12:11 AM, DUSHANBE, TAJIKISTAN

Afsana slept, but not soundly. Inside her were uncomfortable, slithery horrors, and she moaned as she faced them. She had been in the classroom, silently signing to the children about the poet Firdausi, when everything had shattered around her. It wasn’t like any sort of explosion, or even an accident, nor was it simply the weathered blackboard behind her or any of the rickety wooden school-desks in the small classroom. It was everything. The children’s faces, the pale tiled floor, her own body, all split, cracked and shattered as if they’d been painted on glass. She felt her body reform in an oily black sky, falling and falling and falling. Her arms brushed something, it rustled like leaves but felt hairy and soft. A sharp, ragged pain slashed at her cheek, and she tumbled away from the pain. Her eyes were open, but all she could see was blackness, and all she could hear was a distant, haunting scream. She realized that it was her own scream, and that her mouth was open so wide that her jaw hurt. But the sound was not coming from her throat, which was constricted with fear. Her eyes were wide and her mouth was open, but she was disgorging her terrified scream from the pores on her skin. A million tiny screams from a million tiny mouths that she now saw had gnashing teeth and flicking tongues. The screams changed to a cacophony of indecipherable gibbering, tiny maws all incanting prayers, blasphemies, profanities and poetry in unison. The din wrapped around her, thicker than the blanket of blackness, and she felt suffocated, strangled. She choked and tasted bile, tried to breathe and couldn’t. Bright plumes of color appeared in the darkness, and hot blood rushed to her face as she failed to inhale. She squirmed in her noise-prison, and the blackness around her grayed, as if a strange, white sun were dawning somewhere in the distance. She heard birdsong, then a faint chorus of heavenly angels, all in harmony but a few, who were dreadfully off-key and created a disharmony that grated upon her somewhere deep inside. It was the disharmony that saved her, as she awoke gasping in her bed, tangled in bedclothes and sweating profusely.