Under the Olive Tree

5. Khamsa

Her Aunt raced into the room with her hands pressed onto her ears. "Down! Down-," she shouted, pushing Amani lower and shielding her head with her hands. "Bismillah, bismillah," her aunt repeated and pulled Amani against her chest. Another boom came and Amani closed her eyes, afraid that the house would crumble and kill the both of them. But her aunt continued praying, repeating the same words until the noises stopped.

As the silence filled the room again, Amani heard the shouts coming from the street. "...Abu Jabar's house!" A man yelled.

Amani followed her aunt across the house and into the balcony to see all the men racing down her street and toward the bakery. In the distance, a cloud of brown debris and smoke rose to the sky. "Auntie," she turned. "What happened?"

"Come on, Amani. We have to help."

They threw on the fastest clothes they could wear and hurried out the front door to follow the crowd. The bakery doors were left open and bread lay charred on the floor by the stove. Beside it, one window of the pharmacy had been shattered and the other cracked down the center from the power of the blast.

She ran after her Aunt without question but froze when they turned the street. In front of her, a tall home of three stories had crumbled to the floor. The neighboring building remained standing with a large hole in the ground level. The car parked in front was folded on itself and only a few spots of yellow could be seen through the black soot covering its metal and disintegrating its windows.

"Amani!" Fayza grabbed her arm, catching her breath.

"They- they bombed the house?"

She tugged her along. "Come on. We have to help!"

"Help what?" Amani shouted over everyone else's voices.

"His family! They're in there, come on!"

But Fayza's hand slipped away as she hurried toward the crowds lifting the debris off the mountain of destruction. Amani's feet pulled her back even as she tried to move forward, to help as everyone else was. She lifted her hands to both sides of her head as the smoke circled the street and filled her lungs with shards of the broken home.

One of the men shouted from the middle of the debris. "Here! Layla and Rayan," he called and, quickly, the other men raced to his side to lift the large blocks of what had been a pink-painted wall.

She'd heard that name before—Layla.

Amani forced her feet to move and approached the crowd. Her hands shook as they pushed her way through to find her aunt.

"Yalla, yalla."

"God is Great!"

She looked toward the loud shouts and saw the two children being pulled from the rubble, their skin stained with the grey and black dust of the explosion. They were passed down their wrecked home to the man crying on the floor. At the sight of his grandchildren, he rose from the floor to take them.

They were passed from beside her. The girl was unconscious, a dark stain on her forehead. Her brother's eyes were wide and panicked at all the hands he was moved between. "Yaba," he shouted, wiping his head around in search of a face that was both familiar and comfortable. "Yaba!"

Their grandfather cried and held the two children. Beside him, his neighbors assured him that the paramedics should be on their way and it would only be a few more minutes. Rayan hugged his neck tightly out of fear, but Layla laid motionless in his lap.

"Inna Lilla wa inna illayi raji'un." Amani turned in time to see two men laying a white sheet over their mother's body.

"I'm sorry."