The Stories

Nineteen Rooms, One House

Each story in INHALE is a room. Some are bedrooms, some interrogation chambers, some kitchens where bread is still warm. Together they form one house—the architecture of breath under siege. The Prologue opens the door; these nineteen stories are what waits inside.

Part I — The Unraveling

  1. Story 1 · Part I

    “Black Hole Above Gaza”

    A story that opens with darkness overhead and maps the pull of gravity on a place where light itself seems to bend. The unraveling begins not with a thread, but with a sky that refuses to stay still.

  2. Story 2 · Part I

    “Mother Tongue”

    Language becomes a landscape — the words a mother passes to her children carry the geography of a place they may never see. What happens when the tongue itself becomes the territory.

  3. Story 3 · Part I

    “The Prophet”

    A figure who sees what others refuse to look at. Prophecy here is not prediction but witness — the unbearable clarity of naming what is happening while it happens.

Part II — The Searching

  1. Story 4 · Part II

    “Khalil”

    A name that means friend. A story about the search for connection across fractures — between people, between places, between the person you were and the person the world has made you become.

  2. Story 5 · Part II

    “Division”

    What divides is not always a wall. Sometimes it is a policy, a permit, a single word on a form. This story traces the arithmetic of separation — how a life gets divided until the remainder is all that’s left.

  3. Story 6 · Part II

    “The Taste of Other Alphabets”

    Language as taste, as texture on the tongue. A story about learning to speak in someone else’s alphabet and the flavors that get lost — or found — in translation.

  4. Story 7 · Part II

    “Book of Returns”

    A catalogue of all the ways people come back — to places, to memories, to versions of themselves they thought they’d left behind. The book is never finished because the returns never stop.

Part III — The Witnessing

  1. Story 8 · Part III

    “The Row Into Morning”

    A journey that begins in darkness and pulls toward light. The rowing is both literal and metaphorical — a crossing that demands every muscle, every breath, every act of faith in the direction of dawn.

  2. Story 9 · Part III

    “We Held”

    The simplest verb, the hardest act. A story about what it means to hold — a hand, a memory, a line, a breath — when everything around you insists on letting go.

  3. Story 10 · Part III

    “Ad-du’ā’ yaṣil”

    The prayer arrives. A story told partly in Arabic, where supplication crosses borders that bodies cannot. The du’ā’ — the personal prayer — becomes the only passport that is never denied.

  4. Story 11 · Part III

    “Ya Tayr”

    O Bird. A story addressed to what flies above walls, above checkpoints, above the logic of borders. The bird carries what the ground cannot — a message, a seed, a refusal to be grounded.

Part IV — The Reaching

  1. Story 12 · Part IV

    “The Blue Apartment”

    A room painted the color of the sea, or the sky, or the bruise that forms when you press your thumb against the place where memory lives. The apartment is both shelter and archive.

  2. Story 13 · Part IV

    “Resonance”

    Sound that persists after the source has stopped. A story about the vibrations that remain in walls, in bodies, in the air between two people who once shared a frequency.

  3. Story 14 · Part IV

    “The Walls We Dream Against”

    Every wall has two sides and both sides dream. A story about the impossible architecture of longing — how desire presses against concrete and sometimes, impossibly, leaves a mark.

  4. Story 15 · Part IV

    “Later Is My Favorite Time Zone”

    A meditation on deferral, on the future tense as a form of resistance. Later is where the garden grows, where the children graduate, where the cease-fire holds. Later is the only country with open borders.

Part V — The Lasting

  1. Story 16 · Part V

    “The Weight of Wet Soil”

    Earth after rain holds everything — seeds, bones, the foundations of houses. A story about what the ground remembers and the heaviness of land that has absorbed too much.

  2. Story 17 · Part V

    “The Tree Insists on Spring”

    Against all evidence, against all reason, the tree blooms. A story about biological stubbornness — the insistence of roots and branches on a future that nothing else confirms.

  3. Story 18 · Part V

    “After”

    The smallest, most impossible word. After the siege. After the crossing. After the breath. A story about what comes next when ‘next’ was never guaranteed.

  4. Story 19 · Part V

    “We Return”

    The final declaration. Not ‘I’ but ‘we.’ Not a question but a statement. The collection closes as it opened — at a border — but this time the breath moves in the other direction.