Ephraim is lying on the floor. In their sitting room. Staining the carpet. He’s asking for water in Arabic. He’s clutching at his uniform, as if he is too hot and wants to drop a few layers. Grandma does something you have never seen her do. She spits. It’s just sound and air, no actual spit flies around, but still. Grandpa goes to the kitchen. His daughter, your mum, asks if he is seriously going to give this grasshopper water.

Your mum likes to compare the invaders, the terrorists, to locusts. Like they are a Biblical plague. ‘If he dies on our floor we are in a world of trouble’, says grandpa. ‘We have always been in a world of trouble’, says grandma. She tells her husband to bring a knife from the kitchen. Grandma has lost more relatives at the hands of the grasshoppers than you can name. Before the latest mowing of the lawn it was 11. Mostly cousins. Six months ago it was already 23. Then she kinda lost track. And now there is an invader bleeding to death on the carpet and the carpet could very well be worth more money than the entire shack you and your family now live in. You’ve been displaced 9 times, but the carpet has always traveled with you. Uncle Badr in Memphis, Tennessee calls you and your family ‘carpetbaggers’. Probably some Tennessee thing. You wish you were with uncle Badr now. You are 12 years old.

Every day you wake up next to your six year old sister who asks, as soon as she opens her eyes: ‘Are we in heaven yet?’ Grandpa returns with a glass of water and no knife. Grandma says: ‘He was desperate to marry me, only to disappoint me’. Grandma didn’t speak like this before the earth and the windows and the walls started shaking and the streets started smelling like rotten cat food from all the dying. Grandma heads for the kitchen, but your mum stops her. You thought grandma was joking, but your mum and grandma start wrestling. Grandma is serious about getting that knife. You feel tears running down your cheeks. Your sister is banging her fists against her own head. You pull her arms down. It’s hard, that little girl is strong. Her knuckles are bloody again. She drops to the floor and starts kicking. You let her be. Grandpa tries to give the soldier water.

The word ‘why?’ escapes your lips. Grandpa shrugs and says nothing. He also doesn’t know. The soldier says thank you. He’s in bad shape. You have seen plenty of people dying. He has that look. His hands are wandering all over his body. Your mum calls it ‘tapping’. The dying start tapping. Maybe they are saying goodbye to their body that way. You have seen it enough times. That soldier is done for. ‘If he dies here, they will blame us. We should move him.’ You feel that by ‘we’, he means you and him. ‘But am a girl, he looks heavy’, you say. You curse that soldier for running this way. What was he thinking? Why is nobody coming for him? ‘We have to pull him out on the streets’, says grandpa. ‘Not now, I don’t want to do that to anyone. Later.’ You know that later means after he’s dead.

You imagine dragging a corpse out on the street. ‘There is more of them’, you say. ‘They will see us. They will see we dragged him, because of the blood. They are never going to just leave him behind, not even dead. It would be a PR defeat if he fell into our hands.’ War has been a constant throughout your short life, by now you know the rules of the game. Grandpa knows all this too, but he is panicking. His daughter is still wrestling his wife over a kitchen knife.

You can’t think of anything better than to run to your mum and grandma and breaking up their brawl by jumping on top of them. Out of fear of hurting you, they break it off. There is silence. Only broken by the gurgling sounds coming from the soldier. ‘He is drowning in his own blood’, says your mum, herself out of breath. ‘Best sound I’ve heard in years’, says grandma. And then it’s your 6 year old sister who sticks the soldier’s bayonet in his belly. ‘Stop!’

She means the sound, the commotion, everything.