Supplication by Nour Abi-Nakhoul

Author:Nour Abi-Nakhoul [Abi-Nakhoul, Nour]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
Published: 2024-05-07T00:00:00+00:00

When I exited the parking garage the car was waiting for me just outside the entrance, sitting quietly with the engine off, tinted windows rolled all the way up. I walked over to it slowly, automatically. Somewhere inside me a connection had come loose, a cable’s plastic coating had been rubbed off and the frayed wires were disintegrating, energy misfiring everywhere throughout my body: a tugging feeling behind my eyes, a stabbing inside my chest, nerves shooting off signals apropos of nothing. The desperate, insensible movements a body makes when balance has been lost and can’t be restored. In the unbalanced rocking boat of my body all the cells were in mutiny, fighting to push each other overboard into the unfathomable emptiness of the sea beyond. I felt as though I’d lost half of my blood, like the insides of my veins were dry but my heart still continued its futile pumping. In front of the concrete parking garage I bent over, retching and lurching, the dirty grey of the sidewalk spinning and twisting. The whole earth was spinning and twisting and I would fall off of it, would continue to fall until I reached deep space, where I’d have to gasp for breath within the endless empty frigidity; not all that different from the cold, empty world on earth that I struggled for breath within. In front of the garage nothing came out of my mouth except thick saliva, dribbling down from my lips toward the sidewalk. The car horn sounded and I heard it as though over a great distance, through layered sheets of glass. The blunt sound barrelled over the distance, finding its way into my body, hitting the barrier of my skin where its waves were sent bounding off in different directions like frightened deer through foliage. And the waves of sound that didn’t ricochet off my flesh, that didn’t soften and sink, disintegrating, into my skin, somehow found their way serpent-like into my ear, wormed their way into the canal and vibrated those tiny bones inside; they didn’t stop there and fall apart, instead they went deeper still, riding along with the electricity that shot through my brain, nestling into a corner of that organ and remaining there, echoing back and forth endlessly, recalling themselves over and over again. Certain corners of my mind were filled with miniscule sound waves like these, living there quietly enough that I couldn’t hear them unless I knew what to pay attention to, millions of them living quaintly in the elastic pink landscape of my mind.

Once again the car horn sounded, closer and more pressing this time, and then the hissing scrape of the window rolling down. The sidewalk steadied below me, ceasing to spin and becoming solid as I breathed deeply and rose upright on my weak, rubbery legs, taking staggering steps down the street away from the car. Did you find what you wanted? the driver called out the window after me, the words echoing in my head, looping over and over again, what you wanted, what you wanted, what you wanted.

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