Excerpted: Thyme Travellers: An Anthology of Palestinian Speculative Fiction

It didn’t seem to bother any of them that one of their own had just been killed seconds ago. They kept on swimming.

The water warmed them after all, toasted their coarse, pimply skin lightly enough to make them resemble more contented versions of themselves. The cold autumn month was made barren by a string of afternoons that scattered through time to form what appeared to be—faintly on the horizon and decidedly everywhere else—a ceasefire. This subtle comfort was not to be taken for granted in Gaza, particularly in the presence of such a devoted moon, which stood watch over the sea anxiously and helplessly as a mother over a child whose youthful inhibitions shrivel away at dizzying speed. Its shine dimmed at times, forced to combat the heap of trash glooming the shore, but it sufficed.

The corpse belonged to Ibrahim Salah. But that hardly matters. Death will not propel this story. Instead, we’ll discuss the activities of the sextet of adolescent boys who swam expertly in what is undoubtedly the land’s most liberating corner.

Murtaza was the most accustomed to the art of swimming and, even more so, the art of racing. His relentless splashes often preluded a showy display of a fact that he—and to a lesser extent, they—already knew: the sea rendered him invincible. But the whole point of their meeting there was to flex the muscles of their accelerated youth before circumstances stiffened them for good. Talib, especially, ached for that exact opportunity and ultimately was the one to take it.

He and Murtaza agreed to race half a mile into the sea. Murtaza had enough confidence to down half a bottle of smuggled whiskey beforehand. Talib lacked enough confidence to do the same. Within a matter of seconds, they were off.

Murtaza didn’t come back.

His corpse drifted towards the first one without so much as a nudge and remained there indefinitely.

Please keep in mind that his death is as insignificant as that of the Palestinian boy whose death preceded his, and remains irrelevant to what happens both in and out of this story. The most significant event at this point was the break the quintet suddenly decided to take. Each of the boys stopped swimming and began simply to float on their backs. They knew too well that it was only a matter of time before the incoming breeze conquered the night. The boys never cared much for that bitter wind unleashed upon them even in their most docile moments. It was the same wind that always wrested the sand and demolished the beauty with which it freckled the sea.

During their period of rest, they glanced, as was typical of young Gazan boys on moonlit nights, at the horizon. Its mercy emerged more often than not, a transcendental pull bending the bars that shrouded the strip, flashing a panorama of cheetahs swallowing fire and daffodils dancing the tango or whatever else their sleepless minds made of the kaleidoscopic splotch of colours before them. In the midst of this break, however, Nabil grew tired of floating around and eagerly challenged the rest of the group to what was his area of expertise. Saeed, noticing the reluctance of his other three companions, figured he ought to be bold enough to accept the challenge himself.

He and Nabil dunked their heads below the water.

As the seconds passed, the wind grew stronger and harsher. The moonlight bouncing off the surface of the sea was initially the night’s highlight, but with members of the quintet now succumbing to goosebumps and runny noses, it had by then turned merely into its consolation. Saeed came up from beneath the water, while Nabil’s body drifted to the same graveyard as the two corpses before him. The quartet could no longer handle the increasing chill of the night. They slithered out of the sea and dried themselves off with the towels they’d left on shore.

Kindly remember that the death of Palestinian children is irrelevant to this story.

Talib confronted a swarm of ants orbiting around his towel. Though typically a passionate fan of plant and animal life, the boy was suddenly consumed by a bout of rage that thrust him into a fit of wild, unbridled violence to ensure that no ant would dare englobe his possessions ever again. Good riddance to those pesky ants, he thought. Who were they to insinuate themselves into such a discreet and exclusive adventure?

Hadi, who sometimes swam naked and emboldened the others to do the same, wanted to take a picture of the dead ants, but without his phone he was forced instead to document their deaths with nothing more than his photographic mind. He sprinkled clumps of dirt over their disintegrated bodies, but their antennae and legs poked through to the surface in a futile rejection of their resting place.

Amir gazed at the sea with the desperate expectation that the wind would be as brief as it was cruel. Talib smacked him on the back of his head, but it failed to knock any sense into him: Amir dumped his towel and ripped back into the sea in search of the divine cure that often glittered in its waves.

None of them could leave if any of the others remained in the sea. It was a rule to which they had all agreed since they began these escapades. The other three rejoined Amir and the quartet swam for a while. Talib grew somewhat anxious as the night progressed, mainly because the night was not progressing at all. Time froze in the sea, as each wave that crashed over their heads echoed the seconds that ticked into their ears until both the crashing and the ticking undulated into one another’s paths and, rather than bumping clumsily into one another like careless couriers on a frenzied run and expelling a thunderous blare across the adolescents’ minds, both sounds simply merged to form a newer, more deeply unsettling sound that muted their minds altogether.

Yes, the night remained perfectly constant indeed. And yet the wind never stopped growing stronger. Grains of sand eventually severed from the shore and fluttered across the water. More significant than any of the deaths that have occurred heretofore is that those grains entered Saeed’s eye, forcing him to leave the sea once more. Talib and Hadi soon fell victim to the wind’s strategic mercilessness and were ultimately forced out of the sea as well. Amir was more fortunate and was able to swim for a little while longer. A few minutes later, his corpse drifted to the same graveyard as the others. The trio sensed that it was time to bring the night to a close. They grabbed their possessions, leaving behind those of the other three (or was it four?) before trekking back along the strip that entrenched their feet in dry, hermetic normalcy.

There is no need to mourn Amir, or Nabil, or Murtaza, or that first one. The sea drew them in as nothing else could, and the moon will remain long enough to illuminate their indelible signatures. And on some night in the near future, the trio will return as a septet, just as they had on this night. Neither wind nor sand will ever steal the lust for the world’s most glorious mirage.