And Then There Shall Be Rain
by Sophia-Maria Nicolopoulos
Part 1 appears in this issue.
conclusion
His feet were gigantic and thick, connected to immense, veiny legs the shade of sickening green with bones jutting out from the grey skin, broken in all different ways. Raising her eyes higher, Khalilah gasped; the creature’s genitals were an amorphous oozing black mass. Two bony hands hung there, on the left and the right side of his pelvis, with the longest and dirtiest nails she had ever seen. They were made of threadbare rope and fish hooks.
Her heart skipped a beat. What have I done? He’s not just Abu Kees. He’s my Abu Kees: the Smog Man.
Up, up, up her eyes went until they met a large, gaping belly, its circumference shaped by a sack, cloth, and water, surrounded by a cloud of yellowish gas. She had to squint her eyes to see the metal wires and dead fish flying in arbitrary circles inside the gaping hole. When the monster shifted its weight from one foot to another, its belly made a clink clonk sound before a muffled scream was released from inside it. It belonged to a girl.
“Ya Allah! Who’s this?!” Khalilah asked.
The scream ceased as if it had heard her question, and the gas inside the Smog Man’s body shifted to reveal a figure like Yara — not the beautiful small arms and jet black hair Khalilah knew, but a distorted version of her friend — a heap of broken bones and stitched-up arms and legs. Her hair was stuck to her forehead, her face a mask of horror and panic. Khalilah shrieked in terror. Her friend’s mouth moved, uttering something she couldn’t hear.
This must be Yara. It has to be her.
Khalilah’s limbs were paralyzed. Her mind filled with sacks, dead jasmines, and ghosts. Her body refused to move.
A second later, the monster laughed; a deep, throaty sound that reverberated through its body, making the walls of his belly contract and shake while pulling Yara back to its depths, sucking her body down like water in the drain. A nasty smell followed, making Khalilah cough.
The Smog Man had swallowed Yara whole, and now it was digesting her. He chortled, and his long neck dove down where Khalilah stood, crawling until his face met hers. Eyes — pits of black tar — a nose broken and sewn back incorrectly. A mouth full of rotten teeth with seaweed, rocks, and bones trapped inside. The Smog Man smiled widely, and brown vapors emanated from its black gums.
Khalilah willed her feet to move amidst coughs, her mind brimming with images of Yara’s bruised, broken body. She turned and ran for her life. The heavy rain drowned her screams as she stumbled away from the fishhooks chasing her, coming dangerously close to snagging her.
* * *
Khalilah’s sleep was cut short by a cacophony of snores and whimpers slicing through the downpour outside. The dank walls were even damper than before, human sweat, breath, and feces turning the air thicker by the second. Khalilah watched the small puddle on the floor under the window, the way it shook and vibrated with each falling drop from the leaky ceiling. Her eyes were wet. She’d been crying in her sleep.
It was real. All of it.
She turned to her left side, trying to doze off before dawn broke. It was pointless. Her mind kept running back to what she’d seen: Yara inside the beast’s belly, broken and twisted in abnormal ways. Yara’s body being sucked down until she turned into nothing more than filthy gas in the brown fog.
Yara had died because of Khalilah. Not because she had also brought a scary legend to this foreign country, unable to let go of her terror of the war, of the horror of not belonging anywhere now, but because Abu Kees was none other than the version Khalilah had created; the Smog Man.
The lines and edges, the shadows and highlights belonged to the Smog Man, the brown vaporous titan Khalilah’s mind had conceived and poured into paper. Such irony to see your creation come to life as your worst nightmare! But could it really be her journal’s fault? Or was it mostly her fault for refusing to let go of her life back in Syria? Was it because she thought of her parents, dreamt of her parents, and even talked to her parents every day?
And what was she to do? How was she to subdue this creature and hold it accountable? Should she flee or wait to become his next victim?
A quick thought crossed her mind, filling her with shame. What if she found a way to leave Greece? A way to escape the patrolling borders and go to Italy? Or Albania? Or any other country that she could steal passage to?
And what if you bring the Smog Man with you? Can you take more blood on your hands?
She shut her eyes, willing reality to cease for a moment. A few minutes of nothing but stillness, no feelings, no guilt, no pain, nothing at all, was all she asked. A faint lullaby her mom used to sing it when she was a kid came to her. She sat up and imagined the constant drip drop of the leaky rainwater turning into a gentle piano tune. Khalilah lowered her head between her knees, and rocking herself back and forth, back and forth, began to chant.
Just before the sun shines,
And the primroses bloom,
Just before the moon pins itself on the night sky,
And the jasmines say goodnight,
Remember always to leave your window open,
Lest I come back by your side.
She wished for her mother’s tender voice to keep her company, for her father’s strong arms to hold her once again. She wished for sweet mornings at home, the smell of hot tea, the taste of fruit jams on her tongue. Khalilah continued chanting as she opened her small bag and took out the jasmine seeds. Her voice grew firmer and louder even though people were sleeping around her. Steadily, the sound of water fainted as the slow pulse of her heart pounded in her eardrums.
That’s when it happened.
* * *
“Can’t you see them growing in your hand?”
A woman’s voice enveloped the silent room, its softness resounding through Khalilah’s body and soul.
“Who’s there?” She asked, concern gripping her stomach, making her voice break.
Instinctively, she crawled over to Fatima, to see if she had talked in her sleep again. That’s when she noticed her body was pale and stiff. Khalilah placed an ear over her auntie’s mouth but couldn’t tell if she was breathing or not. She touched something wet with her other hand that sat on the floor. It was water, its level rising.
“Can’t you see them growing in your hand?”
The voice persisted, and this time, Khalilah stood up, half-wet and petrified. The room had turned into a tomb; all bodies too pale and still. Khalilah shouted at everyone to wake up, shook Fatima and the three women she always talked to. She pulled their covers, but no one woke up. They were dead.
Water filled the room fast, painting lined figures on the walls like they were inside a swimming pool. In a heartbeat, Khalilah was underwater, trapped amidst corpses and tall grass that had grown out of nowhere.
“Who are you?!” She asked, trying to identify who had spoken to her. Air bubbles escaped from her mouth. She could speak and breathe underwater, so this had to be a dream. When she looked at the floor again, the sleeping faces were now looking up at her, their glassy eyes open to eternal nothingness, algae forming on their lips.
She was trapped in an underwater graveyard. Hyperventilating, she traced her thoughts back to the moments before the nightmare. Yes, she must have fallen asleep with Mom’s lullaby in her mind. This was another horrific fantasy. She was used to dreaming of rot and death.
Khalilah made her way towards the door, her footsteps slower than ever. She toppled over the pile of carcasses, and when she tried to stand up, she saw a too-familiar face staring right at her. His eyes moved.
Those bushy eyebrows.
The scar on the tip of his nose from when he fell down the wooden ladder in his spice shop.
The thin lips that used to smile and light up her entire world.
“Ya Aboui!”
The first thought was to touch the man, but she quickly realized this was a body long dead, lying on a seabed close to Lesvos island. She noticed holes in his arms and bruises on his neck. Grass covered his head and mushrooms grew out of his skin. She crawled back on her hands and feet, suddenly wishing she could get away from this lifeless place.
“Can’t you see them growing in your hand?”
The voice, part masculine, part feminine, came out of his thin lips, and like a chorus on replay, the next time it spoke, it came from all sides of the room.
Khalilah’s right hand started to itch, but when she tried to scratch it, she touched something rough. She looked down and saw the jasmine seeds, the ones she held onto while singing the lullaby, digging through her palm, planting themselves there. They budded under her skin, sprouting through her wrist, trellising the veins of her arm.
Khalilah cried out. They burnt. She shriveled in agony as the seeds climbed the length of her arm until they ran back down her other palm and laid still on the tips of her fingers. She had seeds beneath her flesh.
Khalilah knelt on the bottom of the sea as stems grew out of her hand, slowly springing up until they towered her, covering her body with vivid green.
Tears fell freely down her cheeks. She tried to find her dad’s eyes, but they were lost behind the curtain of greenery and the fragrant, star-shaped petals.
“You shall plant your seeds, benty. You shall plant and water them.”
The voice was softer now, more feminine; she felt a tug, a bond she thought had broken but was still there, tethering her to old memories of falafel and barazek cookies, to pink roses and jasmines and afternoon slumbers in the living room, the air filled with paprika and cardamom. Defying the pain, Khalilah stood up and called on the figure that lingered close to her. “Ummi! Is... is that you?”
The scenery changed. The long and hard jasmine stems separated and, instead of dead bodies cramming the floor, Khalilah saw deflated lifeboats, old motors, and knick-knacks of the lives long lost at the bottom of the Aegean sea.
A lone shadow with a golden outline stood in front of her. “You shall plant your seeds, benty. You shall plant and water them.”
How many times had she wished for Mom to speak to her in her dreams! How many times had she wished to hug her again! When Mom’s golden shadow reached her, it placed a hand on Khalilah’s stems, caressing the blossomed flowers.
“Please, Mom. Stay with me.”
The shadow kissed her on the cheek. Khalilah’s skin was damp. Was it her tears or her mom’s?
“You shall plant your seeds, benty. You shall plant and water them.”
“I don’t want to go on without you, ummi... please!” Khalilah cried. The bond tugged at her heart again, taking the shape of a rope — a durable thread linking her to Mom, connecting her to her soothing voice, never to be broken, never to be cut off.
The royal shadow retreated until she vanished — lifeboats, dead bodies, and Dad’s weed-eaten body were gone too. The room was once again a dank prison. The jasmines on Khalilah’s fingertips became the dark seeds she gripped when she was too stressed to sleep.
* * *
Khalilah clenched her fists tightly, her nails digging deep as she ran from the hotel, away from the sleeping bodies that had turned to corpses, away from Daddy’s still face, away from the police officers that swarmed the place soon after she’d woken up drenched in sweat.
They had come on the crack of dawn. She got out just in time to complete a mission, to meet her purpose. Determination drove each one of her steps. She hoped Fatima had escaped them. She would turn back to look for her, she promised to herself, but now she would defend the memory of her people, her parents, of Yara and the missing girls. They wouldn’t be forgotten.
Her Mom had told her what she needed to know. They were never meant to erase their culture. To leave behind what made them Syrians: their food, their prayers, their language, their children’s stories. They were never meant to bow before people who hated them, to hide in condemned buildings, to detest themselves for being xénoi.
With her backpack strapped on her shoulders, the seeds firmly secured in one hand and her journal in the other, Khalilah reached the Academy of Athens.
She was ready to remember who she was.
* * *
When Khalilah stood up against the most frightening thing in her world, she was neither a girl nor a Syrian jasmine, but something in-between. Under the drizzling rain, she pulled out her last sketch, the Smog Man, and let the water soak it. With her free hand, she opened her palm to water Mom’s seeds and proudly sang her lullaby:
Just before the sun shines,
And the primroses bloom...
Moments passed, and then her skin started itching. She smiled. It was happening. As the seeds dug under her skin, following the same route as in her dream, Khalilah endured the pain. Mom was with her. She was with her in spirit, and this was all that mattered for the plan to succeed.
Just before the moon pins itself on the night sky,
And the jasmines say goodnight...
He appeared out of thin air a second later, his gaseous form looming, his face hovering mid-air against hers. The creepy smile was too stretched, too distorted. Khalilah sensed terror stirring her insides. She wanted to puke.
When he lowered his head and looked straight at her, Khalilah urged herself to stay still. She was not alone, the song was proof of that. She had Mom’s ghost inside her and Syrian soil growing from her skin. With his deep black eyes and wide mouth, the Smog Man looked at her, entranced.
Khalilah approached him.
One step.
Two.
Three.
When she raised the hand, overgrown with jasmine stems and touched the creature’s cheeks, she whispered.
Remember to always leave your window open...
Khalilah’s myth sighed under her touch and closed his eyes. The jasmines latched onto his form and slowly entered his eyes and his mouth, tracing down his body. The green and white started breaking Abu Kees from the inside out.
For Mom and Dad. For Fatima.
For Yara and all those missing girls.
For my people.
For myself.
“You’re my fear. I love you, yet I abolish you.”
The Smog Man grunted, and the foul smell of burnt carbon broke through his mouth. She would put him to sleep. Khalilah kept singing, repeating the same lines rapidly until she entered the place where Yara had died. In a last act of courage, she was in the belly of the beast.
It was pitch black, as if the whole world outside had been nothing but a cloudy figment of the imagination. She shivered, thinking of Yara’s deformed body, of her incomprehensible cries when she saw her friend.
Time for the final act.
Khalilah let her skin fall. The leaves peeled it away, replacing it with a thick stalk, embellishing it with beautiful white petals. A jasmine flower within a jasmine flower; she was wrapped in Mom’s song and Dad’s warmth. She let every seed sprout from her to purge her fear.
Lest I come back by your side.
The moment the lullaby ended, the Smog Man snapped out of his trance and Khalilah’s breath left her body. She was dying out of asphyxiation, suffocating... until her jasmines rushed to cocoon her. Claws reached for her neck, but Khalilah didn’t budge. Putrid odors filled her nostrils and hooks scratched her back. The Smog Man roared, carving her from within. But still she didn’t move; she didn’t scream despite the pain, despite her petals being torn away.
Khalilah held onto her jasmines with dear life; as if they were her lifeboat.
Abu Kees attacked her for the last time and, one final time, he failed. His power was fading away. Khalilah didn’t flinch when sirens and gunshots sliced the cloudy sky. She did not stir when arms dressed in olive green pulled her away.
She had planted her seeds and watered them, just as she’d been told.
Copyright © 2023 by Sophia-Maria Nicolopoulos
