War And All Its Horrors

• Katrina Garlick, Grade 10
• Short Story
• 2017

Clouds billowed around the wings of the plane, colouring the sky grey, visible only through the window. She sighed and leant back against her chair.Tears threatened to spill onto her cheeks in a seemingly never ending fashion. The cabin had turned cold now and she tightened her arms around herself.

The weather perfectly matched her mood, dark and hopeless. Her heart hurt and her eyes stung with the aftertaste of tears. She wished, with all her might, that she was numb. Wished she couldn’t feel her heartbreaking. Wished she couldn’t hear the cries of children or the sobs of broken mothers. She wished she could erase the memory of a father sitting on a step, no longer a man and rather the shell of one; empty and hollow.

Never in her life had she seen such anguish, such pain in one place. She had barely even known it was possible. Had she have known what she was walking into that first day, she may have turned around for fear of becoming the shell of a woman too.

Tilting her head back, she closed her eyes, regretting doing so instantly. All she could see with closed eyes was what had once been a tall, strong building. It was mere bricks now. A bomb, someone had explained. It amazed her that something could flatten out what had once been unbreakable. It was something that would stay with her forever.

No longer a country, a city or even a town. The whole country had simply been fragmented, crushed, destroyed. It had been as if someone had walked through and stolen everything; hope, joy, whole buildings and left the sunken remains of a country swallowed by despair and brokenness.

War; fighting to gain something that’s worth was becoming increasingly questionable. Arguments for power that resulted in the stealing of lives and casualties that ‘can’t be avoided’. Still, she had never considered the tremendous impact of this hostility until she had been standing directly in the middle of it, suffocated by the people's pain and suffering, drowning in their tears and spattered with their blood.

It wasn’t as if she hadn’t seen it on the news or read about in the school classroom. But it would seem as though nothing could truly prepare you for what it felt like. No amount of presentations or heartfelt conversations with those who had gone before her would have helped. She could still remember stepping off the bus into the ‘city’; feeling the terror hit her in waves. Almost tangible in the dusty air.

Shock ricocheted through her system as an eerily familiar voice filled her ears. A new fear coursed through her veins as every instinct, every nerve in her system told her to duck, hide or run away. Yet she knew if she even twitched a muscle, her death was imminent. But hey, that’s war right?