MOMMY

Bombed out mothers and children leave London, 1941

I held her hand when air raids buried my mommy's beautiful face into a world where both of us will no longer tell bedtime stories. The unknown lady clutched onto my tiny-filthy hand and run heading toward nothingness, as the bombs were dropped from the freezing fog that was covering the wide sky.

I was in salty tears that I didn't even question where is she taking me, the only thing my childish-innocent voice didn't fail to do is screaming "MOMMY".

Out of this shock, I felt myself issuing amid a mass of terrible sensations: the fearful blow of the explosion, the noise of glass, the hoarse howl of people, and the rushing of men. I didn't understand anything.

I was hungry, bitterly hungry, and the growling sound of my stomach echoed in the cramped tent, but after couple days of hunger, I wasn't anymore, my teeny shape absorbed the pangs of starvation and then, I was in pain. We all looked emaciated in our dirty-stinky clothes, and one day some of the surviving children my age were tired and feeling the urge to nap, that's what she told me. Their nap stretched from a quarter of an hour to three days in a raw, and I didn't snuggle with them in bed, nor tell them my mommy's bedtime stories anymore.

In a brittle voice, I asked the unknown lady one day when she was collecting the dry loaves of bread for dinner: "why do people I love the most leave me every time I tell them my bedtime stories, are they that awful?"

Her glare was a marriage of solemnity and empathy: "I enjoy the story of the little deaf bunny; you are telling it for me tonight."

The real awfulness back then wasn't in the bedtime stories I used to tell, nor in the people that used to fall asleep to them, not even in the glare of the unknown lady that rescued my life. It was in the selfishness of the supremacy in this world.

I used to fall asleep in her cold arms, a place I was taught by nature to distaste, hate, fear, and reject, she looked nothing like mommy. But in her coldness lays layers of warmth and kindness, and what she was hiding was easily seen through the tiny creases in her high forehead, and I didn't feel any aversion to her from that day on, because in war nowhere is safe. Nowhere.

I hear this story for the first time every night. I don't remember anything from that day.