Vantage Points Don't Always Help by Hibah Shabkhez

I am standing in front of a stone staircase carved into a green semi-hill connecting two roads on the way to the metro station, and I am squinting upwards through the sunshine at a lizard leaping ahead, leading the way up the stairs. One of my selves is following it blithely, while another, waiting pen-in-hand at a vantage point to write my story, is taken aback by this unaccustomed fearlessness. Suddenly the lizard vanishes into the long grass beside the stone steps, and out of the blinding golden of the summer sun, an axe hurtles towards me, whistling in the wind it is stirring up on that sultry day. I do not dodge. There is no time, and no inclination. I am mesmerised. I watch it come, the spinning battle-axe, and I am just idly wondering how it is spinning along the horizontal rather than the vertical axis while simultaneously moving towards me. I am doing sums and drawing graphs in my head with serenity and genuine curiosity, as I never did in all my waking life, and as the bewildered omniscient narrator with her pen rolling uselessly down the slope could assure you, I never will. Behind me rises a voice I know to be my father's, though it is nothing like his real voice. Beside him is my mother, frowning at the axe as though it had just displayed bad manners in front of guests. They fling a pile of blurred rectangular papers at the axe. The bundles scatter and what seem now like A4 sheets cut eight ways into flashcards fall like snowflakes around the axe, the staircase, and my protagonist self. The axe changes course, spins on right past us, up and away into the piercing blue sky, and my parents melt away into the dream-ether whence they had come. It takes me a full minute to start being afraid, but after that I collapse altogether. A hundred voices rush through my head, mumbling of darting dragons and monstrous magicks.

The scene shifts. Night has fallen, and it is raining in twisted transparent ropes of water. Where this dragon is now, why I must hunt it down, or indeed, who I am myself in this freezing world with gabled triangle roofs so different from our own flat and fenced concrete ones at home, I do not remember. A part of me even knows deep, deep, down, that the cackling voices setting me on my quest for shoelaces lied, that there is no dragon, only a lizard in the sun hours ago that sought to do me no harm and is long gone, that I could not strangle a dragon with a shoelace if there were indeed one. But I am still standing bare-footed on the cracked pavement, teeth chattering as I pray through racking sobs for a shoelace, turning pettishly away from all the shoes raining down around me, the slippers, the sandals, the slip-ons. I only know I absolutely must have that shoelace, so that I may find and kill the dragon with the glowing scales.