Aziza feels an unbearable heat, not dry like the desert, but the crackling power of flames, first. Then she sees her parents, lying side by side out in dry dirt, their bodies slowly licked and consumed by the heat. They do not stir. Traditionally, the dead in Saudi Arabia are buried; cremation is rare and though her parents aren’t religious, they certainly wouldn’t want to be ashes. She blinks hard, trying to clear away the image from her mind’s eye, but she can’t.
The vision is sudden, as most of her visions are, but they usually aren’t as sensory as this; the smell the burning of wood and flesh is strong, the air dead of a breeze, and a look around shows her parents are not the only ones being burned. Men dressed in foreign black uniforms are leading the disposal. If they are some sort of relief or army division, the symbols emblazoned on their shoulders and chests are unrecognizable to her. Unfriendly, even. They work methodically by lining up bodies, shouting orders, preparing boxes and holes for the dead to be swept into.
This is a mass grave, Aziza realizes. Are these uniformed men responsible for such death and destruction? For her parents lives’ being taken not only from this earth, but from her. Up until this moment, the men seemed to not have noticed her. It is only when she takes a hesitant step towards her parents that one begins to shout and point a finger in her direction.
“She’s here!” The voice is rumbly and low like thunder. “Contain her, quickly! Nervo wants her alive.”
Aziza’s body is caught in two directions – part of her body turns as if to run while a hand, palm out, shoots up. She could collapse time, wipe this moment off the map (so to speak) if she wanted to. And she realizes uneasily that she does want to if it will undo this mess, make these men pay.
Aziza blinks. The men, the fire, the bodies, are gone. She is back at her parent’s home, sitting at the dining table. It’s a cozy home, filled with rich, earthy colors, a place she’s always felt safe in. Her finger is pressed into a page of a book to keep her place and she remembers then she had been reading. This book was not enough to keep her attention from wandering elsewhere. Her parents are busy in the kitchen cooking the evening meal when they notice Aziza’s expression, eyes wide open in shock.
“What did you see?” her parents asks. They’re always curious about the answer, but they don’t expect it be anything extraordinary – Aziza usually predicted small things like sports victories or the results of a poll. The more serious kind of visions didn’t happen unless she focused deeply on those around her. And as a rule, she tried not to on her parents often or at all because of the vison she just had – seeing something she was too afraid to deal with. Or seeing a moment she blundered instead of preventing. Around fifteen, she had a vision that her mother would trip and drop the family tea set, scalding herself with hot water. Thinking her mother had slipped on the freshly mopped tile floor, she set out a rug in the doorway, only for the rug to be what her mother would trip on. Not every bad thing can be prevented her would try to assure her, but it made Aziza’s insides twist with guilt.
But her parents must sense that she saw something different this time from how her hands shakes, how her face starts to screw up and go red from trying to contain her tears. Her mother crosses the room to pull her in for a hug and smooths a hand through Aziza’s hair. The smell of her mother’s heavy rose perfume feels just like her embrace: warm and familiar, but not suffocatingly so. There is no push to know what the vision was; these abilities have been a blessing and a curse since Aziza acquired them as a girl.
“I don’t know what you saw,” her mother starts and leans back a little to look Aziza in the eyes. “But nothing is definite. The future is too temperamental and everchanging to be permanent.”
That much is true. Still, Aziza knows in the vision that she was not much older than she is now and that frightens her. This could happen soon, sooner than she might expect. Worse yet, it’s possible her ability to see into the future, unstable as it is, and her ability to collapse time could be the very reason her parents were dead in that vision, that her city was destroyed and their death wishes disregarded. In her gut, she feels the carnage might not be contained to just that her city or country, but the rest of the world too.
“Who am I really?” The question seems to come from nowhere, though it’s been one Aziza has been asking all her life. The little memory she has of her life prior to turning eight, strange books her parents gave her when she told them she could see things, her own birth records questionable when her parents couldn’t seem to remember where she was born. Now more than ever does it seem important to know the answer. “Why can I do the things that I do?”
Her father shuffles over with a steaming cup of tea served from the vary tea set her mother had tripped with all those years ago. He slides the tea across the table towards he and Aziza takes a grateful sip, the spices of it soothing her tight throat.
Reginald andah 