Why We Fight

• Suvarna Variyar, Grade 12, North Sydney Girls High School
• Short Story
• 2011

Excellence Award in the 'Step Write Up 2011' competition

It is hard, digging with a broken shovel and trembling hands. I continue, though, even under the blazing sun, thrusting rusted metal through rocky soil, soil that speaks more of a burnt desert than of a village where people live. The sun is hot and bright, but I don’t feel the warmth – only the heat, searing my skin and soul as I dig.

When I arrived, exhausted from a walk that should have taken me four days but took me barely two, I hadn’t yet banished that desperate hope – that what I had heard in faraway-Jerusalem, fighting a fight that can only end in our loss, might not have been truth. Or at least, not truth for me.

I had not thought them to be alive; I believed it, clung to that belief tighter than I had ever clung to anything. 'They’re alive' was my mantra, my own verse from my own Book
It still resonates in my mind like the never-ending toll of a bell, loud and dissonant.

They’re alive.

But these bodies are dead; they litter the streets, and too many of them are people I know - knew. The living – those who have found the courage to leave their houses, who haven’t been taken away by large, foreign vehicles – are too unfamiliar. I avoid meeting their eyes, because I know that they think the same thing I do.

'Why are you still alive?' their dark, empty eyes ask me. 'Why you, and not them?'

'Why?'

That is the question that echoes incongruously with the aftermath of days of frantic hope and prayer.

They’realive-why?They’rewhyalivewhyalivewhywhy?

There is less life here than in a burnt desert; for I do not know if I am alive.

I live, however, for whatever that is worth; and so I cling to numbness as a lifeline, a way to hide from the reality that I dig for.

Thoughts rush through my head though, buffered as they are by that icy paralysis that grips my emotions.
I live. I live to fight the fight that will never be won, so long as children die with holes in their stomachs, so long as a mother’s last act is to embrace her dying young.

I know this, but I do not care.

Chaos surrounds me, in the dusty streets of a small village with doors hanging half off their hinges, with walls reduced to gravel and sand. The sun beats down on my head, searing the echoes into my brain so they can never be forgotten. My thoughts fly haphazardly, wild birds trapped in the confines of a steely cage.

And I dig.