Zari
“Help me!” The woman shrieked.
Her chocolate skin was a mix of dried blood, dirt, and hot tears. Her throat burnt with every scream, and still, she cried out. Her dark hair was wrapped in a thin, gray scarf which fell around her strong shoulders.
Her arms shook with pain as she clung to her daughter. Zari was hysterical, her sweet voice now a low scream as her small legs flailed against the city’s air. After the plane had crashed into their apartment building everything had gone up in flames.
Zari had noticed the plane first.
“Look, Mama!” She grinned as she pointed at the large plane soaring through the air.
“It’s an Airbus A380!”
Seven years old, and she already knew what she wanted to be when she grew up- a pilot. Viola smiled back at her daughter, indulging a child’s temporary fascination. At least, she had thought it was.
As Viola stepped closer towards the apartments window she noticed how close it was flying to the city. The large, white wings of the plane cast a shadow over glistening skyscrapers. Zari pressed her face against the window, the sweat across her brow sticking to the glass.
“Zari get back,” Viola said, putting an arm against her.
Her daughter turned around as the engine roared.
“What ma-“
The high whining of metal hitting glass was like nails on a chalkboard. It was the only answer Zari received. She screamed as the building crumbled and shook, easily throwing her small body to the side. She screamed for her mom as the plane wing cut into their kitchen. Her great grandma’s tea pot from Nairobi fell to the ground, and shattered.
Smoke poured out of the next building as the engine of the plane hissed and burnt. Glass fell to the ground like acid rain.
The plane spit and cracked like a grill, burnt meat in the summer. The plane was crushed into the building, its large wings destroying the organized puzzle of people and steel and glass inside. Anyone within the plane was surely dead.
It was chaos. No one knew what had become of the pilot. Why had the plane suddenly dropped from the sky like the coins Zari threw down the mall’s wishing well? She remembered her daughter watching intently, her brown eyes widening as the penny rolled around and around until it inevitably fell down the dark hole.
What would her eyes watch now?
Smoke filled their apartment, a broken plane wing the guilty culprit. Viola called for her daughter, but the little girl was nowhere to be seen. Screams ripped from the passengers with their dying breaths, their humming bird hearts roaring in their ears.
She cried out through the smoke, the building quaking with her every step.
“Zari where are you?!”
A strong grip between a mother and daughter was the final barrier between Zari and the city concrete.
“Oh god please someone help my baby!”
And the barrier was breaking.
Viola screamed into the empty air as Zari cried and pleaded. Her baby’s hair was scorched and her eyes red with heat and tears. Zari’s charm bracelet pinched her arm, and her nails dug into her wrist.
“Ma-ha-ma! Don’t- don’t let me go- don’t let me go!”
Viola shook her head frantically, locking eyes with her little girl.
“I won’t let go, baby. Mama won’t let go of you!”
The building screeched as it crumbled further. Zari screamed hysterically. The ground was so far down, taunting her.
Her stomach burned with terror, twisting and pulling like fire in her gut. Tears blurred everything but her mommy’s face, her big eyes and her big, white teeth which shook as much as the apartment building.
Viola was leaning over the ripped edges of their window.
Glass cut into her stomach as she pushed herself further out of the building. The pain ripped into her stomach and pounded against her skull. Viola knew she was losing too much blood; with each second she felt lifted and lighter, as if she was fading into nothing. The wind pulled at her scarf as she cried for help.
Where were the medics, where were the firemen?!
“Somebody please!”
Zari looked away from her mama’s gaping red mouth. She hated to see the tears running down Mama’s face- no, she didn’t hate them, but knowing they were there stole Zari’s voice away. Mama was supposed to wipe her face and make pancakes when she was sad.
“We can’t be in our right minds when we’re sad, Zari,” she’d say.
The wooden spoon would swirl in Mama’s hand with years of routine guiding her every move. It was like whoever made Mama forgot to give her a third arm, and now Mama had to do all the extra work. It was one of Mama’s “quirks” as her brother said.
Jamarr kept Zari and Mama safe. He helped Mama pick out the apartment and lifted Zari up on his shoulders. Wherever Jamarr went was a secret, and it frightened Mama. Zari always asked for Jamarr’s stories, about the bad guys he fought, but Jamarr said she couldn’t know.
Besides, Jamarr said, he had plenty of stories about Mama and wouldn’t Zari like to hear some of those?
Jamarr said either Mama was born with that spoon in her hand, or God himself flew down and gave it to her ‘cause she never let it go.
“We try and try, but sometimes our brains just can’t take no more,” Mama said, smiling at Zari as she whisked the pancake batter.
“Our bodies need love, Zari. We need love, some people at different ways and different times. Y’know how Mama gives love?”
Zari grinned, throwing her arms upwards. “Pancakes!”
Mama nodded. “Pancakes.“
Mama was the one who made pancakes, who hushed Zari’s fears. She said Zari could be whatever she wanted to be. Zari never needed to be scared cause Mama always knew what to do.
Zari didn’t want to see Mama’s tears, cause that meant Mama was scared, too.
She saw herself dangling in the apartment’s reflection, her limbs shaking in the wind like leaves on a tree. Zari stared at her own tear stained face. She didn’t see her hand slip from Mama’s grip.
She felt it.
*
Rhodey was flying through the city when he heard the screams. Thor followed close behind him, his red cape slipping in and out of the wind’s grasp. His muscle memory increased the suit’s speed, pushing him through the air and towards the burning buildings.
A woman had practically thrown herself off the side of a destroyed building, clinging to something. Rhodey flew faster and faster as the woman cried out. As his rockets burned hotter and hotter, he saw the woman was holding onto a little girl.
The woman trembled and cried before her arm disappeared, and with it, the little girl.
Her screams would stay with him forever.
Sharp, ear splitting cries which burned her throat until it bled pierced the air. Sounds
ripped through her ears and pulled at her hair as she screamed. The air slipped through her fingers like water.
Zari was falling, falling, falling and just as she passed another row of apartments- another crying boy- she slammed to a stop.
“I got you,” someone said, panting.
She was still screaming.
She looked up at the man in silver- War Machine Jamaar had informed her. His eyes were dark, warm, and focused on her shaking arms. Amidst all the chaos, her mind reminded her of the superhero cutout posters she had in her room.
“I-I...” She exhaled shakily, her breath cutting in and out like a bad radio signal.
She wanted to ask about her mama, beg for him to fly faster. Zari’s heart beat within her ears which made it hard to concentrate. A flash of red fabric slipped past them and her stomach lurched with its reminder.
Zari’s head was as sluggish as her mouth so she accepted the first words which came to mind.
“I have your picture in my room,” she whispered.
He nodded, smiling softly as they approached the ground. He held onto her tightly, the way Jamarr did sometimes when he came home. She wished Jamarr was here now.
War Machine began to speak as they approached the ground, mumbles of her mama and bleeding and is there someone we can call?
Zari tried to speak but all she could think of was how she had fallen, the sweat of her mama’s hand and then nothing. Where was Mama? She couldn’t have just disappeared.
What happened to her?