I came here alone with everyone who wasn't them. After the brown hills of my old village disappeared into smoke. After my mother's voice, my father's hands, and my little brother's smile were lost in the shouting, the bombs, and the soldiers kicking down our door. I do not always remember my mother's voice. Or how my father's hands moved around the house. Or the way my little brother used to smile at me from his crib. But I remember running. Tripping over stones. Past the olive trees. Past the wheat field. Past the well and the graves. Past everything that was ours. My eyes burning. My legs burning. My throat burning.

Everything was burning.

***

Ramallah swallowed us.

For five years straight, I moved from shelter to shelter with an old neighbor, Abu Saïd, his wife, Em Saïd, and their poor cousin, Em Mohamad, who kept rocking a dirty pillow she still believed was her son. They folded me into their family like a neighbor's child taken in during the olive harvest because you need young and strong hands. Whenever the rain came, we moved again, slipping past others like us, carried here by the same storm that tore our villages off the map and the names out of our mouths, waiting for roofs that never came.

***

Abu Saïd was the only one among us who could find work, because he was a man, but he was very old. He kept trying, but no one wanted to hire him. I remember looking for a job behind his back, mostly cleaning homes, and I would see him sitting outside Jamal Abdul-Nasser's Mosque, in the sun, his face buried in his hands. When he couldn't find a job, he was ashamed to come back early. I never told anyone about it. I can't say I know much about men, but if I know anything, it's that pride matters above all. Stupid and unnecessary most of the time—but that's never the point.

***

By what felt like divine intervention—or maybe just the pity of strangers—we were able to scrape together enough for scraps of food, but never enough to keep a roof above our heads for long. Every few months, Em Saïd's hands shook at the jewelry store as she sold another gold ring or necklace behind Abu Saïd's back. She gave him the money, pretending her dead brother was sending it from Kuwait, so we wouldn't end up back on the street again. Abu Saïd would write the amount in a small notebook and tell her he'd pay her brother back.

***

When Em Saïd ran out of gold, we pressed our backs to stone walls that belonged to no one who remembered our names. The city was full of people like us and not enough walls. Some had salvaged more of their belongings, now abandoned in the streets—broken chairs, mattresses soaked, teapots cracked. Sometimes you can see children on these mattresses, drenched, eyes wide, mouths hungry, somehow still moving. At night, we whispered to strangers the names of the villages and loved ones we had lost—grandmothers in Ramla, cousins in Lod, friends in Yaffa, parents and siblings in Qulia—hoping a stranger would know, would remember, would answer some of the questions that had been eating at us.

The stones looked tired of staring at our gray faces, of holding our limp bodies, of hearing our broken stories, tired of our ragged clothes and whatever we'd salvaged hanging soaked from them—tired of us, of what the storm dragged in, of what the rain couldn't wash away.

I used to think the storm ended when the rain stopped. But the storm stayed inside us, moved with us, carved its shape into our bones, long after the world forgot where it began.

***

I hear a shrill cry in the middle of the night. Em Mohammad has woken up to pray fajr and is already searching for her son. Em Saïd gets up and starts pacing after her in the middle of the empty street, whispering verses from the Quran into her shaky hands, rubbing them into Em Mohammad's messy hair. I can see Abu Saïd pushing the dirty pillow onto Em Mohammad's chest, saying, "This is him. This is Mohammad."

She screams back, "Are you crazy? Get that damn pillow out of my face."

A light flickers on and off inside the house whose wall we are pressed against. They're angry again. We've been here too long. And the same noise, every night. Their voices rise behind the glass. They're quarrelling over this.

I should move, make Abu Saïd stop, but I can't get my legs to work. He keeps shouting my name over and over—I am the only one who can give her the pillow, the only one who can convince her it's Mohammad.

More lights flick on. A kid, or maybe two, starts crying now.

Then the man's voice cuts through the night, sharp and hard. He shouts something I can't quite make out, but the bark is the same the soldiers used the night they kicked down our door.

The metal door of the house opens, and I finally move.

I pull the pillow out of Abu Saïd's hands and hold it. It smells of smoke; it's filthy, soaked, and not a boy. But I hold it anyway—wet and cold—and it feels like the time my cousin jumped into the well and I jumped right after her.

I rock it gently, the way my mother taught me to do with my brother, and begin humming a tune I don't fully remember.

Em Mohammad leans forward, her hands reaching out, her breath catching. She smooths the edges, whispering his name, her face softening into something almost whole.

For a moment, the pillow is warm, light, smells of milk. For a moment, it's my brother, smiling at me through my fingers. For a moment, my mother's voice comes through Em Saïd's. For a moment, my father's hands layer over mine through Abu Saïd's.

For a moment, the storm quiets.

For a moment, the sun is out, and it feels like I'm home and we're all there, holding my little brother, together, in his bedroom.


.