Page 170 of The End of the World As We Know It
Nasir woke up in a rickshaw on a bumpy road. It wasn’t Parrot—the doors were brown and made of plastic, not canvas—and a wave of terror overwhelmed the intense throbbing pain in his face and arms. When he tried to move, the agony twisted and returned with a roar, and he groaned.
“Easy, lala.”
Palwasha sat next to him in the rear of the rickshaw, holding his head in her lap, stroking his hair. She looked so much older than her fifteen years, her face gaunt and tired, and was that a lock of white hair on her forehead? He wanted to sit up, but dizziness hit him and he sank back down. He opened his mouth, tried to ask,Where are we, but each word, each breath was a struggle, and the sound came out dusty and garbled.
Palwasha leaned in. “Khanewal.” She had understood. “We’re about an hour away.”
Who, who is driving?
She told him the whole story. From his position up in the minaret, Murtaza, their last man standing—a description by necessity; he was seventeen—had taken out the colonel’s remaining three goons posted out by the barracks. After their near brush with certain death, the older women had rallied. Farzana, a tiny, scoliotic sixty-year-old, had taken charge of the children, while Parveen rushed to a nearby dispensary to find first-aid kits and medicines. They had clamped the remains of Nasir’s jaw together and sutured his wounds with thread and needle as best as they could.
When they finally took inventory, they had lost more than half oftheir little community of twenty-seven. Palwasha hadn’t realized how few of them were there in the first place, and now that the mosque-community was decimated, it was unanimously decided that after burying their dead, they would leave the area using back roads. What had the colonel said? A hundred more men a few hours away? He might have lied, but they couldn’t take any chances.
But where would they go now that they’d lost the only place they could call home?
Uch, Palwasha told them. The city near the conjunction of five rivers.
“And do you know why I said Uch Sharif?” Palwasha asked Nasir as she changed his dressing and fed him crushed potato through a straw—he wouldn’t be able to chew for weeks.
“Why?”
“Because Khizar-chacha told me. After the evil men were dead,” she said, her voice full of love and sadness. “He said we’d build strength and a new home in Uch. We’ll be safe there until GT Road kills all the evil men walking on it one by one and is ready for us again.”
After, Nasir thought. She said Khizar spoke to herafterthe evil men were dead.
He didn’t ask her to explain. Just grunted. “Where’s Hero?”
“Sitting up front with Wajeeha, who volunteered to drive us.” And now Palwasha was smiling. “We freed all the prisoners, lala. Just like Khizar-chacha wanted. They’re all coming with us to Uch.”
Nasir wasn’t sure how he felt about that. He didn’t know any of them. But that fear was for tomorrow.
He repositioned his head on the girl’s lap and gazed directly into Hero’s warm brown eyes. The dog had poked his nose through the rickshaw’s partition. Nasir reached out and stroked the dog’s ears with two fingers. Hero barked happily and Nasir thought,A mouth too big for a dog or a wolf.
Hero turned into a wind, a blur, a swish of smokeless fire surrounding the men in the mosque.
Khizar never told them where he found Hero and they had never asked.
Nasir closed his eyes again and let his body feel the road, every turn and jolt of it vibrating up into the roots of his teeth. The road, the road, a tiny manifesto of humanity’s slipshod attempts at connecting, coagulating, warding off the inevitable end of it all.
He felt Hero lick his hand with his damp, rough tongue, remembered how he used to not like dogs. What a fool he was. What fools they all were, humans: scared, angry, brave, hopeful.
Good dog, he thought.Good dog, Hero.
Now stay.
ABAGAIL’S GETHSEMANE
Wayne Brady and Maurice Broaddus
“If we must die, O let us nobly die,
So that our precious blood may not be shed
In vain; then even the monsters we defy”
—Claude McKay, “If We Must Die”
Summer, 1919
