The People of Forever Are Not Afraid Read Online Free PDF Page B

other than the village then. I don’t know where. My parents are arguing. “Duct tape?” my mother asks. “This is silly.”
    I do not know all the details of this—I hear about it later, and it becomes my memory. That night, I do not yet have enough words to make a sentence. All I remember is my mother, her dark face bare, collecting me in her arms and running up the wooden steps onto the roof. Rain falls on the palm trees below, but my mother removes my mask and pulls my chin up, high up in the air. A ball of light rips through thenight sky in pink and ember and blaze. My mother drowns her chin in my hair. We watch, and if I am alone I do not yet know it.
    I stare at the ceiling of the tent through the sheer plastic into the night. The knobs at the back of the mask pierce into my scalp, still. I am crying, and not because I hope that one of the girls in the tent will wake up.
    But then one does wake up. The blood one, the one who thought too much of her blood was being taken. She is awake, but she does not realize that I am a person, her fellow soldier, and in my field bed and crying inside a gas mask. My suffocated whines sound to her like the words of an animal.
    “Is that a cat?” she whispers, a sound as spiky as a blade that pierces through the air and tent and ears. “Girls! There is a cat in the tent.”
    “A cat?” Gali asks. She does not bother whispering.
    “Help me. I am allergic. I may die.” The blood girl waits for the words of another person.
    The mask protects me. They cannot see my face. They cannot see my mouth. They do not know that it was me who made the sound. If I scream, if I scream right now, a deafening and smashing and muted scream, there is a chance, there is always a small chance that no one will ever know it was me. It will be the sound of all girls screaming.
    And so.
    I scream. I scream as if this is the last time in my life I’ll ever speak my voice, and maybe it is. It is as if no one hears me, hears me right now.
    I scream the fear of blood, and ember, and blaze. I scream the terror of the beeping watches and boots treading the sand, and the panic brought upon by a reek that thinks it is bananas.The sound of the words I scream is the groan of my shame, my shame that is not a boulder, my shame that I never agreed to bury.
    If you really want me to, I will tell you the words I scream, I will tell you all the sounds and words and letters. But first you have to, you have to swear that you really want to hear it from me.

Boys    
    I stretch my arms out, as if I am trying to push the darkness beyond the cement barricade. I braid my hair and then braid it tighter, even though I know no one will be able to see me for hours.
    Eventually I allow myself to yawn and look down at the ammunition bunker hidden below the small hill where I stand. The eight-hour shift and the night broaden and spiral before me like my whole life ahead. When the wait is almost too much, I write my name on the ground in stones.
    Yael
.
    I hate even my name when I am waiting, at least after I look at it and it looks at me for a while, at least when I see it written in stones. So I kick the stones.
    I have been doing this since they stationed me in thistraining base near Hidna after boot camp. At first I wrote other words, but then I felt bad about kicking them, even though I hated them, and I hated that I grew to hate each name and word.
    After I am done kicking stones, I bend over and reach for the helmet, where I placed a plastic jar filled with chocolate spread. I jammed a plastic knife in it for me to lick when the night starts crowding in on me. I put it a few meters outside of the barricade so that I have to step out of it into the yellow weeds and dust of the hill. This makes time pass.
    But the helmet and the chocolate are gone. The weeds where I dropped them are imprinted by the shape of the helmet, holding its absence. The night hums with silence and cold. I place my hand on the handle of my M-16 and