The Essence of the Now
(after Ghassan Kanafani)
ICE vans idle at the edge of sleep.
No sirens. Just engines cursing in diesel.
My mother folds the light out of the room.
My father says Stay still, and we do.
Because silence is the only form we know how to fill.
When I was small he told me about Men in the Sun—
how they suffocated in the water tanker,
how no one knocked.
That’s how exile works, he said.
It teaches you when to stop breathing.
Now I listen.
Boots echo through the building,
a language drilled into us.
A latch, a cough, someone’s name
swallowed by the hallway.
The air holds its breath.
So do I. So do we.
Outside, streetlamps are interrogation lights.
Inside, our lungs are border crossings.
Every inhale is a declaration form.
Every exhale—contraband.
My father called this waiting—
the essence of the now.
Not a lesson. Not a metaphor.
Just the moment before a knock,
when his eyes travel the room,
settle on the oven—
as if remembering the water tanker,
as if measuring whether the oven
could fit any of us.
L.F. Khouri is a Palestinian writer whose work explores war, memory, and the inheritance of silence. His creative work has appeared or is forthcoming in literary journals such as New England Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Wigleaf, Alaska Quarterly Review, Guernica, The Rumpus, The Adroit Journal, Massachusetts Review, and elsewhere. Two of his pieces were selected for Best Microfiction 2026.
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