A face like the moon

by Mina Athanassious

  My body rested but my mind refused. The whole scene replayed in my dreams. All I could focus on was my friend on the concrete with his own blood in his palm and the bearded man’s blood in mine.

  ~~~

  I woke up in a cold sweat. My body was so hot I needed to go back out to the balcony to breathe.

  My alarm clock flashed 3:30. I heard baba snore. I walked out onto the balcony and stared and hung my head above the railing. I looked up above the concrete skyline and saw the white lights lining the streets stretch to infinity. I heard the whistle of a bird and another sing back its own song. I tried to control my tired mind stuck in the moment I would never get back. I stood with my head held above the railing and looked into the blackness dotted by white lights.

  I hoped the big man didn’t die. More importantly, I hoped my friend Mr. Marwan was still alive. I didn’t think a gash on his cheek could kill him.

  I sat on a beach chair on my balcony and kept my eyes open to the horizon. No sign of day still, but I knew it would come. My beating heart rushed with my thoughts and the coming colour of the streets. I saw the darkness and the cuts of streetlights across the narrow roads and I saw the gleam of cars as they passed in the synthetic light and the moon that sat perched like an ornament in an empty sky and I saw the void in this city blind to itself and I saw the world for what it was for so many more nights until I could see no more.

  BREATHE LIFE

  Relics of the saints rested in small red velour pouches across the front of the church. Martino sat in his mother’s arms as she reached to touch the glass and muttered a blessing under her breath. She rubbed the glass, kissed her fingers and crossed herself. Martino tried to stretch for the glass like his mom but his stubby arms couldn’t reach. He settled for petting the small gold cross on a thin silver chain around his mother’s wrist, reached his fingers to his mouth and kissed them.

  An old icon of a wide eyed, round headed bronze, skinned St. George sat proud on a white horse with a thin lance in both his hands that pierced through the mouth and into the throat of the dragon at his feet, its blood seeping from the back of its head. An angel hovered over the head of the saint readying a crown above him. His mother told him it was the crown of martyrdom.

  Crown of martyrdom? The boy was too young to understand and too tired to care. Just hours ago he was home in the comfort of his room playing police chase with his toy cars. The cops always caught the bad guys before he went for a cookie break. He marched into the living room with a small red Camaro in his hand and saw his mom balancing a lamp shade on her head. She stood still in the light of the bulb beside her. The boy could tell she fought a wide smile. Tino laughed and grabbed at her leg.

  “You caught me,” she said. He always did. She picked up the chunky boy in her skinny arms and kissed him and walked him to the kitchen. He rested his head against her pink cotton shirt she always wore at home. He loved to rub his tubby nose against the fabric and feel her warmth. She fetched him a cookie and sat him on the table next to her chair. He faced her as he chewed and looked into the depths of her blue eyes against her bronze skin, like an oasis between the sands of the Sahara. She was the only Egyptian he’d seen with blue eyes in his few short years, aside from his own of course.

  “So now that I got you here, I should tell you,” his mom started. “We’re moving.”

  “Moving where?” the boy asked. “Cairo with Uncle George?”

  “No, Tino,” she said as she rubbed the side of the boy’s belly. “It’s much further than that.”

  “How much further?”

  “Canada. You’re going to sit next to me on the plane.”

  “Canada? What’s that?”

  “You know America? Barack Obama and Fast and the Furious and all those other movies you like?”

  “We’re going to America?”

  “Almost. Canada is right above America. It’s like America’s hat. Baba was accepted and we’re moving in February. Isn’t that exciting?”

  “No! What about school?”

  “There’s schools in Canada.”

  “What about my friends?”

  “Habibi, there’s a lot of people in Canada you can make friends with. We’re moving close to Aunt Salwa and Uncle John. Remember they visited last year with your cousins Peter and Heidi?”

  “I didn’t love Heidi.”

  “I didn’t expect you to, but at least you and Peter were friends. He’s your age and we’ll be in the same city. You can see him whenever you want,” she smiled and tickled the fat underneath his round chin.

  “But what if no one else there likes me? I don’t speak English.”

  “You’ll learn.”

  “And what if a big white snow bear sees us when I’m walking. I could get eaten like in that movie,” the boy said as he clutched at his mother’s wrist. She chuckled and slid him off of her.

  “Habibi,” she said. “I already told you your angel is watching. You will always be protected. Even if a snow bear tries to eat you.”

  “You always talk about an angel but I never see it.”

  “Then you haven’t been looking. You’ll see your angel one day habibi. And you’ll know.”

  “How?”

  “When you know, you know,” she said.

  The boy smiled. His mother had a way with him.

  Tino slid off the table onto his mother’s lap and jumped to the ground. He ran back to his room to play with his toys until his father told him to dress for church.

  ~~~

  He’d slept through much of New Year on his mother’s lap during the liturgy. He woke a few times to smell the sweet char of incense and hear the deacons sing words he barely understood in a melody so full of peaks and troughs he could never grasp against a polyrhythmic backdrop of triangle and cymbals that held the chant together so loosely the boy sometimes felt the words would collapse.

  The words never collapsed. The moments when he was awake, he could hear the words float from above his head to the top of the dome of the church where they echoed back down. The boy never fully understood the chanting, but it calmed him, always managed to put him right to sleep.

  He woke again to a slowing chant nearing the end of the service. The boy wiped his face from the water, rubbed his eyes and yawned. On almost any other night he would’ve been fast asleep in his bed four hours earlier, no interruptions aside from the occasional bathroom break. At eight years old, he’d grown and learned not to pee in his sleep. The fear of his father’s shoe forced his change.

  “Are we done yet?” Martino muttered in his mother’s ear, a narrow peak of his pupil peered through his rested eyelids. “I’m really tired.”

  “Yes habibi,” she said. “It’s past twelve. Happy New Year,” she smiled and ran her fingers through his coarse hair. “Let me just go quickly to the bathroom. When I come back you can go find baba and tell him to meet me at the front okay?”

  The boy nodded and laid down, his head against the seat of the wooden pew. He couldn’t wait to be back home in his blue striped pajamas between the warmth of his blanket and bed.

  “Holy Holy Holy,” the priest and deacons and congregation sang coming to the end of the anaphora. “Heaven and earth are full of your glory.” Martino heard the clang of the cymbals gradually slow to the end of a chant that he wished would go on just a little longer. At least until his mother came back. He felt his eyes gently close again.

  A deep rumble with the rage of thunder startled his tired eyes wide open. The red velour drapes that separated the altar from the rest of the church had blown forward like the sail of a ship caught in a sudden storm. The boy’s pew quaked underneath him. He saw the floating crystal chandelier above the altar swing and whirl from side to side from the impact of the sound that came from outside. He could barely hear it screech over the screams of the people scrambling through their pew and out towards the exit.

  “Don’t fear!” the priest cried in his deep raspy voice. “Don’t fear! There’s nothing.” He waved t
he sign of the cross on the crowd with his right hand as they ran towards the exit. The boy caught the confusion and thought of his mom. The tips of his fingers had grown cold in the moment. He needed her to hold him and keep him warm and safe from the sound he didn’t know.

  Martino slid off the pew to his feet and towards the aisle being rushed by the rabble. His breathing became quick and shallow as he pushed through the feet of the ladies that stood between him and his mother. He needed to make it to the bathroom.

  In the midst of panic, fear changed the boy’s physical world. The late night winter warmth dissipated and transformed into something thick and hot. An older lady with wide dark brown eyes grabbed the boy and asked him if he was okay, her hair covered by a scarf with a large stitch of St. Mark. “I’m looking for mama,” he shrieked as he wriggled her hand off his shoulder. He licked at his upper lip and tasted salt from his sweat or the tears that rolled down his cheek, or both. He couldn’t tell. He wiped his wet face and pushed on.

  The further he pushed through the crowd towards the bathrooms, the closer he got to the exit, the louder and more piercing the shrieks of the people became.

  “Yassou!” he heard repeatedly from more than one voice. “Have mercy!”

  Martino wanted to be next to his mother, but he knew she would never let him out of the front doors to see what had happened when she spotted him. If anything, she’d blind him with her palm as he sat in her arms so that he wouldn’t have to see whatever was out there, like she often did whenever they passed roadkill on the highway. If he wanted to explore, he needed to do so before she spotted him.

  The boy passed the ladies bathroom, making sure to hide behind the legs of the crowds that grew in the front foyer, his eyes wide from the frenzy around him. He squirmed through the people and found the two front doors, maybe twelve feet tall engraved with Coptic crosses stacked from the bottom to the top. They stood open to the streets.

  Martino stepped and slipped on what felt like a wet floor. He fell against a lady’s leg right onto his bottom. The boy stretched his arm across the floor to give him a base to stand on. He stood and checked his wet hands, his fingertips to his palm painted crimson. He looked down at the floor and saw patches of shoeprints in the same deep red running in and out of the church. The prints darkened and dried as he approached the outside. He wiped his hands on his white dress shirt and walked where he knew he shouldn’t, until he reached the doors and peered out.

  Battling alarms set off on many cars echoed through a night air so dense the boy could feel it fill his lungs. A severed hand laid palm up with its finger pointing towards the streets, welcoming him. He gasped and stepped away towards the road to distance himself from the hand. A man’s torso laid a few feet from where he stood, the corpse’s back full of bloody holes punctured through his shirt faced the boy, its head slightly severed from its body lying in a pool of its own blood. One of the man’s legs lay a few feet from the body. The boy couldn’t spot the other.

  Bodies and parts of bodies graced the church entrance, at peace in their stillness. The boy too scared to cry and too dumb to turn back walked on through the corpses. He felt his lunch work its way up his insides. He felt afloat in the massacre, as if he swam through the ocean of bodies with his head barely above the bloody sea.

  He stopped at the feet of a lady knelt beside a young boy, his eyes wide and dumb to the light above him. His hair was coarse and black. His lips parted as if he had something to say but couldn’t. The boy looked much like Martino. The lady on her knees prayed this was just a horrible dream. She prayed for the boy to wake.

  “Let him live Jesus,” she cried as she tried to shake the boy awake. His body shook powerless against her force. She buried her head in his chest and wept for a moment as she muttered something to the Virgin.

  The lady held her son’s head with one hand and pressed down on his heart with two fingers in the other. Blood drained from his head to her fingers to her forearm and dripped in a small puddle underneath her elbow on the cool concrete. She picked him up and ran inside the church.

  Martino raised his head to the streets and spotted a small car glinted green in the streetlight flipped upside down, lying on its hood as smoke floated from its trunk and dissipated into the black night. All around him people crept between bodies and cried and some cursed under their breath as they wept. All but one woman, who stood under a large wooden painting of a bronze Jesus who held his arms open to the streets, spattered with the blood of the church. The woman rested her head against the painting and placed a hand on each side of her face as if to shut out the world.

  The boy’s mind spun in his skull as he tried to keep his heavy head on his shoulders. He wanted to creep into the church to see his mother but his mind couldn’t process how to get back in. He stood a few feet from the entrance. He made his way through the bodies, some with holes or missing limbs, some shielding the holes in their punctured skin or holding onto their nubs with open palms as they screamed for help. Martino spotted the gleam of a gold cross that graced a lady’s wrist in the distance.

  The boy walked towards the lame arm that laid lifeless on a man’s severed leg. He sped up with every stride and hoped to God it wasn’t who he knew it was.

  “Tino,” a deep familiar voice called close to him as thick broad palms grabbed at his sides from behind and lifted and turned the boy.

  “Baba,” the boy cried as he held onto his father’s neck. “I saw a lady over there with a bracelet like mama. It might be her. I need to make sure it’s not her.”

  “You need to make sure nothing,” his father roared with an urgency the boy never heard in him before. “You know never to leave the church without me or your mom. You’re going home with Aunt Sally.”

  “No baba just let me…”

  The man handed Tino over to his sister who stood silently with her eyes wide to the night. He punched against her soft back and demanded she turn around. He needed to see his mother.

  “Everything is fine,” she said. “We just need to get home. It’s late. You should have been asleep hours ago.”

  Though young and stupid, Martino knew that nothing that night was fine. He punched and kicked and screamed and cried to go back so that he could see his mother. He did this until he reached his aunt’s apartment up the street. There was no use. He was forced under the sheets on his cousin’s bed, for his own good he was told.

  He knew this was a fight he could not win. He laid on the foreign bed and stared at the tiny ridges on the ceiling and he prayed. He prayed his mother was alright and he’d see her in the morning. He prayed for the people he’d seen pierced and maimed, dying and dead at the front corridor in the church. He prayed they’d live. The dead ones too. And he prayed his tired mind would rest despite the sound and chaos coming from the same block.

  A miracle, grace granted him sleep.

  ~~~

  Martino woke a few hours later to a light patter at his door, his head heavier than the night before as if he’d never slept. Memories of the night trickled into his conscious mind. Along with them came the unease of uncertainty he felt but couldn’t name.

  “Mama,” he said as he sat up quick and swift.

  “No, it’s me,” a weak female voice muttered as the door opened. His cousin stood at the door, her eyes dark and tired. The boy knew she must’ve slept worse than him, if she slept at all. She was short for a girl her age, seventeen she told him a few months ago.

  “Dina?” the boy asked as he stood and marched towards her. “Where’s mama?”

  “Shh,” the girl said before he could walk past her out the door. “I know you want your mom. She’s in the hospital now.”

  “What?” the boy cried.

  “She’ll be fine,” Dina said examining the room with her eyes as if searching for the right words. “Listen, mama and baba are headed out and I have to take care of you. Do you want anything to eat?”

  “What happened yesterday?”

  “That’s not what I-”


  “What happened?”

  The girl sat herself on her bed next to Tino and wrapped her hand around his shoulder. She smelled like peach shampoo. She must have showered to clean the bloody night off her. Maybe Tino could do the same.

  Dina kissed her little cousin on his temple. Tino pushed her away and wiped his wet head. The girl giggled something subtle to herself and looked down at Tino’s feet as they swayed to the beat of the boy’s unsettled heart.

  “There’s some bad men out there,” she started as she rubbed his shoulder. “They’re few but they’re strong. They don’t like us.”

  “Why not?”

  The girl stopped and stared at her red toe polish shining off her nails. She wriggled and bunched them and let them loose again. Tino saw a tear escape and slide down her pink cheek.

  “We’re different,” she said. “We believe different things.”

  “So?”

  “That’s all that matters to some people.”

  “Who are the bad men?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe terrorists. Maybe police. Maybe the police are terrorists.”

  Dina didn’t have many words. Tino figured she didn’t want to talk because usually she wouldn’t stop talking.

  “I’m hungry,” he said.

  “After everything I told you, you’re hungry right now?”

  “Can you make me something?”

  “What do you want to eat?”

  “Eggs and liver.” Tino hated eggs and liver, but it took a long time to cook.

  “Okay, well I have to see if we have any liver. Sit still. If there isn’t any I’ll at least make you some eggs.”

  The boy heard his cousin rustle through the pots and pans as she prepared his breakfast. He’d slept in his clothes from the night before, all except his shoes and his white dress shirt stained crimson. His aunt gave him a long sleeved undershirt to wear to sleep instead.

  He gently turned the knob and peeked through a small opening between the door and the moulding that surrounded it and saw his cousin across the hall as she reached in the fridge for a piece of liver. The onions frying on the stovetop spat and crackled next to her along with their sweet smell that lingered throughout the apartment. The boy pinched himself through the narrow doorway, closed the bedroom door behind him while his cousin’s back was turned, made his way to the front door where he slid into a pair of slippers, and walked out as he closed the door.