The Terminal Velocity of Narrative

By Sophia Khan

/ First Place, 2026 Plentitudes Prize in Nonfiction /

I

Terminal velocity is the maximum speed a body can attain as it falls through air. The terminal velocity of a human is about 120 mph. Vesna Vulović is believed to have been the first person to survive a terminal velocity fall. After the bombing of JAT Flight 367 on 26 January 1972, the Serbian flight attendant fell 33,300 feet to earth. It was the little things that saved her: the snow-covered slope, the food trolley that pinned her to the cabin, the fact that she had squeaked through medical checks a year earlier by drinking enough coffee to disguise her low blood pressure. Doctors theorized that it was this last factor that prevented her heart from exploding upon impact.

Smaller creatures are all but impermeable to falls from great heights. A mouse can shake off a thousand-foot drop into a mineshaft. An ant can survive a fall from any height. In “Microscopic End,” Liu Cixin imagines a future where tininess offers humankind an escape from the environmental woes we’ve wrought upon the planet. Like ants, these little humans are all but impermeable to that which is vast. Smallness is heroic in the hands of the right storyteller. It is the telling, after all, that makes the story.

I remember vividly when I first became aware that narratives are not merely stories confined between the covers of books. It was in 1999, when General Pervez Musharraf conducted his coup d’état. One of the first things he did was send troops to scale the high, white walls of Radio Pakistan. My grandfather, a retired general, drove over to cheer them on. My father and uncle, celebrants of the country’s first democratic transfer of power two years prior, despaired.

“What’s the big deal?” I asked. I was thirteen and couldn’t understand how the fate of the nation had anything to do with the great block of a building we drove by every day.

For some years, the general was a benevolent dictator. He cracked down on corruption. He passed the Women’s Protection Bill. He held democratic elections. We mocked him only gently in the political satires we staged at school.

But Musharraf lost hold of the narrative during the so-called “War on Terror.” He told the wrong stories, lost the sympathetic audiences, and was charged with high treason. His heart gave out (twice) on the way to trial, but in the end, he was convicted. You can write yourself a hero, but heavy things crash hardest.

In his famous lecture on the shape of stories, Kurt Vonnegut draws our attention to the most popular story in Western civilization: the one where the little girl is tormented by her evil stepmother and two cruel stepsisters. Every time someone writes it, he tells us, they make a million dollars. Our hearts bleed for the little orphan. The small satisfaction of a marriage well-made is an epic ending to the tale. What is small captures our imaginations and plays upon our heartstrings. Even though it is a story that has been told a million times, it gets us every time. There’s just something we cannot resist about a small child’s suffering.

The thing nobody tells you about having a child is that your soul will split across two bodies. Your mind will become a running inventory of fingernails to clip, knees to moisturize, hair to trim. You will feel the pains of that body more acutely than you feel the pains of your own.

In time, it will grow separate from you. Hands will wash themselves and noses will get blown. Your child will be grown, and your body will be one again. But slowly. Almost imperceptibly.

What is it for this rupture to be sudden, for the narrative to stop short? To wake up one morning with two sets of teeth to brush. To wake up the next, the other set dust beneath the rubble.

It’s a story that would get us every time—if we read it. We change the channel, skim the story, skip the protest. When I mentioned a demonstration in support of Gaza, a dear friend told me that people don’t attend “those things” because Palestine is a story that has been going on forever. I bristled, at the ready to deliver a disquisition on the history of western interference in the region, the world’s readiness to watch brown bodies break and bleed, the United States’ military industrial complex. But I paused, realizing he was right. Palestine is not a story that makes a million dollars each time it is told. It has gone through so many iterations people think they already know. As a narrative, Palestine has reached terminal velocity.

II

Not long ago, a student of mine wrote a story I at first took to be dystopian. It was about a young woman who lives in a world where adolescent girls attend school armed with mace, children are kept indoors, always, for their own safety, and all day long, the news reports catastrophe. When the young woman wakes up one day in a world suddenly at peace, she struggles to accept it. Just when she finally begins to feel safe, she awakens to realize it was all just a dream. During workshop, it became clear that this story was not, in fact, dystopian. It was a realist depiction of the young writer’s experience of the world. Although “it was all just a dream” breaks one of the cardinal rules of any creative writing class, this story stuck with me in ways it took me weeks to parse. In time, it occurred to me that it was the resignation that had so struck me: what must it mean for someone so young to have concluded that a better world is just a dream?

What it comes down to, I think, is moving too fast through too many things. Speed, at a certain point, becomes a sort of stasis. When I first brought Black Lives Matter into the classroom, my students groaned. “Do we really need to say this?” one asked. At the international school where I taught, few of my students were white. None were American. That such a thing still needed to be stated was shocking to them. Over the next few weeks, we considered the project of Afrofuturism. We watched James Baldwin eloquently prevail against William Buckley Jr that the American dream is indeed at the expense of the American Negro. We asked ourselves whether Kalief Browder’s world had told him his life mattered. We concluded that it had not. We mourned Venida Browder’s broken heart. In exploring stories we thought we knew, we learned a lesson about what needs telling.

At Thanksgiving, that same dear friend of mine was of a mind to listen. He learned that the Balfour Declaration was a story he didn’t know. That the Nakba was a word he hadn’t heard. That Palestinian families still hold onto the keys of the homes they were forced to leave in 1948. How much does it matter if one dinner guest departs with a different vision of the world? Admittedly, not much. But knowledge is a small thing that can coalesce into something vast. Consider the ants again: scurrying around beneath our feet. We can ignore them should we choose to, but is it ever wise to ignore the very things on which we stand?

The history of Palestine is a complicated one. We must go back at least a hundred years to understand how a foreign power that that had no claim to a land handed that land to a people who had no right to it. Why? The Suez Canal. Zionism. Sympathy for a suffering people. A solution to Europe’s so-called “Jewish Problem.” Who can say for sure? Stories are interesting when they are at their beginnings but, over time, they lose their luster. We all remember Alan Kurdi, face down in the sand. He might almost have been a young tourist, nodded off in the surf after too much excitement. Who didn’t want to place a hand gently on his little red-shirted back to rouse him? To shade his fat little cheek from sunburn?

Since 2015, an estimated 32,000 migrants have drowned in the Mediterranean. They are young and old, cute and not. It is hard to hold a number in your mind when it doesn’t have a face. While it is naïve, of course, to believe that stories can change our world, I do believe that they can give names and faces to things too vast and terrible for us to grasp.

As small children, my cousins and I discovered a Nazi pistol in our grandfather’s desk. We knew he had served in the British Indian army during World War II, but our colonizers had been the good guys in that story. What could it mean that our grandfather had this emblem of the enemy? When we finally gathered up the courage to ask, he told us about the handsome, young Nazi he’d encountered in Italy, how he’d been struck by the soldier’s youth and beauty, how he’d imaged he had a doting mother somewhere far away praying daily for his safe return.

“I had nothing against him,” he told us. “And he had nothing against me. But I knew if I didn’t shoot him first, he would shoot me.”

And so, my grandfather shot the soldier. He kept the pistol in his desk for the rest of his life to remind him that valor is an empty concept we use to excuse the senselessness of war. Although our own childhoods were as yet unmarked by war when we first heard this story, my cousins and I saw the soldier and we felt his loss and we caught just a glimmer of what it meant.

For large objects, hitting the ground at terminal velocity is catastrophic. They shatter into a million pieces, splatter all over the ground. Survival is a miracle. It interrupts our understandings of ourselves.

After Vesna was released from the hospital, she was keen to fly again. The airline relegated her to a desk job. The thinking was that she would attract bad publicity. No one wants to think about an aircraft blowing up when they’re 33,000 feet off the ground.

For many years, Vesna led a quiet life. She married then divorced. She lived in a modest apartment in Belgrade with her cats (three). After the breakup of Yugoslavia, the airline forced her into early retirement for trying to persuade co-workers not to vote for Slobodan Milošević, the “Butcher of the Balkans.” Vesna avoided jailtime because the government worried about the negative publicity it would bring, but the story of her famous fall was called into question. Pro- Milošević tabloids sought to smear her by claiming she hadn’t really fallen so far, after all. Vesna was a hero because she was a miracle, but if she weren’t a miracle, how much would she matter? When you can’t erase a person, erasing their story works just as well.

III

At the start of the war, my Facebook feed was full of Gazan children. Every morning, I clicked “See more” and learned about their interests and aspirations. Their quirks and dreams. And how they died. They interrupted terminal velocity and then, one day, they vanished. I could not find them no matter how I searched. 

That December, US billionaire Barry Sternlicht started a media campaign called Facts for Peace. The goal: helping Israel “get ahead of the narrative” as humanitarian outrage over Gaza grew. Investors blacklisted pro-Palestine students. They exhorted Ivy League institutions to release the names of those who have signed letters critical of Israeli policy. Under the new administration, innumerable people have lost their jobs—and even their freedom—simply for posting on social media in support of Palestine. Although signing letters and holding placards feels so meaningless, if billionaires tell me not to, it’s the first thing I will do.

At the demonstration, my son and I waved signs on the side of the road on a quiet Sunday in Kalamazoo. People honked and held up peace signs. Young activists spoke eloquently of ceasefire. I wondered if my heart would bleed so brightly if the corpses in the rubble didn’t look so much like my son.

When asked, “how many [dead Palestinians] will be enough” Florida congresswoman, Michelle Salzman replied, “all of them.” There are many ways to obliterate a people. Not all of them require bombs.

In moments where I feel hopeless, I seek refuge in stories. It may be difficult to hold on to 20,000 children, 22 hospitals, 67,000 civilian casualties. But we can hold on to Daoud Tamimi, age five, dying of a heart attack during the bombardment. We can hold on to parents writing their children’s names on their arms and legs so their bodies can be identified. We can hold on to the impossible rupture of occupying two bodies (or three, or four, or five) and then suddenly existing in just one.

It’s possible that human beings are like hurricanes to ants: vast and immutable annoyances. Although we bear no particular ill will to Formica candida or Adetomyrna venatrix, global warming could prove catastrophic to them. Safer picnics, we might celebrate! But ecologists have long warned that should they vanish, the food chain will collapse. There are still many questions about ants that remain unanswered. They outnumber humans 2.5 million to one. They began farming 50 million years before we did. They outweigh all the mammals and birds on this planet put together. And yet.

The journalists who sought to defame Vesna claim JAT Flight 367 was accidently shot down and she fell “only” 2,600 feet. Vesna herself does not remember. What she has said is that she thought of the fall every single day of her life. The story, then, becomes a matter of who tells it and how.

So how do you survive a fall at terminal velocity?

Perhaps you must start small.

Perhaps you must imagine it’s your heart falling to earth at 120 mph.

Perhaps you must imagine it’s your heart shattered on the ground.