Between Hope and Damnation

3 AM comes hard and swift. Papa rustles me out of bed, but it's not his usual pair of gentle hands cupping my face and kissing my forehead. They're rough, tense, unrecognizable, squeezing my forearms so tight it stings. Baby brother is screaming like the owls that scoop up rabbits outside our windows at night....ear-drum busting, menacing. I pull my knit sweater around my head and tuck my body into a roll on the warm side of the concrete floor where my dad was sleeping. Papa puts his hands on me again, only this time he shakes me until I sit up and he yells. Papa never raises his voice--his words are made of stories from his grandfather's time as a young professor in Damascas, his lips laced with whispers as he kisses mama on the cheek in mornings and says, my beautiful habibi, his tongue humming those now ancient lullabies of sleeping on the banks of the Barada. His voice is changed. Unrecognizable to me in the moments between our last bit of hope and damnation.

I stand waiting, shivering as Papa dresses baby brother in two sweaters and a pair of my old pants. The chubby tops of his feet poke out from the worn sandals. A speckle of light peeks through the crack in the door, painting a tree on the opposite wall. I remember trees, I thought I'd forgotten how they look when they're living; their leaves weren't always covered in the ashes of the dead, or roots soaked in the innocent blood of women and babies. They were once proud and tall hanging over our roof with long limbs stretched out, calling to me and Laila to climb. So we'd climb, stretching our arms and feet from limb to limb until we reached the top. We'd look up at the blue and white, no smoke, no pops, no tanks, no screaming. Just wind over the tops of our heads and grannies laughing while they cooked pots of Bulgar on porches. Those are the only good sounds I remember now in this hour between our last bit of hope and damnation.

I feel a smack across my back as Papa pushes us out of the concrete room and the tree leaves the wall. My big toe hits a rock, blood leaks slow and puddles up on my shoe as we trip along the edge of more concrete rooms with more people like us. I can see a gray bus parked in the distance with people swarming around it, bees to a hive, or rats to cheese, as some would see us. I think of my Mama. She was walking on the road where she wasn't supposed to be to buy milk for baby brother. Her milk wouldn't come in most mornings from the bombs dropping outside the window and baby brother would scream that owl-swooping cry so she'd have to go out in the smoke. The shopkeeper told her not to come back, danger, he said, but she had no choice and it was just around the corner. Papa was gone most days to find food and fuel, and so she went walking through the smoke, past the boarded up windows, and blood-soaked trees to buy baby brother some milk. I watched her from the crack in our boarded-up window. She moved weightlessly through the heavy smoke that crept closer to the back of her long black dress between her last bit of hope and damnation. The popping started up and boom. I landed on my back. I crawled back up to the crack in the window and I saw her on her face, long black dress billowing around her still body as tires screeched and the smoke took her away.

The tears have dried since then. Mama didn't cry, she is silent. Papa didn't either. Silence. As my toe stings with the dust and the dirt mixing in, I don't cry. Baby brother is the only one that cries because he's weak and small, not grown like me. We inch closer to the bus and the hive is buzzing, people crawling up along the side, passing children through the windows, some already on top. There's no room. Papa's shoulders drop so low, his body buckles under the weight. Baby brother screams the owl-swooping cry then he chokes himself on his own phlegm. I grab him and hold him there, Papa's face in his hands, he looks small and he's not small. He grabs us in his arms and runs toward the bus. I hit him in his face over and over and the tears come streaming down. I know we can't go. We fall down, baby brother lying between my legs, Papa cursing with his head between his knees, watching our last bit of hope tear down the road as we stay in damnation. The popping starts up in those blood-soaked trees, Papa throws his body over us, his chest pressing down on my head, and mine on baby brother's, and boom. Dust clots up my vision as I look through the crack in Papa's arms covering my face. The hive is hit, but the bees aren't moving. All is silent between their last bit of hope and damnation.