Palestinian Superstitions by Edward Salem

When I told my father, on the back porch in the last days of summer, that he would die in a matter of weeks or months, then invited my sisters at the screen door to join us on the patio to share the moment, Susan cried softly and said, Energy never dies, remember in physics, you taught me that.

His communist atheism was only rarely challenged by the eeriness of déjà vu, most forcefully by the time he dreamt of a giant statue of Christ at the top of a mountain, arms outstretched—then woke up and turned the TV on and saw it straight away, the Christ the Redeemer statue in Rio de Janeiro on some television program. It flabbergasted him, he talked about it for decades, always punctuating the story with a maybe—Maybe there is a God, who knows. Once, he speculated that it could have been television waves passing through the air to the satellite dish that somehow, through some blip of physics, managed to render in his mind the image it meant to transmit only to the TV. 

His atheism was also confused by his belief in Palestinian superstitions, the ones he taught me when I was a child: if you dream of a wedding, it means someone you know will die; if you dream of a funeral, someone you know will fall in love or have a baby. Pretty one-to-one stuff there, but he believed in it.

The night before his PET scan, I dreamt of a makeshift wedding with lots of people but no evening gowns or fancy clothes. In the dream, Carol put me on the spot, handing me the microphone and asking me to address the audience. I didn’t want to, I didn’t even know who was getting married. I woke up and immediately knew the implication of my dream. Hours later, I read the results of the scan, and asked my father to sit with me on the back patio.

I hate that he’s dying while Syria is still a living hell, while Palestine is still under apartheid. In his fantasy, his own family would be vastly different, not only the world. I’d have children, not dogs, I’d still be overworked at the corporate job, I wouldn’t live in the city. Young women would want to date him, he’d be a composer and the conductor of an orchestra, and when his time came, he wouldn’t choose treatment. He’d die in his daughter’s carpeted, comfortable house in the suburbs, eating fruit and home-cooked meals, sitting in the rocking chair by her fireplace, taking a hit of her Iraqi boyfriend’s weed pen. Just like what’s happening. We’re doing everything right.

Edward Salem is the author of Monk Fruit (Nightboat Books, 2025). His writing appears in Poetry, The Kenyon Review, Narrative, and elsewhere. He is the co-founder of City of Asylum/Detroit.

15 April 2024