The electricity was out. There was no studying to do and we were bored of staying at home. My neighbors and my friends went out for a football match. I wasn’t allowed out, because my mother was preparing lunch and it was almost done. I stood on the balcony, watching my friends kicking the ball to each other and acting like famous football players when they scored a goal, spreading their arms like eagles and running around screaming, “Goooooaaaal!”
I stood there, cheering whenever my best friend, Ahmed, scored. Lunch seemed to take forever! I looked back. Mom was putting plates on the table. She looked at me and smiled serenely. She knew how much I wanted to go out and that I was staying because she made me.
“Come on, Mom! Hurry! Ahmed is scoring all the goals,” I complained.
“Almost done, dear. You won’t be able to play on an empty stomach, will you?” she said sweetly. I gave her a grumpy face and went back to watching the huge match. I rested my chin on the edge of the balcony, pulled my arms back, and kept my feet on the small, blue, plastic stool which my mother bought exactly for that purpose. She said I didn’t need more than ten centimeters to be able to view the street. Anything higher than that would cause a tragedy that no one in the family or the neighborhood, especially me, wanted to see. She terrified me with stories about children who climbed the balcony and ended up in the street with all sorts of broken bones. My little mind, of course, believed every single word she said, and I was always cautious not to dangle my head and arms when I climbed the balcony on the precious little stool. Ahmed, who seized a lull in the match, looked up at me and gestured a question. I shook my head and yelled, “Not yet!” The kids laughed at me and went back to their ball.
In a second, a huge light flashed right in front of me, and I was thrown back to the wall of the kitchen and then to its floor. Bricks hit the ground and smashed glass followed seconds later. My knees and hands were shaking, and I couldn’t stand up for a moment. There was a strange noise in my ears that sounded like a very annoying, nonstop whistle. Smoke was suffocating me. My mom ran to me, crying hysterically. She checked every part of my body to make sure I wasn’t hurt. Then she hugged me. But I did not care; I wanted to see what happened to my friends. She immediately pulled herself up and carried me out of the house, because smoke kept rushing in. My hands were shaking, and my mind couldn’t let go of the fact that all of my friends were playing in the street seconds ago. In a minute, my mother and I were standing in the middle of the street, trying to breathe some oxygen, but all we were doing was gulping cement-filled air and coughing it back.
As the smoke faded away, we could finally breathe air that smelled like fireworks. Then my mother realized we were standing in the spot where the game was taking place. She didn’t know where to go. She kept walking in circles while holding my head above her shoulder, close to her neck. I saw my friends lying on the ground. All of them. Ahmed was thrown on top of his cousin. His head was torn open. Aunt Um Ahmed saw him as well from the front of her house and started screaming. My mother was still hugging me as hard as her scratched arms could. Um Ahmed rushed to the street, screaming, carried her son, and hurried for any of the ambulances whose sirens were wailing in the distance. She couldn’t get further than a few meters. She collapsed to the ground, still crying, still holding her son, and then she fainted. Ahmed’s dad rushed after her. He carried Ahmed and started running. He too couldn’t go on. He fell down. By then I was weeping hysterically, along with my mother, who kept carrying me and pulling my head back. She did not want me to get closer to my friends. She wanted to cover my eyes from all of the flesh scattered here and there.
The neighbors carried Ahmed and rushed with his dangling body to an ambulance. They took his mother to one of the neighbors’ houses. Uncle Abu Ahmed stood in the middle of the street while people were collecting rubble and evacuating the injured. He stood there, staring at Ahmed’s blood and brain on the cement. My father and others tried to pull him away, but he kept resisting them. Later I had to be rushed to the hospital too, as it turned out I was injured.
Ahmed was gone. The others haunted me with their blaming looks every day I went to school. I couldn’t look at them. Amputated limbs. Scarred faces. Limping gaits. Our neighborhood was blown to smithereens in a split second. No more games were played. No more goals. No more cheering. And my friends grew up in one second. They no longer looked at me the same way they used to before that awful day. They wouldn’t come out to play. And they had a distant look, like Uncle Abu Ahmed when he looked at me, like I didn’t understand, like they knew something I did not know, like I did something wrong.