For miles and miles you could see the destruction the earthquake had left in its wake. All of the mud houses people had been living in for years,crumbled like ant houses. A new mosque was being built nearby. Workers swarmed the area like ants on an anthill,getting things ready for the Prime minister visit. Cardboard walls were propped on pillars beside the mosque to show the non existent development going on. People were garbed in the same white material of the relief workers. They all looked the same.Their faces etched with the misery they had seen and premature wrinkles forming on their foreheads.
A teen aged girl was watching all this,sitting on a raft sticking out of what used to be a house. She would have been pretty if she didn’t look dead. Lush brown hair fell in cascades around her heart shaped face. A Greek nose and perfectly formed cherry lips and a complexion like cream with rose petals. The eyes were beautiful too,but they were vacant.Windows to an empty house.They took away all the beauty from her face.
She was wearing the traditional shalwar kameez. It must have been beautiful once. The sleeves frilled with lace and the shirt splashed by a bucket full of different colors. Her green dupatta was flying in the air behind her as though trying to escape her throat to which it was pinned. She looked like a damsel in distress waiting for her prince. The perfect picture of misery,with her head bowed down in her lap and feet hunched up. But there was no prince…just pain.
She should have gotten used to the scenery around her. The fallen down houses,grass growing out sparsely out of the ground,the children walking around barefoot,still perhaps looking for their parents. But she was still living in her own little world. She still thought she was the pedantic little girl who walked around with her nose in the air, feeling sure of her superiority and success. She was destined to be a Queen,she’d gotten scholarships in ever grade,topped every one of them. With a little bit of luck she would be studying abroad by now. In her imagination she was.
She was walking down the corridors of Oxford with the sun shining down on the faces of thousands of people from all over the world. Black,Caucasian,Asian,and South Asians like her. Walking side by side united for education. The elite of the world. The best brains. The reality was far too harsh for her. She couldn’t be stuck in a broken down town in a remote Pakistani area. She was going to be famous. Sitting on a stage,answering the questions of a hundred reporters,a light shining on her face and eager faces from all over the world tuning in to her on their Televisions. She was going to write bestsellers,sing chart toppers. Do whatever it took to be famous and respected all over the world. Be well-known. And she was going to clear the image of Pakistanis as terrorists and extremists. Show it for the peaceful country it was. Run over and by a handful of power hungry maniacs.
Instead she was sitting here,parents dead,her money squandered by the authorities. Having no future. Having no present. She was alive simply by the power of her imagination.
There were some other sounds mixed in with the mundane and the innocent now. If she was alert to her surroundings she might have noticed them. As it was, she kept on daydreaming while a young man garbed in black from head to foot slipped out from behind the shadows. A veil was blowing in the air behind him giving him a surreal appearance. He walked with a feral grace. Putting his feet in precisely the correct place so to not slip in the debris. He suddenly started running, got in front of the Mosque and billowed ‘ALLAH-U-AKBAR’ and slapped his hand on his chest. There was a deafening bang. All the birds in a 5-mile radius flew away in a flurry of wings. There was ash and debris now where the Mosque was. Blackened soot and blood running off the rocks. Limbs and fingers lying in a gross display of carnage. Rafters and broken bricks were lying here and there. some people who were far enough were barely alive,their legs or arms missing or under a broken wall,blood running out of their mouth and a gurgling sound coming out. Somewhere to the side a piece of cloth which might once have been green was pinned under a rock and fluttering in the wind, as though trying to escape. Trying to fly away to Oxford.
Somebody asked me to write an essay for them. So I did. But I also posted it on my blog.I have this need to show off m work. otherwise i die a little. :D
Nobody reads it so He can’t really be discovered…but is it good? :p
-Darcy
