The first thing he knew was that a great black rock was resting its full weight on his chest and head, and for a moment he assumed, as was usually the case in his nightmares, that he had died. For the briefest fraction of a second he thought it must be the sleep paralysis, which held his body in its grip whenever he went to bed too tired, but when he tried to wiggle his finger the tip responded, and so did his elbow when he tried to flex it, then his whole arm moved, and then he summoned his courage and cracked open a lid. A dazzle of sunlight. A scatter of flies hanging mid-air. Turning his head, he saw that he was lying in the dirt surrounded by garbage. A dump perhaps? He appeared to be lying in a shallow trench, scraped a few centimeters deep into the packed earth. Pain at the back of his head and in his joints. His chest was tight.

The ground beneath him began shaking and then there was a furious clanging as if of church bells, a sound which resolved itself into a train’s bell, the next instant supplanted by the din of a horn blaring at a tremendous pitch and drawing closer and more powerful every second. Seized with terror, he shut his eyes but then opened them again to see a train’s hulking mass rush by very close to his right, its horn battering his ears, and then, before his heartbeat could return to normal, the train was away into the distance, then gone. He pushed himself up from the ground and stood.

He looked around and saw no one. Some way off, the indistinct form of a bird dipped low to the ground then rose up and flapped away.

Where am I, and what now?

With a little effort he managed to remember his name, and checking himself all over he found no wounds, despite the pain. Another look around. Nothing but distant rooftops and the snaking tracks. Then, blossoming inside him without warning, a thought: Noha! What’s happened to her?

Then he remembered. Remembered everything but the one thing he needed to remember.

He had just finished trimming his hair and shaving over at his friend’s apartment. His family was at home, waiting for him, and Noha’s family was at her place, also waiting for him. He was due to go over to her place with his family, pick her up from the hair salon on the ground floor of her apartment building, then head over to the wedding venue, thus bringing an end to a journey of patience and longing and exhaustion and—for her—of terror. He wouldn’t leave her, would he? A thought she’d brooded over daily and which had made him laugh to hear, because his heart had been hers from the moment they met.