Meteor
See you in 80,000 years.
Saya
‘Sweetheart,
can you open your eyes for me?’
Where am I?
My head…
‘Squeeze my hand…
come on…
squeeze…’
‘Baby, the paramedics are here, come on, just listen okay?’
Where am I? My room…why am I home? It looks so white and boring, where’s the calligraphy?’
‘Just going to shine something in your eye now, my lovely.”
‘Don’t fight it, I’ve got you. I’ve taken off your gloves, got your kit, don’t worry, it’s all here.’
Why are there fairy lights? I thought I took them down.
‘Saya, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.’
Chris, you idiot, why did you put them back up. Eid finished yesterday. You’re just going to trip and fall over th…
Fuck, is that my shoulder? Get off me!
‘She’s localising
but she’s so agitated,
we’ll have…’
‘Baby, shh, it’s okay…’
Fuck you, hey, fuck…no…
‘Is that a tube?’
‘Oh God, Oh God.’
‘I’m sorry...”
‘Can’t you give…”
“I’m sorry…”
Fuck
Oh God
Allah, I know I’ve done so much wrong
I know I don’t deserve you
If you can hear me
Tell Lilly…
I tr…
I’m…
She’s stronger than you know, a heart of steel starts to grow
She’s stronger than you know, a heart of steel starts to grow
---
Chris
I get in the ambulance with her. Only one family member allowed. Lilly says she’ll get an Uber, but as she tries, her tears smear her phone. My eyes remain dry, even as the weight behind them continues to swell.
Before the tube went in, Saya thrashed and fought like hell. As they tried to put in a cannula, her muscles bulged like trapped snakes around the needle. If I wasn’t there, they say that they might have needed another crew to restrain her. Now she’s under, the ambulance blue-light blare starts to roar as it speeds through foreign streets. The leather seat I’ve sunken into is barely my size, but right now, I wish it would swallow me whole.
I can still hear it. The crack of fist against bone. It felt wrong the moment the punch landed. Saya didn’t just collapse from the impact. She crumpled like a leaf. I can hear that noise, that sickening noise echoing through me with every swing of a door, with every beep of the observation machines in the hospital resus as doctors rush her to the scanner and back, saying she needs surgery for ‘a bleed on the brain’.
“Whatever it takes,” I say, signing whatever they ask of me. Subdural, extradural, pupils, contusions, the words pass through me like smoke. “For God’s sake, just save my wife.”
I hold her hand, even though her sedation means she can’t respond. Every time I look at her, the blue bruising around her eyes, the swelling where the fist landed, I’m tumbling through a trapdoor I always dreaded would open. She might be loud, she might be strong, but despite all this, she is a small woman. My hand swallows hers like the sea sucks a drowning man beneath its waves. I run my fingers over her calluses, the dips and dents that line her knuckles. I kiss each one, whispering strength into her skin. If she can hear me, I don’t want her to know that I’m crumbling.
It’s only when Lilly comes and Saya’s in the operating theatre, when I look out over the roads beneath the hospital, the cars whistling against the tarmac, a smoker lonely in the cold, that reality finally hits me. Time slows like a choke around my neck, fading into a hazy eternity.
It’s my fault that she’s even here.
Like the collapse of a dam, a violent un-stitching of hearts, my tears at last begin to fall.
---
Laila
We all have our defaults. The things we fall back on in times of crisis.
For Chris, it’s his and Saya’s song. Superheroes by The Script. Not something they ever played at the reception, being as small and traditional as it was, but what they played as they danced alone in their hotel, hand in hand, forehead to forehead. Saya told me the story so many times.
“He was so scared,” she’d say, bubbling with joy. “A guy who could choke out a bear turning to jelly in front of me. He’d practised this whole routine of what he’d do when we were alone, but it just wouldn’t come to him. His feet just wouldn’t move.
I didn’t mind. I told him, “Hey, honey, it’s okay, we’re okay, really okay, we’re married, we’ve got all the time in the world to dance,” but bless him, after all the chaos of our Nikkah, he wanted everything to be perfect that night.
So you know what I did? I sat up, on my knees on the bed. I sat up…and then started singing the lyrics to him.
I can’t sing for shit, you know that, but Lilly, I’m telling you. When he heard me, Chris lit up like a candle. He just…it just did something to him and next thing I know, he got me by the small of my back, lifted me off the bed…he made me feel like I could fly.”
I can see him replaying what must be her favourite parts, swiping along the slider to reach them time and again, having this sweetest of memories echo in his ears. Their anthem, their armour. Them against the world.
I never had anything like that with Mustafa. As I covered up the latest bruise in front of the mirror, waiting till he fell sound asleep before coming out of the bathroom, I would default to my most solitary of memories. The documentaries I’d watch as a wide-eyed child, the dinosaurs in all their glory wandering across the screen and into my heart. Such memories became my own armour plating: a four-spiked thagomizer, a thick clubbed tail or a crushing bite to the fear that filled my bones every single day. I would imagine being transported back into these wonderful ancient worlds every night. I’d watch the actions of parent and child, predator and prey play out in front of me, sometimes walking a few steps in the claws of my favourites. So long as I had these memories to come back to, then perhaps I had some hope. If my dinosaurs just kept on going all the way beyond the horizon, I could dream of escape, of a life beyond that cursed little flat, a family that genuinely wanted me.
I sit facing the theatre door while Chris paces the Waiting Area like a maddened tiger.
“Is it supposed to take this long?” he asks, furiously googling ‘decompressive craniectomy ‘, asking any staff member who walks past to check in on Theatre 9 to report back to him as to what’s happening.
“Chris, just sit down, you know they won’t be able to tell you. You’ll have to wait for the surgeons to come out.”
“Maybe they won’t need to take it all off,” he replies, his throat dry, his mind distant. “Maybe…maybe there’s just enough that she’ll be able to keep all her bone…she’d hate wearing hijab with a sunken head…”
His burning optimism forms a hole in my chest. Over the preceding weeks, I had barely spoken to Saya. After being cut up in her last loss, she would refuse to drill with me, spending time on the mats with Chris and his BJJ team, practicing her stand up game alone or with Marcel and Omar. I tried to reach out to her, but every time, all I received were excuses, feints, escapes. Chris said just leave her be, that she needed time to get out of her own head. That was five months ago, and even though he never told me directly, I’d cried enough to know the truth for myself. After everything we’d been through, after saving my life all those years ago and bringing me into her world, Saya no longer felt I was welcome. Chris already knew I was looking for other gyms. In the end, I was only here at Saya’s fight to say goodbye.
The thing is, a few birds aside, the dinosaurs didn’t just keep on going. After all, no species lasts forever. Instead, their nemesis fell from space 66 million years ago. A meteor that hit the Earth with the force of 10 billion Hiroshima bombs, turning it into a dust-choked hell that killed 75% of all life. As we wait in that sterile waiting room and Saya’s operation ticks on, my mind is consumed a single thought, fed by the scans the surgeons showed us before taking her to theatre.
Thick white bleeds crushing the left side of her brain.
Bruising, clots and torn nerves.
The fracture cratered into her skull.
This was the dust from her meteor. The blast front from her 10 billion bombs.
No amount of armour could fight that, could it?
That’s the thought that destroys me the most.