Shattered

Yesterday, as the war finished its first day, we became refugees. The fires, air raids, bullets, and bombardment ruined many homes and burned many crop fields. They drove us away in the middle of the night like a nation of terrified deer. We all knew that someone wanted us dead yesterday. So we ran to the caves and then through the fields that would take us to the second day, and to a road through which we could cross to safety in a neighboring country. But the road was empty except for the fierce June sun that pierced my face. I asked that I sit. My father instructed that I must remain standing and ready to run. But my feet had gotten bruised from running without shoes yesterday, and I could not stand. When the sun centered in the sky and my noon shadow pooled like the blood of a butchered animal below me, I fell to the ground, asleep. Mother, who hovered over while holding my infant sister to her chest, and my two brothers frantically shook me and pinched my cheeks until I woke up again. "No one can carry you," Dad explained as he skinned off a piece of cucumber and rubbed it on my face to further awaken me. He had carried the cucumber to replace water at Mother's urging last night. "Do you really think it can replace water?" he had exclaimed in the darkness before we fled. 'il imagine so," she had replied. "Imagine" was Mother's favorite word. In Arabic, she would say Batkhayyal, which also meant "to see the shadow of a thought," as if one is separated from it by a thin cloth. Mother seemed to dwell behind this veil, gaze through it, and long for uniting with its other side. Mother could imagine solutions to many problems and would pop them out of her mouth with the ease I popped my Bazooka chewing gum. Now, standing only one step away from my mother, I could see that she had slipped into the other side and the door was shut behind her. My heart pounded at the barrier and begged that she come out and see me. But her gaze only floated afar on the horizon. When she finally spoke, the words were not directed at me. "I hear something in the distance," she said quietly, as if not to disturb the spider-thread perception connecting the sound to her ear, "perhaps an engine." A fierce look covered my father's face. He closed his eyes, cupped his ears, and opened his mouth, as if to swallow the sound upon capturing it. He asked us all to listen; then he instructed that we hold hands and run behind him. If it's a vehicle, I will stop it no matter what that takes," my father vowed. At the center of the road, Dad flung his arms across his chest. He was ready to embrace a broad destiny. He wailed after the men to join him, and many answered. Dad and the men huddled and, like magnets, stuck to one another's bodies. They formed a tight,knot barrier. Terror was the mortar that held them together. Their heads faced to the inside, and they looked into one another's eyes to fill each other with courage. Everyone seemed to understand the strategy, and in no time other men formed new knots along the road. The noise now became increasingly louder, its diesel hum madly goading everyone's desperate hopes and deepest worries. People spoke words of solid anger as they fought to get closer to the road. They pushed and propelled one another in every direction, like marble balls in a child's play. My brothers and I knew to plant our bodies where we could see our dad: We were a compass needle, and he was our North. Our mother, a tall and astonishingly strong woman who relied on her hands more than she ever relied on words, was always behind us and making certain we stood ahead of the crowd. It was a white water tanker that emerged from the silver spot on the horizon. People cried out to God in gratitude and jumped high in the air as if to deliver the words. But the tanker increased its speed as it approached aArmstrong, Jennifer is the author of 'Shattered' with ISBN 9780375911125 and ISBN 037591112X.