Walking for Tomorrow
by Elina Kumra
Maybe the woman from Shuja'iyya, who shared her tramadol and showed me where to find water during the raids. Maybe an imam who'd lost his voice from calling too many funerals. Maybe, even, the pharmacist with eyeglasses held together by medical tape...
Or maybe my son Ibrahim, taken by a drone that left his body in pieces across the sand where children once played soccer.
I appeared in this life not by choice but by incident, a Palestinian woman who'd spent twenty-seven years learning to keep her head down. I was reciting fajr prayer when Ibrahim's soul left his body. The doctor who told Khalil used words like "shrapnel" and "internal bleeding." I said don't tell me. I knew every detail already. I could close my eyes and see exactly how the metal had entered his organs, what parts had failed first, which direction the blood had traveled.
They had me on something. Yellow pills swiped from the ruined pharmacy. My lips numbed, the ceiling turned into a movie screen where Ibrahim's life reviewed itself. Birth to death to birth again.
"You can identify him?" a nurse asked me at Al-Shifa.
"Of course I can identify him," I said, but when they pulled back the sheet, I announced, "That's not my son," even though it was. I stood there not crying while flies crawled across the sheet and the electricity cut. The darkness made things easier.
At home I collected his things: a blue coffee mug, textbooks about human anatomy, a keffiyeh that still smelled like him. Samira had his birthdate embroidered on her sleeve in red thread. Leila wrote "Ibn al-Qassam" on her wrist each morning with a green pen that bled when she washed for prayer.
"I'm not the first woman in Gaza to lose a son," I told Khalil on the third night.
"No," he agreed, lighting a cigarette in our kitchen with hands that trembled. "But you're taking it strange."
"Define strange," I said. Through the window, the sky above Gaza blurred with ash. A helicopter circled, its searchlight cutting through smoke. Everyone we knew was either leaving or dead or waiting to be one of those things.
Khalil reached for my hand but touched only air. I'd already moved to the doorway. My body had started doing things without consulting my brain.
"Are you talking to him?" Khalil asked.
"Of course not," I lied. "He's dead."
But there he was, Ibrahim, squatting in corners, standing behind doors. Sometimes a hand reaching through plaster. Sometimes his voice, telling me which pills to take.
I started walking after the three days of mourning. Dawn and dusk, when the light was uncertain. I'd walk the shore where Ibrahim had taught boys to fish with nets he'd repaired himself. Sometimes I'd find things: a child's shoe, a page from a schoolbook, bullet casings, once a human tooth. Evidence of what, I couldn't say.
"You look like a woman who knows things," a man said to me one evening. He was a fisherman, or used to be before they limited how far boats could go. Now he fixed nets and talked to whoever would listen. His hands were lumpy and scarred from hooks.
"I know nothing," I told him.
"The living are buried," he said. "The martyrs are with their Lord, receiving provision."
I wanted to grab him by his salt-stiffened clothes. "How do you know? Did you get a phone call? Did your sons send you a text message from paradise? Did Allah give you coordinates?"
He just smiled—three teeth missing—and went back to his nets. I watched his fingers work the knots, thinking how all labor in Gaza is ultimately useless. We build, they destroy. We heal, they wound. We raise children, they take them.
I was 50. My body had started betraying me in small ways before Ibrahim died, but afterward my knees gave out completely. They'd buckle during walks, surrendering before the rest of me was ready.
In the apartment, gravity worked sideways. I'd be walking straight but find myself suddenly against a wall. My neighbor Um Mahmoud recited Quran through our shared wall, her voice thinned by grief for her own martyred son. "Sabran jamilan," she called to me. Beautiful patience.
I swallowed another yellow pill. Patience my ass.
When they buried Ibrahim, I looked on, dry-eyed, thinking it would be harder than this. I was empty as a shell casing. The imam said words I'd heard at dozens of funerals. After, I touched the soil of the grave briefly. It was warm, unlike Ibrahim's skin when we'd washed his body.
Later that night I dreamed I was inside Ibrahim's body during those final moments. The clinic walls split open. The ceiling became sky. I felt the pressure wave before the sound, how it collapsed his lungs before his brain could register pain. I woke convinced that my own organs had liquefied.
The yellow pills ran out on the tenth day. My right eye developed a twitch. My hands forgot how to hold things. The apartment became a sudden museum of Ibrahim: his prayer rug holding the impression of his knees, his medical books exhaling mildew, his unwashed clothes hung in the closet.
"The dead visit us in dreams," a woman told me at the market. I was buying bread, or standing near bread. Sometimes I forgot to complete actions. "My husband comes every night," she continued. Her face had the look of someone preserved. "He tells me secrets from the other side."
"What kind of secrets?" I asked, suddenly desperate to know.
"That's between him and me," she said, and walked away clutching a loaf.
I tried summoning Ibrahim in dreams. I'd lie on his bed with his keffiyeh over my face, breathing his scent until I fell asleep. But he never came. Instead, I dreamed of the sea rising over Gaza, washing everything clean.
One night walking home after Isha prayers, I saw a young man with Ibrahim's exact walk crossing the street ahead. I ran, and called his name. When he turned, his face was nothing like my son's—too thin, too scarred, eyes containing different horrors.
"Afwan," I whispered. "I thought you were someone else."
"We are all someone else now," he said, and continued into the darkness.
I watched him disappear, thinking how death transforms us in ways we never anticipate. I'd become the kind of woman who chases strangers in the street. Who talks to empty rooms. Who beachcombs trash. Who swallows pills to blur the unbearable.
When I got home, I found Khalil sitting in Ibrahim's room.
"What are you doing here?" I asked. We'd been separated five years.
"You left the door unlocked," he said, not looking up from the prayer beads in his hands. "Someone could walk in."
"Someone did," I said, but didn't ask him to leave. There was comfort in having another person who knew exactly what we'd lost. We sat in silence until the electricity cut.
That night after Khalil left, I laid my prayer rug beside Ibrahim's and pressed my forehead to the ground. Rain leaked through the roof, droplets hitting my back one by one like tiny judgments.
"Ayna ant?" I asked the darkness. Where are you?
The answer came in the form of a small gecko that scurried across the desk and disappeared into a crack in the wall. Just another creature that could move between spaces I couldn't access.
I stood at the window watching Gaza's nightscape—scattered lights, some electric, some fire, some the flashlights of people searching rubble. In the distance, the Mediterranean reflected what illumination remained. I remembered Ibrahim at six, holding my hand as we stood at the shoreline, the water covering our feet, then retreating, covering, then retreating.
"The water is praying," he'd said. "Look how it bows."
Now I couldn't tell what was prayer and what was endless repetition of suffering. I couldn't distinguish between grief and worship, between memory and hallucination, between this world and whatever came after.
I kept walking the shores at dawn, at dusk. With each step I thought: perhaps this one brings me closer to wherever he's gone. I never found him. Still, I walked. What else could I do? The heart beats even when you've forgotten why.
Elina Kumra is a BIPOC Bruin based in California. Her work has been twice shortlisted for the Bridport Prize—in both poetry and fiction—and she is the recipient of the Phyllis Smart-Young Prize in Poetry from the Bay Area. She writes across genres, from speculative and horror to psychologically layered literary fiction, often blending lyrical intensity with sociological teeth. Her stories explore interiority, memory, and marginalization, aiming to linger in the reader’s mind long after the final line. When not writing, she is likely tracing coastal fog or revisiting the recursive dream logic of Serial Experiments Lain.