Kfar Yona

• Mark Knight, Grade 8
• Short Story
• 2018

Twenty years had passed. The ground grew no different, and the same burning sun floated in the sky. A lady sat down on a concrete grave that read ‘Thou children were given thy destiny’ as there were no birth records of any form, nor their bodies, it just read, ‘children of Kfar Yona’, what they thought was their home. The Israeli sat, depressed, contemplating how horrible the experiences must have been. A passage of footsteps banged hard against the ground. They saw men. Many men. Fully black in cloth. They looked sincere. “We are sorry” they could translate, and the unforeseen feast began.

Over two decades ago, when the sky was once a bubbly, bright, blue capitalising the perfect scorching, summer days in Israel, birds used to chirp and sing, and children would run and play through luscious, green grasses. Nowadays, the ground was dirt. Cracked deep, illuminating a tunnel of darkness from far below. This was a time where hope was lost, and each day was a dreadful time. In this world, children merely sat and stared, in all that was left of their torn down, isolated wreckage of a community. Not even the sound of the slightest whisper was projected, and vultures soared through the sky tyrannically feeding upon their sorrowful, helpless prey whom could only give one another a last glimpse of sadness before being devoured in only the cruellest technique possible. Some days felt as if walls covered in irrationally large and dangerous spikes were staring into their souls, closing in as each second ticked by. They were helpless as an ant wandering through a human gathering, just waiting to be squished by oversized feet.

It was a cruel world, they had found out, and they had been forgotten, nearly as awfully as the children lost and forgotten years ago. They shared a table with the men, but did not speak. They were regarded as being as villainous as their ancestors, and were outraged to even look into the furious, enflamed eyes of a murderer; or at least his sons. Never did they expect such people to share footsteps on their land, nor did they expect them to be accountable for terrorising their country.

The Jordan men handed a traditional meal, a symbol of respect, in the direction of the oppositely positioned women. “You can take our country, but you can’t take our pride!” The eldest on the table, who had experienced it all remarked in a spiteful fury. The men who sat at the table were not even alive at the time of the attack, yet were stereotyped as being as evil as their ancestors. The woman, who ran off in anger had a daughter once. Her daughter was a kind hearted community orphanage worker who loved all children equally and gave her life to save the ones she loved. The debt the men owed her was too high, and she would never forgive the foreigners for spilling the blood of her much loved daughter.