long time no see. it’s been a while, and a lot has changed. some of it good, some of it not so much. that’s all for another time, though. today, I am offering a free short story.
I wrote this for last year’s Macmillan Sponsored Write (there’s still time to sponsor this year’s campaign!) At the time, the war in Gaza had only just begun. It would be untrue to say this story is about that war. But it was inspired by it. A war that did not start in October 2023, but in 1948, when Palestinians were expelled from what is now Israel. Every day, I watch as the humanitarian crisis and extermination of the Palestinian people continues unabated, as the Western world turns a blind eye to acts of colonial genocide.
This is not a story about the war in Gaza, but it could be.
In The Kingdom of Flowers
Your father walked on water, my grandmother once told me.
I paid her little attention. She was old, frail; the war had taken a toll on her, and she would say strange things. Her dreams were elaborate. Inventing means of escape, each more impossible than the last. And our days were filled with the mundanity of staying alive. With keeping her alive, for she would forget to eat, would wander off into the hills if left unsupervised, and we’d find her half a mile away, staring up at the buzzards wheeling overhead with an expression of pure joy, as though they were her own children, silhouetted against the blue.
You don’t need to worry about me, she’d say, when we’d brought her back to the house, checked that all the windows and doors were locked, the key hidden. Everything I need is out there.
The bombs come more frequently these days.
#
My parents were killed in the war. My brother too. His children lived with us for a while; they were taken away by aid workers, who said they would be rehoused in some safe country a long way from here. They spoke a different language, but they weren’t worried. Children’s brains are malleable, they said. Like clay that has not yet taken shape. They’ll learn.
Grandmother did not grieve. She seemed to believe that my father wasn’t really dead. She hadn’t seen him die. The massacre at the marketplace had happened in broad daylight; men with guns storming the plaza, shooting indiscriminately. We’d never experienced war at close quarters before. They usually killed us at arm’s length. Missiles tearing through the sky like falcons. Exploding in a shower of dirt, and blood, and flesh. Schools, and hospitals. Military targets. Necessary, they said. We must be contained. We must be controlled. We must be excised at the root, like cancerous tissue. It was why we’d let the aid workers take my brother’s children away. The trauma of displacement might be survived, adapted to. Death is permanent.
Did you see your father die? she’d asked us.
Nona had grown frustrated. Father went to the market, she’d said; they shot everything that moved. They killed the goats and the chickens too. He never came home. What else do you think happened?
Grandmother had smiled, strange and inscrutable. The lines at the corners of her eyes a thousand miles deep. Like cracks in the riverbed.
Perhaps he escaped, she’d said.
Nona had thrown up her hands. Where to? she’d said. There’s no way out of this country. They surround us on all sides, except for the sea; and there they shoot boats on sight. Where exactly could anyone escape to?
I keep trying to show you, Grandmother said. But you won’t let me.
#
We try to live by routine. Nona wakes first; she goes to feed the chickens, collects the day’s eggs. Comes back in and starts cooking breakfast. While she does, I draw water from the well, for cooking and bathing. Nona and I used to wash at the stream, but the guerillas pass by more and more frequently these days, and you can’t even trust your own men in times of war.
Before the heat peaks at midday I cycle down to the abandoned orchard. The summer apples are gone now, but the autumn apples are just beginning to mature. I harvest as many as I can, stop along the way to pick blackberries from the side of the road. There’s enough fruit to keep us going for a while, if we ration it carefully. The rest we use to make preserves. The summer tomatoes, strained and poured into jars. Pickled lemons. Apricots in cinnamon and star anise. Soon, the figs will come back, and we will turn them into jam. Grandmother loves making jam. When we can go to the market again, she says, we’ll buy fresh lamb, and we’ll cook it with the vegetables we’ve foraged, serve it with warm fig jam, and we’ll remember what it’s like to feel so full you could burst.
We live in the kingdom of flowers, Grandmother says one day, when we return with a basket full of marigolds; poor man’s saffron, but are we not poor? We live in the valley of trees, Grandmother continues, dreamy, and a little wistful. Whatever else happens, we shall never starve, as long as we have them.
In the afternoon, we let Grandmother nap while Nona and I wash our clothes and utensils at the stream. We hang them up to dry on a line strung between two lemon trees; the chickens fuss around, hoping for more food. On a good day, they might get the leftovers from my harvest; chopped up apple cores, strips of carrot skin. They are growing thin. Producing fewer eggs. We will have to risk the market again soon.
We try to live by routine, but the bombs keep changing everything.
#
At night, we move by the light of a single lantern. Electricity is intermittent these days; we tell ourselves we’re saving gas for the generator, but the entire valley is plunged into darkness when the sun goes down, and the truth nobody speaks is that even in this world of radars and GPS we believe, somehow, that we can will ourselves into secrecy if we just keep the lights off. That the missiles will fly harmlessly past, if we just stay hidden here, where the fireflies glow green-gold in the summer, and the stars wheel overhead in their silent millions.
Grandmother sleeps in my father’s bed. Nona and I have our own bedroom, but we tend to camp in the living room these days, one eye trained on the front door in what passes for sleep. It’s an academic decision; if they come for us in the night, we have nothing with which to repel them. A few garden tools. A kitchen knife. Precious little defence against rifles and body armour. They haven’t started going door-to-door yet. Maybe they never will.
The fireflies left weeks ago. Soon, winter will come.
#
When Grandmother dies, it isn’t war or guns or even age that takes her.
Nona and I return one afternoon to an open front door. Fearful, we approach from the side. Hand in hand, as though it might make a difference. Peering through dust-grimy windows; listening for strange sounds, though we hear nothing but the chickens fussing in the back yard, the wind in the dry grass.
I enter the house. Nothing is out of place. The door sits peacefully ajar; no sign of forced entry. I accuse Nona of forgetting to lock it. She drops her basket of wet washing on the front step, skulks in silent anger into the living room. But everything is precisely as we left it. Soup-scraps bubbling low on the stove, meagre. The newspaper our brother picked up from his last trip to the mainland, before they started shooting boats. The jar of money beside the sink, useless.
Our father’s bed is empty. Meticulously made; fresh sheets, as though awaiting the arrival of some new guest. Grandmother’s shoes, neatly tucked beneath the bed. On the pillow, a handwritten note, in Grandmother’s spidery scrawl, familiar to me now as the veins of my own wrist, the shape of my fingers.
It said: I’ve gone to the sea.
#
Six months ago, Nona and I might have argued ourselves blue over who was to blame.
Three months ago, we might have run heedlessly into the valley in search of her. How far, after all, could an old woman have gone in such a short space of time?
One month ago, we might have sorrowed the empty space left behind, numb now to loss.
I’ve gone to the sea.
Now, we only envy her.
#
A few days later, the orchard goes up in flames.
It was a dry summer, they say, across the valley; a careless spark is all it takes. A half-smoked cigarette in the grass. Accidents happen, don’t they. It can’t be helped. Nevermind the smell of petrol soaked into the charred stumps. The fruit that would have fed us through the winter. Nevermind any of it.
We gather scraps of charcoal and bring them back to the house, where Nona counts our preserves, does the maths based on worst-case scenarios. We have just enough, she says, to feed the two of us until spring, if we’re frugal. If we can stand a little hunger.
We live in the valley of trees.
It’s almost like Grandmother knew this would happen, she says, and we both know that is impossible, but we wonder, still
#
When we were young, my father would take us to the beach, and we’d bask in the light of a sun that loved us; we’d eat lemon granita so sharp and so cold it made our teeth ache, and the sea stretched out before us like blue silk, studded with diamonds, all the way to the end of the world.
That was when we were young.
#
Nona and I curl up in our father’s bed, against the growing cold.
Do you think Grandmother will be all right out there, Nona asks.
At first I think she means heaven, but then I understand. Your father walked on water, my grandmother once told me. I imagine her, withered and so very small, stepping shoeless feet onto the silken waves one at a time. I imagine the wind in her hair, her gap-toothed smile; barefoot on the water as she walks toward the horizon.
I think about the jar of money on the shelf. The lamb we’ll buy at market when she returns, someday. Maybe in the springtime. When all of this is over.
Yes, I tell Nona. Yes, I think she’ll be fine.
This is a free story, but if you enjoyed it, I would consider it a personal favour if you could donate even a little to UNRWA, Medical Aid for Palestinians, or Medicin Sans Frontieres, all of whom are doing stellar work easing the humanitarian crisis in Palestine.
Dispatches from the Sinister Room 