Running

It was so terribly cold. Snow was falling, and it was almost dark.

The wind found them the way fingers find a weak seam. It slipped beneath scarves, pressed through stitching, crept along spines. It made a sound like breath drawn through teeth.

Ihtsham walked with his head down, one arm around Farid, the other braced against the slope. His feet were no longer his. They were heavy objects attached to him by habit alone. When he lifted them, it was memory doing the work, not feeling.

“Keep moving,” he said.

His voice cracked. He did not know whether he meant the boys or himself.

Lina went ahead, Karim on her hip, the child’s arms looped loosely around her neck. His head bumped her collarbone with every step. His breath fogged the wool of her scarf in short, uneven bursts. She kept one hand firm between his shoulders, feeling the flutter there, counting it without numbers. When the rhythm faltered, her jaw tightened. She did not slow.

Farid stumbled. Recovered. Stumbled again.

“Baba,” he whispered. “I can’t feel my feet.”

“Stamp them,” Ihtsham said. “Hard.”

He demonstrated. Pain shot up his leg, white and immediate. His vision narrowed. He tasted blood and realised he had bitten his tongue.

Farid tried. Snow sprayed weakly.

“Again,” Lina said, not turning. “Harder.”

The boy obeyed. Colour crept back into his face, faint but real.

They reached a shallow cut between rocks where the wind snagged instead of slicing. Snow had built high on either side, leaving a hollow just wide enough to crouch.

“Here,” Lina said. “Just to breathe.”

They folded into the space. Karim curled between Lina’s legs. Farid pressed against her side. When Ihtsham joined them his knee touched her thigh. The contact steadied him. It always had. This time he felt the tremor there, faint but undeniable, and knew she was aware of it too.

The rock leeched warmth with infinite patience. Cold gathered around them like a second body. It settled in hair, along ears, inside boots.

Karim coughed. The sound tore out of him, sharp and violent, breaking at the end into a thin wheeze that echoed off stone.

Lina bent over him, palm flat against his back.

“Slow,” she murmured. “Let the air in first.”

She felt the cough travel through him and into her hand. For one dangerous moment a thought surfaced, unwanted and sharp. What if this is where it stops. She pressed it down with the same discipline she used to press pain from her limbs. Later was allowed. Now was not.

The cold pressed closer, listening.

A gust forced itself into the hollow and punched breath from Ihtsham’s lungs. The present blurred.

Not the violence. Not yet.

Warmth.

Aleppo returned not as a single image but as a system that had once held him.

Morning heat from the bakery on Ibn Khaldun Street spilled into the road as the shutters lifted. It wrapped ankles, climbed lungs. Boys ran with wicker trays balanced on shoulders, flatbreads stacked like sleeping faces. Their calls changed depending on who they called to.

Oil, yeast, dust.

Then the souk. Light fell through slats in clean bars. Cumin drifted in it like gold. Copper hung from hooks, each dent a record of hands. Voices overlapped without collision. Even anger observed rules.

Above the shop, the apartment opened like something briefly alive. Lina flicked jasmine water along the hallway in the mornings. He used to complain about slippery tiles. She would laugh and say guests should fall in love before they fell down.

He carried that scent with him into the street. It was his first inheritance.

A gust tore the memory away.

Karim’s hair brushed his chin. Farid’s shoulder dug into his ribs.

“We move,” Lina said. “Before dark closes.”

They rose stiffly. When Ihtsham stood, pain exploded through his right foot. Something had torn open inside the boot. He swallowed the sound it forced from his throat and stepped anyway.

He did not tell her.

She knew.

They walked.

Time dissolved into breath and step. Hunger stopped announcing itself. The body conserved what it could. Lina began counting silently again, not steps but breaths, Karim’s first, then Farid’s, then her own, as if keeping them in sequence might keep them here.

Farid halted suddenly.

“What is it?” Ihtsham said.

The boy stared at a half buried bush clinging to the slope. Dark beads clung to the branches.

Berries.

Farid lunged. Karim made a sound that was pure instinct and followed. Hands collided. One berry dropped and vanished into snow. Karim scooped it and bit down hard enough to cut his knuckle. Farid crushed another in his fist and licked the juice before the cold could steal it.

It was not a fight. It was hunger stripping away childhood.

By the time Ihtsham reached them, the branch was bare.

He gathered them under his arms.

“Enough,” he said, though it was not.

“My stomach hurts,” Farid said.

“I know.”

His own stomach had fallen silent days ago. His foot pulsed wetly with every step, warmth turned sour inside the boot.

Lina saw the way his weight shifted. She adjusted her pace without comment, bringing her shoulder close enough that he could lean if he needed to. He did not. Neither of them named the agreement.

Later. Not now.

They walked until light thinned to nothing. The slope levelled. The wind changed. The air tasted of metal.

Then sound came through the ground before it reached the air.

A truck.

Lina stiffened. The counting stopped.

“Be ready,” she said.

Ready for what was understood.

Headlights bled through the snow. The truck crawled into view and stopped.

Inside the container the cold was different. Controlled. Manufactured. It smelled of metal, cardboard, old breath.

They climbed in. Faces shifted in the dark. No one spoke.

The doors closed.

The refrigeration unit began its thin, relentless hum.

Karim coughed again. Lina’s hand moved in slow, unfinished circles. She matched her breathing to his, forcing steadiness into her own chest. If she let herself feel how tired she was, she would not stand again.

Ihtsham closed his eyes.

Boots. Shouting. A door breaking. Dust hanging in light.

His father turning.

The sound of bone meeting metal.

His mother on the floor, scarf slipped, breath slicing thinly.

“You must go,” she said. “With the children.”

He promised. It felt like judgment.

The truck lurched. His eyes opened.

Cold pressed harder.

Then the hum changed pitch. The engine slowed.

Metal clanged. Light cut the dark.

Wet air rushed in, smelling of diesel and salt.

Voices. English. Flat.

“Out. Move.”

They stepped onto wet tarmac under floodlights. Snow fell thinly, already melting.

A low building crouched nearby, its windows glowing an exhausted yellow. Guards moved with the unhurried efficiency of people for whom this was routine.

Documents were taken. Names half heard. They were counted without being recognised.

One guard spoke to him, words stacked clumsily together, meant to sound familiar.

“All right, son. Mate. Over there.”

None of them fit.

Inside, fluorescent light burned the eyes. Plastic chairs were bolted to the floor, too light to trust, too fixed to move away from.

Karim slept across Lina’s lap, his mouth open, breath rasping as if it had to scrape its way out. Farid leaned against Ihtsham’s side, the pressure of him faint but insistent, like a question repeated until it no longer sounded like one.

A man at a desk slid papers across the surface without looking up. His pen clicked once, twice. The sound lodged itself somewhere behind Ihtsham’s eyes.

He took the forms. They were thinner than he expected.

The first page asked for a date of departure.

He stared at the line until it blurred. The pen rested in his hand without weight. He tried to remember the day they left, not the day the decision was made, not the day the house emptied itself of sound, but the day his foot crossed the threshold and did not turn back.

There had been light then. Or maybe he had invented that later.

He wrote something approximate. It looked wrong immediately.

Next to him, Lina adjusted Karim’s position with careful efficiency. When his head lolled, she corrected it. When his breathing hitched, her hand flattened against his ribs until it smoothed again. She did not look at the papers. She had already moved past them.

The second page asked for possessions left behind.

He almost laughed. The sound made it as far as his throat and stopped there, unfinished. He could not decide whether to list the shop, the apartment, the copper pots with the dented rims, or the shoes his father had repaired three times before finally throwing them out.

He wrote nothing.

The pen left an indentation in the paper without ink.

Farid stirred.

“Are we staying now?” the boy asked.

The question was not fear. It was logistics.

Ihtsham opened his mouth. No answer arrived.

Across the room, a television was mounted high on the wall, its sound turned low. A woman stood in front of a blue screen, pointing at shapes that did not concern him. Her mouth kept moving.

Lina glanced at him then. Just once. There was no instruction in her look. Only acknowledgment. You are still here. That is enough.

A guard called a name that was not theirs.

Someone stood. Someone else did not.

Ihtsham folded the forms back into their stack. The corners were already softening under his fingers. He placed them on his knee as if that might keep them from drifting away.

He thought of his mother’s hand on his wrist. The pressure had been precise, almost calm. Not pleading. Directing.

Save their future.

The phrase no longer sounded like a promise. It sounded like an order issued without appeal.

Karim coughed and did not wake. Lina kept her hand where it was, though it had begun to cramp. She did not shift it. Pain was easier than adjustment.

When the man at the desk finally looked up, his eyes moved over them quickly, as if counting furniture rather than people.

“Wait,” he said.

It was not reassurance. It was postponement.

Ihtsham nodded.

The pen clicked again. Once. Twice.

He watched the mark it left on the paper, small and final.

He wondered, briefly and without drama, whether this was the moment that would one day be described as arrival.

Then the thought dissolved, replaced by something simpler.

Karim was breathing.

Farid was warm.

Lina was beside him.

For now, that was enough structure to hold the day in place.