A Glimpse of What May...

It was 4am. She was lying down in bed, her eyes wide open. Another sleepless night, another night of fear and dread of what may... She couldn’t make herself close her eyes, what if the memories came back? There were many phantoms in her life, and at times when the world was sleeping she could clearly hear them giggling and madly ecstatic.

Could she really remember how the first ghost sprang into existence?

“You naughty girl, I told you to never puke in my classroom! You make me sick to my stomach!” Oh, how sensitive she was. The youngest in kindergarten, she was stuck in that vicious circle of vomiting everyday, shuddering of fear of the teachers insensibility and aloofness.
The little skinny girl sat in a corner alone during recess thinking of a way to throw away her sandwich without being caught. Suddenly a classmate, Christine, came to her and said, “My dad told me you are a Shia Muslim, you can’t be my friend”. “A Shiite? No I can’t be a Shiite! Shiite is bad! I am not bad; I only have a weak voice and a retching problem.”
That afternoon, her dad pulled the belt off his trousers and warned, “There would be no talk of religion in my house!” As she lay under the covers crying she kept asking herself, “What did I do? What does religion mean?”

Funny, religion should have been a very comprehensible word to her. Being born to parents raised during a bloody civil war in Lebanon means religion is fed through the amniotic fluid in the womb. Still, she would learn what religion could destroy and reap in a hard way…

Two months later after the Hizbullah Dec.1st sit-in,

Another stormy night, hail showering down breaking into homes and into hearts. The hail is not cold but hot as their summer barbecue coal and as dark as the hate engulfing people around her. Her mom is screaming as a maniac foretelling their death, calling for the selfish leaders burning in hell. “Hurry, hurry, and get out of bed; we have to sleep in the corridor tonight.” She took her cat and followed. Her aunt and daughters were all camped there each already halfway through their own version of the end of their lives and total Armageddon. A knock on the door, it is her cousin. “I have found a safe place for us to sleep, tonight. It is the small bookshop warehouse.”

The warehouse is small and smells of unhealthy mold. The girl can hardly breathe, her cat is for some reason hiding behind the toilet seat and that scene suddenly reminds her mom that her parents should join them.
They find the girl’s grandparents having morning coffee at their house’s porch, having small talk and for some mysterious reason unaware that shellings not yet cold are covering the grounds around them. “Your generation is cowardly,” he said, “I would never hide even if rockets were being launched directly at me. No human could change fate. Death-if your time has come-will strike you even if you hide in China.”

That night, her grandfather died. He didn’t need to run from death to China, death came to him thanks to the stubbornness of the so called “Defenders of the national unity” and the girl blamed herself. She is Shiite as Christine told her so she must have had a hand in his death for sure!!!

This is a gloomy glimpse of what may, please do not make it happen and dare to say no!