Dissolved

Amidst the cries of the inconsolable, those hopelessly forlorn people inside the Zahir, all facing an imminent demise, there was the distinct repetition of the word: no. Everyone had retreated to the far corner of the room, facing away from the explosives, averting their eyes from the monstrosity like a bad dream. No one had seen Amuela march toward the grenades and pick them both up, repeating the word no with greater anger as she approached the window. She pitched them out into the streets like baseballs, and a moment later they exploded, killing half a dozen more guerrilla fighters outside.

Outside, the men were momentarily immobilized, frozen with consternation and befuddlement at the sudden reversal. How? Unbelievable! First the rocket, and now this. "We have lost too many soldiers," one of the men shouted over the chaos and gunfire. "What do you propose," Mustafa asked him, taking cover behind a building across from the Zahir. "I fear if we do not retreat, we will incur even greater losses," the man replied, "there are only the two of us left." Hesitating, his pride wounded, the sharp sense of failure cutting him savagely, Mustafa solemnly agreed with the soldier's assessment. He forfeited the fight and fled the street bitterly, the want of vengeance, of victory, stinging his mouth. "They may have staved us off today, Haqar, but their days of plenty are numbered," Mustafa said, with a cold air of assurance, his black eyes lightless and hard, like pieces of coal.

Inside the Zahir, men struggled to restrain Amuela as she thrashed and fought to make her way past the door. She wanted to see the faces of the cowards that had ambushed and murdered innocent people, murdered Abir. Her face was wet with tears and flushed with anger. "Get off of me! Let me go! You cannot keep me here! I want to see them," she cried. Finally, the men pried her from the door and sat her in a chair. Someone came out with a glass of water. The people inside the restaurant, thankful to her to be alive, watched curiously as she drank. She was not from there, it seemed. She looked to be of Spanish descent, perhaps from Madrid. Amuela - with her wild, light-colored eyes, her strappy sandals and frenzied hair, her white dress, blood-stained and torn, clinging provocatively to her lean physique - looked merciless, like a goddess of war.

One of the men, the man who, earlier, had stood at the window beside the now dead bearded man, pulled up a chair and placed it in front of Amuela. Calmly, he sat down and said, "we are very thankful to you, for your bravery." She stared back at him, expressionless. She wasn't listening to what he was saying. To her, the realization was beginning to sink in: she was lost. Her fantasies of financial freedom, love, a life of travel and whimsy - all of it - had been detonated with Abir. How could things ever be the same? How could she ever love anyone again after watching him get blown to pieces by a suicide bomber. Some hardships are not simply endured, they are deformitive, debilitating, like surviving a fire; ruined melted skin, waxen and thin, forever disfigured.

Her last memory of him was of them together in bed, two nights before. They lay in the dark, beneath a silk canopy, and through the narrow open doors the light from the full moon glowed on the balcony, overlooking the sleeping city. Beside the bed was a lantern. Its flame flickered gently, dancing inside a ball of glass to the same billowy rhythm as the curtains that hung from the tall windows, to a tempo set by the breeze. The night was hot, even hotter as they explored each other's bodies. Sweat dripped from their pores like small oases, and they drank one another completely.

The cool air felt good, restorative, somehow auspicious.