“Black Hole above Gaza” is the winner of the second annual Commonweal Prize for Short Fiction, which recognizes original and outstanding short fiction by emerging writers. Written by Elina Kumra, the story was selected by this year’s guest judge Vinson Cunningham, a staff writer at The New Yorker.

We have a problem with the sky over Gaza. There’s a hole in it, about the size of a fist now, black and getting bigger. It started as a dot maybe three months ago—I can’t be certain anymore. Time bends funny here. I found it while smoking on Maryam’s roof after her wedding. We thought it was a drone at first.

My neck’s twisted when I wake up. Pain shoots sideways behind my ear, like someone jammed a pencil back there. I keep saying Khalil’s name in my sleep. He’s up in Sweden somewhere—studying, supposedly—but we all know that’s bullshit. I get up and check the sky through the cracked window. The hole’s expanding again.

Day three, or whatever, of darkness. I’ve lost count.

The taxi driver won’t shut up about his cousin who got a visa to Canada. He looks at me in the rearview instead of the road, which has been re-cratered since yesterday. His eyes, around the edges, are yellow.

“You’re going to Maryam al-Hassan’s? The one with the broken house?” He swerves around a donkey cart. “Her father disappeared into that sky-hole, you know.”

“That’s not true,” I tell him, but I’m not completely sure.

Maryam’s house has three stories, only the east side blown open where a missile kissed it once. The wall looks like a mouth frozen mid-scream. We use that room for ventilation now.

“Where’s Khalil tonight?” Maryam asks when I arrive, though she knows perfectly well he’s not in Gaza anymore.

“Swedish winter,” I say. “Very educational.” She puts her fingers on my face. 

“You didn’t sleep again.” She doesn’t ask anymore if I’ve taken the pills from the UN package.

I help arrange the coffee cups that somehow survived the last seven bombings. Maryam’s family has ten left—the most unbroken coffee cups in this neighborhood. Sometimes I think it’s the only reason we keep gathering here.

“Look,” says Dalia, pointing up through the courtyard. The black hole has expanded to cover maybe half the blue. It doesn’t move the way smoke or clouds do. It just is. Nobody remembers who first noticed it, but I do. I saw it the day Khalil left.

“I know a meteorologist at the university,” says Kareem, but he doesn’t finish the thought. His eyes drift to my collarbone, and I keep hearing the things he whispered that night on the beach, before the sky turned wrong.

I’m sipping from my second cup when Samia arrives with her new husband. The new one looks frightened, his eyes wet as a baby’s. He smiles the way they always smile, these new husbands who haven’t lived in Gaza long enough to understand the rules.

“Masha’Allah, what a beautiful home,” he says, and I nearly laugh coffee through my nose. 

“It’s half destroyed,” I say.

“Yes, but such excellent ventilation.”

I look through the hole in Maryam’s wall and see the hole in the sky is getting bigger. Something about this feels correct. Georgie—no, Kareem, his name is Kareem—corners me near the bathroom.

“I have contacts,” he says, like he’s always saying. “Istanbul first, then wherever. I could get you papers.” His breath smells like garlic.

I stare at his left earlobe while he talks, because there’s a small mole there that twitches when he lies. It’s dancing now. Kareem claimed to have contacts last year too, just before they closed the Rafah crossing and Khalil somehow found his impossible way out.

“Sweden’s very cold,” I say. 

“What?”

“Nothing. I have to make wudu.” I push past him into the small bathroom.

I don’t actually make ritual ablutions. Instead, I open Maryam’s medicine cabinet and find an orange bottle with no label. Her father’s, maybe? I shake two pills into my palm. They’re the same blue the sky used to be before the darkness started spreading. I swallow them dry.

By the time I come out, Maryam’s father is in the room, which confuses me because I was sure that he’d disappeared months ago. Walked straight up into the black hole. But there he is, talking about building materials like anyone can just go buy cement whenever they want.

“You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” says Dalia. 

“Just tired,” I say.

“Aren’t we all,” she says, and her face stretches in strange directions. The pills are kicking in.

Someone turns on a radio. It starts playing an old Fairuz song that makes my chest hurt. The music reaches into memories I don’t want disturbed—Khalil and me on the beach, the way saltwater dried on his shoulders, the lies he told about coming back for me. Someone turns it off quickly.

“Those oranges look delicious,” says Samia’s New Husband, pointing at an empty bowl.

Everyone stares at him. There are no oranges in Gaza this month. No oranges, no lemons, no grapefruit. The groves were bulldozed or burned. Does he see something we don’t?

“Dates,” corrects Maryam. “Those are dates.” 

“Of course,” he says, blinking. “Dates.”

But now I’m staring at the bowl too, because for a second I swear I smell citrus. Khalil used to bring oranges when he visited, back when such things were possible.

We gather by the blown-open wall to watch the sky-hole expand. It’s almost magnificent, the perfect darkness of it. A nothing so complete it dizzies you to look at it. Below, the Mediterranean pretends normality, waves doing what waves have always done.

“My cousin in America says it’s not on their news at all,” says Dalia.

“What isn’t?” asks Samia.

“The hole. The darkness. They don’t see it.”

“Because it’s only over Gaza,” says Maryam’s father, who I’m still not convinced is really here.

I try to explain what I’m seeing, but the blue pills have thickened my tongue. “It’s like the sky is a shirt,” I manage, “and someone burned a cigarette through it. And now we can see behind the sky.”

“And what’s behind the sky?” asks Kareem.

“Nothing,” I say. “Absolutely nothing.”

“Very poetic,” Maryam whispers, not unkindly. I need air, though we’re already standing in the open section of the house. I walk out to the street. I light a cigarette I’ve been saving for three days and stare up at the hole. It’s growing faster now, eating the stars one by one.

A thin dog trots past, ribs showing through mangy fur. She stops and looks at me with surprising clarity, like she might start speaking. But she just continues down the road, disappearing into shadows. 

I feel a presence beside me. It’s Khalil, which is impossible because Khalil is in Sweden with his blonde woman. But here he is, wearing the blue sweater I darned for him.

“The medical college would have accepted you,” he says.

“They bombed the medical college,” I tell him. 

“After I left, you mean.”

“Yes. After you left.” He turns to me, and his face isn’t right—it’s wavering, melting around the edges. It’s the pills, I know, but I don’t fight it.

“You could have come with me,” he says. 

“No, I couldn’t. You know that.”

“I sent for you.” 

“You sent excuses.” 

He doesn’t argue. As his image wavers again, I notice something terrible—the blackness from the sky is coming down, coating him like oil. It drips from his chin, pools at his feet.

“Are you even alive?” I ask.

He smiles crookedly. “Does it matter? Sweden, martyrdom—either way, I’m not in Gaza anymore.”

I reach to touch him, but my hand passes through air. A car backfires somewhere, or maybe it’s a gunshot. By the time I look back, he’s gone.

I return to find the party has shifted somehow. Maryam’s father is definitely not there, so I was right the first time. The food has diminished to crumbs. They’re telling stories now, the kind we always tell—about who made it out, who didn’t, who’s coming back someday, who’s not.

“Does anyone else see how fast it’s growing?” I interrupt, pointing up at the black hole that now covers almost the entire sky. Everyone looks up.

“Perhaps it’s a weather phenomenon,” offers Samia’s New Husband, determined to be helpful.

“Weather doesn’t do that,” says Kareem. 

“A military experiment,” suggests Dalia.

“Whose military?” asks Maryam. “Ours? We don’t have a military.”

“Theirs, obviously,” says Kareem.

I want to scream. They’re discussing the hole like it’s a traffic problem or an electricity outage—something inconvenient but ultimately explainable. They don’t understand that the darkness is devouring everything, that soon there will be no sky at all.

“I need to go,” I say. Maryam walks me to the door, her hand light on my elbow. 

“Be careful,” she says. “The darkness attracts drones.”

“That’s superstition,” I tell her, but I can’t be sure.

Outside, I don’t call a taxi. I start walking, my sandals slapping concrete. The darkness has consumed all but a rim of normal night around the horizon. It feels like being at the bottom of a well, looking up.

I pass the ruins of the university, the marketplace, the elementary school where I once taught English. Everything half-standing, half-gone. The streets unusually empty. Everyone’s staying inside tonight, watching the darkness spread from behind whatever walls they have left.

At the beach, I kick off my sandals and wade in up to my knees. The water is blood-warm. I look up at the nearly complete darkness and spread my arms.

“Take me too,” I say to the hole. “If you took him, take me too.“

Nothing happens. Just waves lapping my thighs, wet fabric clinging to my legs. I was hoping for something cinematic—the darkness reaching down like a hand to lift me up, or maybe dropping like a curtain to smother me. The darkness just continues its expansion, methodical as a bulldozer.

A small boat bobs nearby, tied to a concrete block half-buried in sand. For a wild moment, I consider untying it, pushing out into the water, rowing toward whatever lies beyond the blockade. But I know what happens to little boats that try to leave Gaza waters.

Khalil appears again beside me in the shallows, more substantial this time. The pills are really working now.

“Did they shoot you at the crossing?” I ask him. “Is that why you never sent for me?”

“I made it to Sweden,” he says. “I have a small apartment near the university. The toilet works every day. You wouldn’t believe how the toilet works every day.”

“Then why didn’t you come back for me? You promised.”

“I couldn’t,” he says, and now the darkness is dripping from him, running down his face like tar. “It’s not something I can explain. It made sense there. Coming back stopped making sense.”

“Did you ever love me?” I ask, knowing how pathetic it sounds. 

He doesn’t answer. The darkness takes him, his body blending with the growing black hole above until I can’t tell where he ends and the void begins. 

By the time I get home, Khalil—the real Khalil, my husband Khalil who never left Gaza—is already in bed. His breathing is heavy with sleep. He doesn’t stir when I lie down beside him.

My life bifurcates constantly now. In one version, Khalil escaped through a tunnel and abandoned me for Sweden. In another, he never left, and we live together in this three-room apartment with the leaking ceiling and the view of Mrs. Hamoud’s laundry line. In a third version, he died in the bombing of the university, and I hallucinate his presence beside me. I can no longer remember which version is true.

I stare out the window at the sky. The darkness has completed its conquest. No stars, no moon, not even the glow of distant bombardment. Just perfect, absolute blackness.

“Khalil,” I whisper, not sure which Khalil I’m addressing. “The sky is gone.”

He mumbles something in his sleep, turns over. His arm falls across my waist, heavy as concrete.

In the morning, everyone acts like the black hole is normal. People go to whatever jobs still exist. Children kick soccer balls in the rubble. Women hang laundry beneath a nonexistent sky.

Khalil makes coffee on our little gas burner, half-awake, hair sticking up in tufts. “What’s wrong?” he asks, catching me staring. 

I consider telling him everything—about the darkness, about my visions of his other life in Sweden, about the blue pills from Maryam’s bathroom. But what would be the point?

“Nothing,” I say. “Just tired.” 

He hands me a chipped cup of coffee so dark it mirrors the sky. I drink it standing by the window, watching people move through their days under a void, carrying the strange weight of absence above them, their shoulders bent as if anticipating something heavy about to fall.

“We should visit Maryam tonight,” Khalil says. “It’s been too long.” 

I nod, watching him, trying to determine which version of reality I’m in now. He catches me staring again and gives me that crooked smile I remember from before the darkness began. For a moment, he seems solid and real.

“What?” he asks.

“Nothing,” I say. “We should definitely go to Maryam’s. She always has the best coffee cups.”

We both look up through the window at where the sky should be. Neither of us mentions it. Some things are too big to fit into words. Some absences create their own gravity. We drink our coffee and prepare for another day.