Fly Away
Maryah Converse
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The most kites flown simultaneously is 12,350 and was achieved by children of the Gaza
Strip at an event organised by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency at Al-Waha
beach, Gaza Strip, on 28 July 2011.
– Guiness Book of World Records
Leaning against the wall of the courtyard at the U.N. school, she squeezes the dirty, ripped knees of her grimy bloodied jeans tight to her chest, trying to keep dry the book tucked to her chest.
“You can’t take that, Samyah!” her mother had scolded, “only the essentials!”
“I will carry it,” Samyah had insisted, just as her littlest brother Omar insisted on his football.
Now the book is all she has.
*
“Khaaloh Adel!” yelled her fifth brother Fuad from the bedroom. “Uncle Adel on the Whatsapp!”
Samyah ran to the bedroom. Khaaloh Adel, Mama’s baby brother, was her favorite uncle. Usually, he called on Friday nights on his way to jummah prayer at a masjid in a place called Patterson in a place called New Jersey far away in America. When it was jummah prayer time in Patterson, it was maghreb prayer at Samyah’s house, just after dinner. But khaaloh Adel hadn’t called in weeks.
Since the war started, he had sent them text messages every day, when he got up in the morning and it was lunch time here, and when he went to bed at night and it was fajr dawn prayers here, to check that Samyah and her family were safe. He hadn’t called for weeks because Baba had to save the battery on the phone. They never knew how soon the electricity would go out, how long until it was back. Now, Samyah could hear khaaloh Adel’s salaams from the bedroom.
This week, the bombs had stopped. Well, not stopped, but they weren’t all the time anymore. Baba said it was temporary, and that was why they went to ammoh Bilal’s apartment, Baba’s big brother in the south. When the bombs came back, it would be safer here, they said. That’s what Baba told her. And ammoh Bilal had solar panels clamped to his balcony so they could charge Baba’s phone even when the electricity was out. It meant that they could finally see khaaloh Adel on video again.
Samyah clutched her thick book to her chest, the iridescence on its cover flashing in the sunlight, as she leaned into her uncle’s field of view. “Yaa khaaloh! How. Are. You?” she asked in the painstakingly enunciated English she had learned at the U.N. summer camp last year.
“I’m fine, al-Hamdu li-l-llah,” he said, switching into Arabic. “Are you practicing your English?”
“Yes, yaa khaaloh! I’m going to be very good!”
Khaaloh tilts his head. “What are you holding, yaa Samyah?”
She brandished the big, fat book, newspaper clippings fluttering past the edges of the iridescent cover. “Your book Guiness, khaaloh!”
“You brought this with you from the north?” He sounded surprised, almost appalled, but not angry or frightened as Mama had been.
“It’s your book, khaaloh! I couldn’t leave it behind. It’s your record! One day, khaaloh, I will be in the Guiness, too, and then I will go to the America and get the Masters and be an engineer like you, and I’ll come back here and build houses with bomb shelters to keep us safe like the occupiers have, and design drones that can keep the bombs away, and—”
Naser, her third brother, smacked Samyah’s head out of the video frame. “Enough, little donkey. I’m talking to khaaloh Adel now. Get lost.”
*
Samyah leans against the wall of the courtyard at the U.N. school, hugging the dirty, ripped knees of her grimy bloodied jeans tight to her chest, trying to keep dry the book tucked to her chest under the dusty, too-big maroon sweater that had been her eldest sister Rania’s. It had been drying on the roof of ammoh Bilal’s apartment block, the only thing that Samyah had recognized in the rubble.
Her glazed eyes stare unseeing into the school courtyard crowded with tents and families huddling under tarps from the light, cold rain. Samyah’s ears are inured to the cries of the wounded whose pain can’t be eased, the whines and moans of children whose hunger can’t be assuaged.
She can only remember how annoyed her mother had been when Samyah wouldn’t take ‘no’ for an answer, begging to join the children’s program at the U.N. school. “It will be safe, Mama, I swear to God!”
She can only recall the annoyance on Rania’s face as she inked in permanent marker on Samyah’s bicep her full name and Baba’s mobile number, in case the worst happened and the doctors needed to identify her. Bombs had crushed other schools and U.N. facilities, ammoh Bilal had said. She can only hear Naser’s recently descended voice as he pushed her through the gates of the school and growled, “I’ll be back after asr afternoon prayers. Don’t make me wait.”
She can only hear the blast of the attack, too close, too loud, making her ears ring and her heart seize up as her body understood before her mind could catch up that the attack was in the direction of her ammoh Bilal’s house.
Both her hands are bandaged to the wrists, shredded raw in a fog of terror that keeps her from remembering the pain, digging frantically, helplessly, guiltily through the wreckage of rubble and glass until she fainted from lost blood. The paramedic who dragged her away from the mountain of death had written new English letters on her forearm, WCNSF: wounded child, no surviving family.
Now there is only khaaloh Adel, in a place called Patterson far away, but Baba and his phone, ammoh Bilal and his solar panels, they’re all gone now. How will khaaloh Adel find her? How will he even know to look for Samyah? Her beloved khaaloh Adel who helped set a world record flying his kite on the beach, and then had flown far away where there was only the free air.
She wants to fly away, too. On a kite, on a plane, on a bomb of her own, does it matter how? Anywhere not to be so totally alone.
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Now a 2025 Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Fellow in Jordan, Maryah Converse was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Jordan (2004-2006), and then an English teacher in Jordan (2008-2010), and a student in Cairo during the 2011 Egyptian Revolution. Her publications include essays, fiction and poetry in New Madrid Journal, Silk Road Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and L’Éphémère Review. She holds a Masters in Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, and is a PhD candidate in Arabic applied linguistics. maryahc.bsky.social
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Posted in Finding Home and tagged in #boudin, Fiction