It was nothing short of a dream. 

Rafah thought that to be a funny phrase. The waking world she used to know always came short–the weddings, the galas, the parades, the protests. Always one-fifth of what they could be, even if they did seem dreamlike, as their ‘likeness’ meant they could only ever come close. But Rafah’s dreams were boundless.

Borderless.

So yes, where her soul existed now was nothing short of one. But she’d like to believe that if all the dreams of every single person that had ever dreamt on Earth were accumulated and brought to existence, it could never come close to this. 

She sat against the silvery veil that cocooned her, one that provided a partition that was subtle but present enough between her and the previous world she had once known. Rafah rubbed her thumb and index fingers together, stared at it. Her body of cells that were once called skin were now reconfigured in the form of saffron. It looked natural but in an otherworldly sense, royal but stronger in colour and richer in scent than the ones she could buy from her local Souq market. Like her skin on Earth was merely an exoskeleton, moulting, waiting to be shed into a form that fit more perfectly than it ever did.

Rafah never bled here.

No, now she emitted musk. Sweet and fragrant and undying. There was no difficulty here. There was no point to it. When her house was made from the stars, the markets free of charge, and people gathered every Friday in celebration and left with more beauty on their countenance than when they entered, ease was now their constant. And boredom, a foreign concept. The spectrum of human emotion has been elevated. The parts humanity thought were necessary; pain, guilt, fear, and even hope, had been nullified. Parts which weren’t even known to exist thrummed in her every fibre.

Children screamed. 

In joy. Pure, unmasked, unadulterated, perennial joy. The type of laughter she had never heard before, the type of laughter that knew it would never have to stop. Rafah watched as kids bounded about in the air as green birds, in the waters of milk, honey, and wine, like mythical creatures who were no longer myth, and on the ground, running about the large, noble feet of Prophet Ibrahim. He embraced them like a father. 

Rafah remembers her father. Her Baba. And felt a debilitating emotion that somehow still had a purpose to exist in this plane. 

‘Rafah! Catch me!’ 

She turned towards the sound coming from above. Rafah’s siblings, all five of them, soared towards her like those flying American elf boys they once read a book about. She opened her arms with a grin, ready, and they all collapsed into something soft and pillowy.

‘Ya albi,’ Rafah exclaimed, breathless, ‘Will the rest of my eternity be spent keeping you from harm in this place too?’

She looked up at them, at their clean, smiling, full-cheeked faces and squeezed them all tightly, fulfilled by the simple fact that she’ll never have to let them go.

‘Why do you sit here by yourself?’ Rafah turned to her little brother, Younis, his eyes curious and as blue as the Jordan River as he surveyed her. ‘Why don’t you come play?’

She sat up, glancing back at the veil beside them, at the star-studded galaxy behind it, and felt the deep longing in her bones travel to her tongue. 

‘I miss Baba too.’ 

Haifa said it before she could. Rafah stroked her sister’s hair in response, Khalili gemstones falling out of her strands like starbursts. 

‘Did you hear?’ Little Jenin piped, bright-eyed. ‘Ahlul-Jannah says there’s gonna be martyrs arriving from the camp Baba is in.’

They all turned back to the eldest sister, wanting a confirmation to a question in their hearts Rafah didn’t have the answer to. 

‘He’s coming to us, Rafah,’ Haifa said, reaching her hand out tenderly. ‘We’ll be together again soon.’

It was paradoxical. News that she had been willing to welcome into her arms since she first entered The Gardens was now slipping from her grasp, because this fickle human emotion would not rest. But fickle as it was, perhaps it could serve as a means to return something greater than longing. Rafah smiled at her siblings.

‘I have an idea.’

*

Khalil stood at the opening of the tent, squinting up at the burning circle in the sky. He raised his hand, blocking most of its rays but relented his limb when his skin began to sting from the heat.

That wasn’t good. He won’t be able to see it when it comes. 

It had been almost too pleasant lately. After being displaced from Khan Younis, Khalil and the many neighbourhoods in his city travelled in droves to the camps in the south. The buzz from the drones could still be heard above their heads, white noise that could paint the land red and burnt black at any given moment. But they hadn’t gone off for four days now. And that was never a good sign. 

He peered over his shoulder, surveying the many persons huddled inside the tent, like flightless birds inside a splintered nest. His gaze lingered on the man sitting cross-legged at the centre, the man he had followed all the way from their shrapnel-ridden neighbourhood to this camp. He hasn’t spoken much, just the usual Allah Ysalmak. May God protect you. The uncle wore a grey thobe that may have been white once, a salt and pepper beard that was increasingly more salt than pepper as the days went by, and a sandy-brown, giraffe-spotted turban. He played with the bandage that Khalil swaddled his bleeding arm with before looking up at him. His eyes were sunken but not pulsing red like most who had lost someone; they were warm like the Filastini Sunbirds in the valleys of Wadi Qelt. 

They reminded him of her. 

At the familiar pounding sound of death, Khalil instinctively turned, ducking under the tent flap. But there was no smoke, no screams. Just an elderly man who had toppled over by the weight of his belongings. Khalil sighed, plagued by the fact that death’s voice was everywhere, and so was its claim on his soul, hence there was no use to distinguish between its whispers and its rallying calls. 

He needed to be ready for both. 

He reached for his phone, the little box that could make the world stand on its feet, and clicked on the recent video he posted online. The comments, a pool of both heartfelt prayers and hard-headed blame games, settled the nerves in his chest. It was proof, in one way or the other, that they exist.

‘I had a daughter.’

Khalil flinched, turning to the man behind him. His eyes, half-vacant half-alive, stared somewhere around Khalil and not directly at him. 

‘Her name was Rafah,’ the man said, now meeting his eyes.

He knew. He hadn't been following the man’s shadow for no reason. The girl in his pharmacy class that had dreams the size of the Earth, who had promised to feature in his film project that very day. The day her dreams were pulled from under her feet, and her body, six feet under the school. Khalil was then overtaken by an inner calling, a fire that he thought had long been put out since the day he ran back home to find it in ruins. How many kids whose lives could’ve changed others are now gone? Not just the ones that have been martyred, but the ones that were still here, survivors that had forfeited any previous conviction of the world’s mercy upon them. Like him. Khalil dug his nails into his fists, thinking it was best to simply acknowledge the uncle’s words in silence. 

‘My daughter has gotten married to the skies.’ The man smiled. ‘And she has her whole eternity to live now with the rest of…’ 

Khalil watched his face twist, the creases of grief unveiling themselves by the words left unsaid, and felt compelled to sit down in front of him. The Sunbirds in the man’s eyes returned. 

‘Living.’ He said the word like it was revelation. ‘Not just surviving. But away from me. Only visiting occasionally.’ The inhabitants of the tent were listening. Khalil could tell the difference between the silence saturated with wet grief and this one, rinsed once again by the hands of faith. ‘She visited me last night. We were in her room. Rafah was lying on her mattress, her eyes shut like she was asleep. I tried waking her, but’ - he chuckled - ‘you could never take Rafah out of her dreamland.’ He sighed. ‘I began to cry. But that’s when she looked at me, the soul of my soul, wiped my tears and said, ‘Ya Abati, blessings will be upon you soon,’ and placed this in my right hand.’ He held up a brown key with his good arm, a Hello Kitty keyring dangling from its bow. ‘I laughed,’ he continued. ‘What would I do with this, ya omri? We no longer have a home.’ She looked at me, almost sadly, and then said, 'It'll open more than the door to our home, Baba,’ and shut her eyes again. I woke up with Rafah’s housekey in the same hand.’

He kissed the metal and whispered a prayer. Khalil swallowed heavily, his throat feeling like sandpaper, likely from the lack of water and maybe something worse. 

‘What do you think the dream meant, Ya Khalil?’

Khalil blinked, staring at the warmth exuding from the man’s face. He didn't remember mentioning his name. 

‘That you’ll be home to her soon,’ he answered, then paused, contemplating, ‘Nabhan.’ 

Nabhan raised his brows and laughed heartily. Khalil looked down, his cheeks warm. The film project he was planning to make at school was titled ‘The Heroes Among Us’. Rafah, her presence as warm as Nabhan, told him she was going to talk about her father. And it seemed, he hoped, that she had talked to her father about him. 

The warmth inside the fragile tent was washed out by the sudden patter attempting to shred the tent from the outside. They were still too light to be bullets however, too liquid. Khalil stood up, stepping outside of the tent. A wet sheen glazed over the sands of Rafah like a gauze as it rained. The tents gained life; sheets of plastic, torn fabric and prayer mats moved back and forth as if they were taking long breaths. Mothers grabbed their remaining children, their arms shielding their little frames from the front as the little ones held onto that shield, their slippers squelching hurriedly. 

Too hurriedly.

Khalil saw the tank before he heard it trudge along the sands towards the camp. He stepped forward, having to make sure he wasn’t seeing things, that the rain was not tricking him. That there really was only one. He turned to Nabhan who stepped up beside him, a ready look on his face as raindrops leaked from his beard. Khalil knew something was going to happen today, everyone did, but that didn’t stop his chest from thudding in his ears again. He caught a glimpse of the lone soldier standing atop the green tank. He looked young, half-baked, ideals unripe, his helmet fitted for someone twice the man he thinks he is. The soldier held no guns himself, like the weapon beneath him was big enough to conceal his deficiencies.

‘Let’s go,’ Khalil muttered as the hunk of metal moved closer, grabbing Nabhan’s sleeve, only to be shrugged off briskly. He frowned at the older man, wanting to shout as Nabhan held up Rafah’s key defiantly, as if it could singlehandedly block the machine gun. Khalil had the mind to turn and run like the others were, away from the camp, pretend there was somewhere safer beyond it. But then he heard it. A melody that made every deadened cell in his body spark with vigour. The calling.

‘Come to my hometown and see how the sea smiles at you,

Come to the coast of Haifa and keep its sand for souvenir, 

Take a photo of the streets of Khan Younis, 

Our hearts are the home of your eyes.’

As Nabhan sang the Dal’ouna, the winds accompanied him in intensity. And no sooner did the nameless figures from their tent. A new mother, two teenage brothers, an elderly couple and a child rose up beside them, each with their own keys in hand and an iron voice. Khalil took a shaky breath, stepped back behind them all, and held up his own weapon, pressing record.

‘Come to my hometown and see,

How the sea, how the sea smiles to you.’

The soldier yelled to someone below him before the gun barrel was manoeuvred in their direction. But there was rain, its temperament too unrelenting, that the vision of any soldier in that tank was left to merely a shot in the dark. Nabhan whipped his head around to him. 

‘You got a good arm, Khalil?’ he asked, urgent. 

‘Yes.’

Khalil answered before he even knew it himself. Nabhan nodded firmly and exchanged Rafah’s key for his phone in an unspoken agreement.

A chill seeped into his muscles as he walked ahead of the chanting crowd, gripping the keychain tightly. Khalil stopped when he was ten feet away from the tank, its engine pressurising, something locking and loading. He raised the key up high, not knowing where to even aim, except, maybe, he mused, watching the young soldier desperately wipe at his eyes to keep them on him, towards the deficiency in man. 

A key could not stop a weapon of war. He knew that. But as he dealt the hand of faith with his own, Rafah’s key vanishing into the shadow of the faceless behemoth, he felt the enormity of what he did, like he sent the weight of a thousand martyrs towards their freedom. Khalil waited for it, the guttural strain of metal clashing against each other, the engine working up, then breaking down again. Some miracle. But only the silence, polarised by what it meant to each adversary, overcame the unbidden battlefield, with heaven the sole speaker raining down its primordial wrath. Khalil didn’t miss it, however. It was in the subtle flinch, the erratic flitter of the soldier’s eyes, of his hands as it wavered over the gun, that made him take another step forward, a defiant movement mirrored by the dozens of voices now joining behind him as they rallied towards the tank.

‘To smell the soil of Rafah

And draw our glory on its rock.’

The sun grew its light amidst the rain as the song swelled in spirit. The soldier, frozen within it, could only stare at the wall of a people, lost but present, each holding a house and a promise, unbroken, advancing. Khalil saw him jolt back, scrambling to signal the driver below. The machine’s treads churned the muddied sand, threatening to plough forwards, then hesitated.

‘Khalas! Khalas!’ 

The soldier spoke, in an accent foreign and unfamiliar, voice breaking. Khalil shuddered, the Dal’ouna quivering in his throat. Because it was then that the people of Rafah witnessed the awaited miracle unfold in front of their eyes.

The tank began to back up. 

All at once, as if there was a green light, men, women and children began to charge towards the tank with their keys as if they were swords, as if they were the pens that had written every history book, as if they penned the oldest maps, and opened every gateway to the skies. Khalil stood still against the swathe of people storming towards the retreating tank, stunned, waiting for the other shoe, bomb, blast – something – to drop. 

‘Good arm, ya walad.’

A hand, bandaged and steady on his shoulder, brought him back. Nabhan passed his phone back to him with a smile. Khalil wiped the droplets off of the screen, beholding a sight akin to a Renaissance painting. The Heroes Among Us. He looked up, at the back of the soldier’s helmet as it drove off over the Zoroub hills, wondering what excuses the man must be reasoning with, what ideals may have ripened. But Khalil saw it laid bare in the young soldier’s eyes. The all-encompassing truth. That the olive trees stuck their roots deeper than they will ever be able to pull out. 

It was like a spell in the air was broken. Tides of people ululated in tandem for the smallest of victories, for they and their remaining families lived for another day.

‘You were wrong,’ Nabhan bellowed against the saluting winds. Khalil smiled at him, wide enough for it to feel foreign to his facial muscles. They were not meant to be martyrs today. Rafah’s plan was something different. A return of something greater than their homes. The return of a people’s will.

‘She’s finally awake,’ Khalil stated, his fingers sending the video out into the world. ‘Rafah is awake.’