, she can barely fathom what’s happened, much less imagine a lifetime of this or begin to comprehend what that lifetime would do to a person. To him. All the ways it’s raised his voice in a moment of quiet. The ways it darkened him in the glare of a
