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While the Waves Crashed
cc&d, v274
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While the Waves Crashed

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Last Love Letter

W. Scott R. Brownlee

    Zaid Abdullah felt his depression coming back. He was staring at the walls of his college dormitory but saw nothing at all. It was as if he could see right through the walls, peering outside into the warm, breezy spring day of Dearborn, Michigan. Perhaps even further than that. That stare of his probably could see clear across Lake Erie searching for a lost love going to college in Ohio. They were supposed to be together tonight for a Jack White concert. Nuru and Zaid forever, inseparable. And it had been for a long time. Until their second year in college when she insisted on going back to Jordan with him during break. Zaid had played it off, avoiding it as much as possible, blaming ISIS instead of discussing a certain truth that was gnawing away in her guts.
    She was black.
    A poor black Tanzanian girl with a gift for the violin. She was going to an American University on a music scholarship. Even this would not do for a third cousin of the Jordanian royal family. Zaid had never come clean with the truth. The constant dismissal of having an honest conversation began to make him sick. Each day closer the break drew near, Zaid felt worse.
    By two days out he couldn’t take it anymore. He went to a strip club with his roommate. Several lines of cocaine and whiskey found Zaid in the back seat of some stranger’s car having sex with a stripper that stank of heavy perfume and a rotten vagina that left its smell on him the entire night he spent in jail. The hooker and Zaid were arrested for breaking into the vehicle.
    An entire night without sleep slowly crept by. Black gangsters of Detroit kept staring at him as each second of the clock’s hand took an eternity to tick along. Zaid lost his shoes, shirts and watch. The gangsters didn’t steal his pants because of the dirty sex smell on them. Though tears threatened, Zaid held his composure intact, solidifying his nerves to brace for the long night.
    Centuries later, it seemed, daytime did come but freedom didn’t arrive until well past noon when Nuru picked him up. It was over as soon as she smelled the sex on him. That’s when the tears fell from his face. He had gotten down on a knee and proposed to marry. Nuru walked away, never looking back. The last thing he saw was the slender frame of her hips and shoulders moving furiously and far, far away.
    After months of texts and Facebook messages, Zaid tried to actually call her, the old fashioned way, but she never answered. Desperately, the last thing he could think to do was writing her a letter with a black ink and lined paper. It was a tear stained letter. He had explained it all, came clean and asked for forgiveness. Marriage was suggested but the relevance of that circumstance would depend on a variety of factors, namely Nuru being in agreement to such a concept. The letter had been sent off two weeks ago. Now Zaid was resigned to his inevitable defeat on the battlefield of love. For days he had sat in his room moping around sadly, quietly staring at the walls.
    His roommate stopped by and hopped on a PS4. He was playing Call of Duty Advanced Warfare for quite some time before he remembered that Zaid had gotten a letter from the campus post office. Falling into Zaid’s hands, a while passed before he began to register in his brain that it wasn’t a bill. Instead it was a return letter from Nuru.
    It was a hand written response.
    With shaking hands he tore the envelope open and read the words in her beautiful hand writing. The words were lofty and eloquent, almost preaching, but summarily there was a tentative understanding that she had of their situation. Because in her village there were class structures as well, where certain lines were forbidden to cross but now that they were in America that all could be forgotten. Nuru suggested that they start brand new and apply for U.S. citizenship. With his degree in Science he could teach or work in engineering, preferably the latter for a chance at wealth. Then the letter was full of ideas of how to successfully become a resident of the United States. They could pray for President Obama to grant amnesty for illegal aliens or they could simply over stay their visas. Finally the grit of the letter came. Zaid would have to go to the doctor with her to get an STD test. As embarrassing as it would be, the practicality of the notion made sense. Regret stung him once again, like cement being poured around one’s feet when a monster is near.
    By the gods of the world he would do anything for Nuru. Climb up on top of the building. He would. Zaid would scream out to the gangsters that stole his clothes. He would scream out to Detroit, to Michigan, to the Great Lakes, to all of the USA, in fact, to all of the inhabitants of the planet Earth, to all of the animals, plants and protozoa included. He would. Zaid would scream into all of the cells of every living organism, into every atom of the universe. He would scream his love for Nuru. This love was the cure for death itself, for love was eternal. By the gods he felt fine. He set the love letter down on his bed and smiled, long and merry.
    Zaid decided to clean up. Several days had passed since he had shaven or showered. His roommate laughed at him, saying that with his olive skin and bushy beard that he could be mistaken for a terrorist. Zaid was laughing about this memory, standing naked in the hot steamy shower, when he heard the thunder of gunfire echoing in the hall.
    First thing to occur to his shuddering senses was instant defecation. Then his legs became jelly. Zaid could hardly walk. He slipped in his poop and fell down onto the hard shower floor. With shaking hands, he hastily wiped the poop and soap suds off of himself. Automatic gunfire filled the bathroom so loudly with a dizzying din that Zaid’s ears were ringing terribly. When he saw his fellow students run through the community bath, sheer terror strewn upon their faces, Zaid instinctively followed the herd. As he turned the corner into the hallway he watched the three students in front of him start twitching about and fall down. Blood painted the wall in an instant. Zaid spun around and ran the other way toward a stairwell. The gunman shouted at him. It was in Arabic. Zaid knew that the gunman was saying to stop as he reloaded a clip into his AK-47.
    Zaid did not stop.
    He jumped like an athlete down the steps, not touching a single one. At the bottom he tucked and rolled back onto his bare feet quite nimbly. The terrorist was at the top of the tops when Zaid turned another corner. The shooting was occurring above him. He could tell that much. An awareness settled into his terrified mind that he could outrun a man but not his bullets. But perhaps outside he could run into traffic or into one of the yards neighboring the campus where the elderly white people mowed their lawns on small tractors. Oddly, he reflected that he loved the scent of fresh cut grass. Mind racing with an absurd thought process, Zaid ran past several students standing at their doorways. He shouted for them to run but instead they unexpectedly laughed at his nudity. Zaid didn’t wait around to explain. He barged into a room, past a tall, skinny black student with a comb stuck in his hair, opened the window and jumped out.
    Zaid landed two stories below onto his feet, tucked and rolled. This time he felt his ankle sprain but his adrenalin was at such a high volume that the pain was hardly noticed. The gunfire was continuous but not as loud outside. There weren’t any students on the lawn under the tall oak trees. A Mexican was mowing with a tractor. The headphones he wore deafened him to current events unfolding on campus. The Mexican didn’t see Zaid jump from the window. Zaid figured compassion would be served and the Mexican would be spared slaughter if he simply ran past him in the nude.
    It worked.
    The Mexican took off his headphones and yelled something in Spanish. When he heard the screaming and gunfire and yells in Arabic, the Mexican began to run as well, not bothering to turn off the tractor. Zaid hid behind a utility building. He watched the Mexican run beneath the oaks trees toward the road. A shot rang out and the Mexican toppled over. Three more shots raked the Mexican’s twitching body. Zaid stayed hidden behind the building.
    Minutes ticked away but each stroke of a second seemed to last an hour, immensely worse than his night spent in prison. Zaid listened to the terrorists shouting in Arabic. They were asking people if they were Muslim. Some were shot instantly. Others were further questioned as to whether or not they could recite a Sunni prayer. Zaid didn’t know his prayers that well. He wasn’t certain if he knew the prayer they asked about. Then he remembered Nuru’s letter.
    Impossibly, Zaid ran back to the college and climbed into a lower level window that a Japanese student was jumping from. Moments later he heard the Japanese student get shot. He wondered why the sniper hadn’t shot him upon re-entry, perhaps it was the mutual absurdity and unexpectedness of a man deciding to come back into the carnage and the strange fact that Zaid was naked. But onward he went through the room, with a deep breath and blindly into a hallway. Once he saw that the hallway was clear, he wasted no time in running back to the stairway. Beneath the steps he paused for a breath. Students were in a flurry as they sped past him. It sounded like the gunmen were moving upstairs from the sounds of the shots.
    Zaid ran past his fellow students back up two flights of stairs. The first and second floor were empty, but on his floor, the third floor, he saw the dead bodies of students in the hallway and in their rooms. None were left alive. The gunmen were definitely one floor above him. Zaid ran into his room and found his roommate dead on the floor, his brains leaking out of his skull and dripping onto the floor. Zaid could see where he had pissed on himself. A sickness was in his heart at this macabre spectacle.
    There was Nuru’s letter sitting exactly as he had left it. Zaid swiped it up and ran back into the hallway past the dead bodies. He heard a gunman slightly ahead. It was in one of the forward rooms so Zaid ducked into an adjacent room. Zaid hid behind a door. He held his breath as the gunmen walked past, kicking the bodies on the floor. Zaid tip toed out when the gunmen turned around a corner. He skipped barefoot to the stairway, looked up, saw nothing, and quietly skipped down two flights of stairs. On the last flight of steps there was a gunmen, a dangerous looking kid with tattoos, piercings and a young man’s woolly beard. Hatred filled his eyes as he pointed the Ak-47 at Zaid.
    “Why are you nude?” the gunmen said in Arabic.
    “I was in the shower,” Zaid responded in Arabic.
    “Are you Muslim?”
    “Yes.”
    “Say your prayers.”



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