Ghosts

Those of you who do not stand here and see what I see,
allow me to be your eyes and bear witness to the horror that lays before me.
Those of you who do not walk this fuming ashtray of shattered hearts and broken souls, allow me to be your feet.

The city is a graveyard, a sprawling necropolis marked by rundown debris and powdered concrete. Blocks of
rubble and battered panels of granite vandalize the asphalt roads, now sizzling flues of napalm and gunpowder.

Flowery plumes of torched yellow and orange shine like beacons of light through the billowing smoke belching from the afterburn of bombshells and mortar, the bewitching amber glow of the flames projecting a luminescent shadow upon the streets of fire enveloping the landscape within a penumbra of doom and despair.

A siren blares somewhere amid the pandemonium, muffled by a tragedy of screams ripping through
the smoldering tendrils of noxious fumes, the wails of the hapless widow, the voiceless orphan,
the nameless mother of a crippled three-year-old, the faceless father of a dead son who just last week
learned how to take his first footsteps clutching helplessly onto his fingers: phantoms; apparitions; ghosts.



— Fahim Ferdous Kibria

Paradise Lost

The silken canopies of azure and white were overcast by an infernal canvas of Hellfire and Brimstone; kites of
our childhood no longer adorn them and the lone woodpecker never flutters across them, overtaken by wings of iron; hedgerow shrubs of strawberry and aster were replaced by entanglements of barbed-wire and razor.
It was the sudden death of youth’s innocence: the scorching hot barren wasteland, its morbid sepulcher;
the great south-eastern wall, a colossal tombstone.



— Fahim Ferdous Kibria

Candle

Her left hand had shriveled dry to the bone: a blackened, brittle stump of withered flesh and charcoal.
The rest of her body was unscathed. She was cradled in my arms.
I kissed her. I kissed death.

Her skin was cold as steel – sheer and biting; I felt as if my lips had touched the edge of a jagged knife. The realization of what I held in between my palms made me shiver as a chill ran down my spine. My sister was dead. Eight days old. She was merely eight days old. Eight days old and at the throes of Azriel's Grasp.
My baby sister was dead.

The tears refused to fall. Pain and sadness were long forgotten memories of a time when we knew the difference between them and happiness. The serenade of bullets had robbed us of our grief.
The incessant barrage of bombshells had murdered our sense of mourning.
The embers of white phosphorus and sulfur had stripped away our humanity.

The blame game is on at full throttle. Talks of Hamas breaching a ceasefire issued by the Israeli Government were echoing through the battered and smoldering walls of our demolished city. My sister wasn't a member of Hamas, neither was I, nor my family. My sister couldn't even spell the word "ceasefire" and, until last horrid morning,
I had no idea what it meant.

They say they're doing this for self-defense. What did they have to defend themselves against from an infant?
An infant who couldn't even utter the name of her own mother, what threat was she to anyone, I ask, whether they be Arab or Israeli, Gentile or Jew?

I still remember the sunlit afternoon she was born. The hopes we had, the dreams and ambitions: for once in a long time we felt the joy of seeing the light at the end of a dark tunnel... and then, like the fingers that smother the waning flame of a dying candle, they snatched it away.



— Fahim Ferdous Kibria

The Day It Rained Lead Over the Olive Tree

I was dead... for five minutes. I opened my charred eyes to the strong stench of blood and vomit,
right cheek plastered against the dusty floor – a bed of slugs and bones, azanes and brains, guts and gunpowder.

I pressed my arms hard against the platform to prop myself up: head throbbing, chest pounding, knees buckled,
my face a crimson mask. The world was a haze, slowly sliding into focus as I crawled forward through heaps of
bullet-ridden skin and flesh. Gingerly, I clawed my hand out to grab onto something, anything, for support.
My fingers gripped what felt like an organic mass: it dissolved at my touch into a viscid pool of black and red –
the bodies had begun to decay.

Nameless, faceless bodies lay strewn and scattered across the hellscape... bodies of my parents, my siblings,
my aunts and nephews, neighbors and their children, draped in rags soaked scarlet as stars of
white phosphorous blistered the night sky.

Assalam Walaikum. My name is Salman Abbas al-Ali. I'm sixteen years old. My family is dead. Welcome to Gaza.

— Promi

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