• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

There’s no water, no water.

We’re tired, we’re tired. Our kids’ nerves are shot. They are terrified.

A throat rich with decades of cigarettes. A voice without a face.

I was at home and a missile struck the house but we weren’t killed. We could have been chopped to pieces.

Look how people are living. Our children are going to die of thirst.

We want a ceasefire, we want peace. I was born in war and I am forty years old and I live in war. We build our homes and they destroy them.

Don’t leave us here! Send airplanes for us, please …

There is no water.

In the dark I write as fast as I can, and upstairs voices are screaming that it’s time to go, we have to go. I don’t understand why we have to go, the shells are coming thicker, but there is only one coherent idea in my mind: if I get abandoned in this dark, rich whale belly overnight I will lose my sanity. So I clamber up into daylight, into the thick crowds of weakened humans who crawl into the sunshine because they can’t bear the hospital bowels anymore. “A chain is broken in the ambulance,” a Red Cross volunteer yells. They climb under the ambulance, shake their sweaty heads, and talk fast. We followed the ambulance here, clinging to its wake for thin protection. Israel is bombing ambulances now, too, but still it seems like a shield. The shells are crashing, smoking, chewing the dirt. Soon it will be dark. The Red Cross men tell us to go away. They think the Israelis are shelling around the hospital because we are here, because the ambulances gave cover to the journalists. They want us to leave on our own because maybe once we are gone the shelling will stop. So we creak back through ghostly towns and bomb-scorched valleys, past the sign reminding us that RESISTANCE IS A NATIONAL DUTY. My heart is in my mouth. I know what this phrase means now. The heart swells, slicing off breath, sending beats in echoes through your skull. My heart is in my mouth and we drive as fast as we can.

Adrenaline is the strongest drug. When it floods your veins the world smears around you in a carousel spin, except that each detail is crisp and hard, the colors are not negotiable, the hardness of shadow and sunlight cut you but they feel good and real and you keep on standing. Words drift for hours and days on the surface of your thoughts, gathering like algae. Ever since the mass funeral I have had these words in my head: killing the dead, killing the dead. People look like ancient animals, lurching over some primordial land. A single bird’s cry is clean and hard enough to carve your skin. This is why people get addicted. When adrenaline really gets going you can’t get sick, you don’t need sleep, and you feel you can do anything. I know when this is over it will be like dying.

It is the last day of July and the land has no mercy, it dries out and flakes off, bearded by yellow grasses. The whine of the cicadas rings in my ears like the voice of heat itself, higher and faster until you think the vibrating song will lay you flat in the dust. There is no other life left in the hills, only the space left over, the empty dent where the noise of drones, jets, and explosions used to be. Suddenly they have stopped and there is only the space they left.

Israel has stopped bombing for forty-eight hours. They just killed a lot of civilians at Qana, and the world is angry, and Israel says it will investigate. I was in Qana yesterday and now I am going to Bint Jbeil. That is where the fighting has been the worst and nobody has managed to get there. You know there is a war going all over the south but you can only know what you can reach. By now they have wrecked all the roads and everybody knows they aren’t kidding: they will kill us if we get in their way.

The refugees are coming out of Bint Jbeil and we are going in. They look like hell, or as if they have recently been there. Coated in dust, faces cut sharp by hunger, dry as the yellow grasses. They are packed into cars or staggering on foot. They put their dead eyes on our faces and beg us for help.

Can you take us to the hospital?