He dreams of parades in his sleep. The streets are crowded with people he knows. Children run around his feet, scrambling over dirt paths and cobblestone pathways- one trips by his side and he helps him up. His own face smiles up at him, green eyes naïve and full of childish wonder. Behind them, he hears a scream.
A man with red eyes stares at him from across the asphalt and as soon as he locks his eyes with him, everything changes. The world tilts, splashed with hues of crimson, and there’s so much blood- on his hands, on his clothes, on his face. He hears gunshots, sees bodies fall, but what tears him apart is the sight of a lone boy staring up at the smoke-filled sky and the burning sun amidst the chaffed houses and broken dreams, the sole survivor of a predestined apocalypse.
There’s something peaceful in this way of leaving, he thinks. Something almost tranquil, a ripple of silence in the chaos that surrounds him and haunts the streets of ash-Shām after midnight. No more anticipation, no more picturing missiles as kites in the sky that pollute the air with their rainbow trails of smog. No more muffled cries and punctured sobs, eyes inundated with something thicker than tears but thinner than blood. No more war bunkers and wailing sirens and morgues stacked with half-formed miracles. No more misery.
His awakening is unplanned, a little haphazard and hazy, like his brain just up one day and decided it was time to rise. There’s no beeping monitor to pound into his cranium with its ticker-tape pulses, no blue-sky morning to welcome his return. The world is as he left it, bustling with soot, slowly coming apart at the seams.
The needle prickles on his hand. He pulls the IV with its stand and stumbles out his room, knees jammed like rusted nuts in a ball bearing, toes blistered with the heat that emanates from the walls and seeps through the floor. The hallways are empty, filament bulbs flickering up above, shadows dancing on the walls. His feet squawk on the linoleum floors messily, but he barely notices; it’s the silence that unnerves him, the absence of blood on the white washed walls, the empty crevices left beside metal benches that were supposed to be filled with snot-nosed adolescents and empty-eyed adults. Chest aching, heart in his ears, he fumbles with his steps and stumbles. The panic reaches in and squeezes his ribcage, yellowing nails digging in, choking his lungs and poisoning his jugular.
He runs. Snapping the needle, he pulls it out and ignores how his hand goes numb and blue. He doesn’t care, like he doesn’t care that he’s dead as long as he knows he’s dead and not lost in the labyrinth of his mind. Hallway after hallway, he flies past rooms, past operating theatres and clinics and empty elevators, eyes flickering left and right in a mad frenzy, searching for any signs of life only to find-
Nothing. Not so much as a dead centipede, just the sands of time and dust of the desert wind filling niches left behind. His knees buckle, and he collides with the hard gray floor, his breath haggard, retinas burning images behind his lids.
Then he sees them. Fireflies, by the hordes, moving sluggishly in a queue, their flickering tails lighting the walls with neon sunlight. He closes his eyes and thinks back to his valley, of the nights he had spent crouched behind grass and smeared his hands with the foliage of the earth, the summer dew fresh on his ebony hair, sight trained on their iridescent bodies, transfixed. He thinks of skydiving from walls and running on fumes, a history of the world untold.
He thinks he’s had enough of this life. He knows he has.
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Waking up again in a warm bed doesn’t surprise him. His wife shifts in her sleep beside him, taking the sheets with her. He looks at the light coming through the blinds and blinks the memories of Damascus away.
