I don’t know what I saw today. Here is what was in front of my eyes:

Here is water, in front of their eyes, up to their eyes, over the fronts of their eyes, the shorter ones, standing here in the tent, and they aren’t blinking. They don’t shut their eyes when the water comes, do they? It’s a little hard to tell, actually. Maybe they do. They aren’t shutting their mouths when the water comes washing over their faces... Or are they? I can’t tell. I feel like I can tell, but I can’t.

Look at the water coming in through the holes in the top of the tent. It is in front of your eyes. Look at the water falling in little streams, here and there; is it splashing on the surface of the flood? Is it sending out ripples and rings and waves? Or is it just disappearing, like one digital layer into another?

Here is how I should write about it: Look at this family! Look at the children: they are children, all of them. Did you notice it the first time you watched? Only two people in this video are tall enough to have their knees above the water, and they are only children, still, a boy and a girl.

The girl is holding a baby in her fence-wire arms. She is ten years old, maybe, and the baby is ten months old, or two years old, maybe, and she weighs ten pounds, maybe, soaking wet, either one of them, take your pick, they are both ten pounds, and they are both soaking wet. The whole family of children, their clothes are pure dark and drip-shining and itch-sticking to their skin, tight. They have been buried in the rain like it's rocks.

Look at how the water is coming in; this is how I should be writing about it, not just through the little holes in the ceiling of the tent, but through the open flap. How could you ever shut it, anyway? It’s not new water that’s coming through, really, but it’s waves,

Like
Somebody
Copied and
Pasted
A video of the sea—

Or no, isn’t that what happens when water comes in through a narrow opening? I get up and go try it out in the bathroom sink with a pair of wooden blocks, but I can’t quite figure it out.

Look at the water, coming in waves. It is washing over the necks of the shorter children, standing next to the boy and the girl.

They are sobbing, or else their faces are wet. The shortest child, the water is washing over his face, or else he is sobbing. The waves are coming up onto him and past him, and he is still just large enough that none of his other siblings can help to hold him over it. I will tell you about the color of the water: it is brown, like the dust, not the dirt. I will tell you about the arm of one of the middle children: it is bent, at not quite the right angle.

The girl holding the baby, her arm is not angled quite right either. I start counting her fingers. I start checking the comments. It is in front of all of our eyes. Some of us are sure what we see, they beg to God, and they promise curses and vengeance and all of that.

Some of us, my brain, am I starting to doubt? What is wrong with me?

Here is what was in front of my eyes today. A soldier in a lawn chair, reading verses, with three men hogtied and blindfolded, face down on the ground, on the dust, in front of him. I count his fingers as he laughs, and he gestures, because the world simply cannot work in this way, can it? This must be fake, mustn’t it? Like the other one, the first one. If that can be fake, anything can be fake. Unless everything is real, nothing is real. Unless everything is the worst that it can be, nothing is really so bad at all, is it? Is your leg really broken if you aren’t bleeding into your lungs? Do you really have skin cancer if you don’t have brain cancer?

I don’t care if the candy and chocolate and soda coming in on the aid trucks don’t have any nutritional value. Don’t you realize that starving children in Africa would love to eat that candy and chocolate and soda? Right? What about the children in Sudan? See? You don’t care about them at all, do you? You only care about yourself, don’t you? It’s only a genocide when it’s happening to you, isn’t it? Or is it only a genocide when Jews are doing it? Is that all it is?

You lied about your brother breaking your action figures, remember? You broke them yourself, but you said your brother is the one who broke them, and now you’re telling me that he cut you with the kitchen knife, and I’m supposed to believe you? How do I know that you didn’t just cut yourself? How do I know that you’re cut at all? Are you really even bleeding?

Look, look at the water, here are some photos, see? Are you looking? The water is the same color, the dust, not the dirt, the color of the water. It’s up to the knees, if you’ve got high knees. Look at it, all around the tents, in the tents.

Photos are even easier to fake than videos, aren’t they?

I’m zooming into all the images, checking the waterline against the folds and corners and curves of the tent fabric, does it match? Taqiyya, taqiyya, taqiyya, taqiyya, taqiyya, “Your prayers for our family, all our tents have been drowned". Or else look at this: here are some men with brooms? Rakes? What are those? Are those shovels? Are they digging? No, you can’t dig water.

What are they doing? The water is up to their knees and they’re standing in the center of a square of tents, using whatever it is that they have to drag as much water as they can from the right side of the screen to the left, and that’s pretty pointless. It’s water, it just goes right back again, as fast as they move it. It just fills in the space as quickly as it empties, and also it’s still raining.

The water is just going up and up and up. This must be fake. Why would they be doing anything like this if it were real? So pointless, why would they be doing this?

I notice that the handle of one of the tools is bent—no, broken. It’s been broken, and now it’s being held together with tape, and not very well; it’s bending every time the person drags it through the water, limp. It looks like someone with a broken forearm and no cast is trying to dig a hole in the cold forest dirt with their hand; it is shatteringly painful to watch this; it is painful in the liver, to watch this, every time the handle bends. What are the names of the bones of the forearm? The radius and the ulna? Or is it the humerus? I can never remember.

Picture the bones, do that with me, picture the jagged ends of the bones, like splintered wood, cutting back and forth through the muscles and tendons and blood vessels, and the nerves, all of the bruised tissue, pink and then red and then purple and then brown, until it is all just soup between the wrist and the elbow, sloshing around, and the hole isn’t anything close to being dug—just a slight indent in the ground. God, fuck, the inside of my arm is just a

Soup

Of shredded muscle fibers and collagen and blood and blood and blood, all the cells have been torn up into little plastic bags, full of holes and nothing else, all their fluids and organelles and chromosomes are all mixed together with everything else, the

Soup
Of
People
And
Stories
And

What all the layers of the arm used to be. I have seen all the parts of it, now, with my own two eyes. I understand exactly how it all works.

The men are digging a trench, which is what they are doing; I understand it exactly. They are trying to dig a trench under the water so that all the water will go into the trench instead of into their tents; that’s what they are doing. It won’t work.

Here’s the next day, look at the water! Look at the wind! Look at the tents, fluttering like leaves! That’s all they are, leaves. Here and there, they rip free from their stems and go flying away, and you can see the people huddled under where they’d just used to be, screaming and searching about for somewhere else to run to.

Look at the flash of lightning! Look at the jeep, struggling to pull itself through the mud! Look at this! Look at this! It’s like a magic trick; even the tents have turned into rubble. Look at people buried in the smashed remains of their wooden furniture! Look at the people, tangled up in their table legs.

Look at the people, wedged halfway through the headboards of their beds. Look at people, pelted by the loose backs of their chairs. Look at the chests and footstools, crushing them. It’s biblical, that's what it is, and there’s not a bit of irony in that, there isn’t. Watch the wind, like a shout. Watch it all go flying away. Or maybe it’s all fake, is what it is.

Maybe visions are dancing in front of my eyes.

Or maybe I am only worried about visions dancing in front of my eyes, so I am dangling my own visions to cover those other ones, if they are there. Or maybe there are three layers: visions on top of visions on top of visions on top of whatever is real, but I’m not sure what that would mean, anyway. Is the Veil what is real, or is the Veil a dream? Is the Veil what is normal, or is the Veil bizarre? Is the world being crushed flat by a giant, or is it a windmill in disguise? You know how they are, those windmills.

You can't trust a windmill. Sometimes they dress up as giants, and sometimes they dress up as little pinwheels in little girls' hands, starting to turn as the tip of the pressure-wave hits, and then shredding as it washes past. Sometimes the fighter-jets dress up as fire birds, you know? Sometimes the train-cars dress up as dragons, the rumble, the screech, the roar. You can't trust the skin, you can't trust the pulp. You can’t trust the

Soup.

Is the grenade hiding inside the teddy bear, left behind by the soldiers? Or is that a real man with a fake explosive vest, walking across the "ceasefire" line at gunpoint? Trembling,

We have
Your family
In the other room—
We have
Your wife—
We have
Your children—
Here is what
You will
Do—

And look at that, bang, we've stopped a terrorist attack, but can't you see how they are? You can see it, right in front of your eyes. They'll never stop without us stopping them. We have to put a stop to all this. We have to

Wipe
It all
Clean—

That’s how it goes; the world works in that way.

Or maybe he really is a terrorist. How would I know, someone like me? I just don’t know these things. I send messages to Esraa, to Basma, to Ahmed:

“Tell me what is happening To you,”

I ask, and I don’t ask it because they need to hear me asking it, or because I need to get it out of myself, or because I need to be answered, but only for the sake of the poetry of Creation and for no other reason.