An Explosive Conflict

I remember that the night they came for us was particularly warm. My mother had just finished putting my baby sister to bed. My father was tucking in my younger brother. Being the oldest, I was allowed to stay up for another hour longer than the younger children. That night, until it was time for bed. I remember going through the motion of getting ready for bed, then falling asleep to the muffled sound of the television coming from the living room..

I don’t know when they came for us. The first thing I was aware of was someone pulling me from my bed. I screamed. I couldn’t make out my attacker in the dark. My attacker threw me over their shoulder and carried me out of the house. Behind us, I saw a blonde-haired woman with a brightly colored shirt. The shirt had the words PEACE written across the front of it in white letters. The woman had my brother by their arm. She was dragging him down the hallway after us. My brother was screaming. I saw his cheek shiny with tears as he kicked the woman repeatedly. After he managed to kick her in the stomach, the woman smacked him hard enough that he went limp. The woman threw him over her shoulder and carried him out of the house.

My brother and I were dumped on our front lawn. A massive crowd of people surrounded the front of the house. The front yard was brightly lit from all the phones that were being used as flashlights. Many of the people held up and waved signs. The group cheered at something behind me. I looked back to see my mother and father also being dragged out of the house. They too were thrown to the ground across from us. My mother spotted us, stood up, and tried to join us, but a man with a black shirt grabbed her by the hair. I saw tears begin to stream down her face as the man pulled her close to him.

Another man left our house holding my baby sister.

My mom always taught us to not hurt other people. I remember her telling me one afternoon after a fight at school that I lost the moment I hit the other person. Yet when my mom saw the man holding our baby sister, she spun around and slammed her fist into the man’s face. The man let go with a cry as blood began pouring from his nose. My mom ran to the man holding her baby and slammed the heel of her hand into the nose of the man. The man cried out. The man dropped my sister. My mom caught her, held her close, and ran back to my dad. The crowd roared in anger at my mom. Empty bottles and rocks were thrown at her. My father took her in his arms and turning his back to the crowd sheltered her and my sister from the worst of the attack.

Then he turned back to the crowd. One of the items had grazed his head hard enough to make him bleed. The crowd cheered this sight. They didn’t seem to see the rest of his body.
My father went to great lengths to teach his children that we must not act out of anger. I remember a particular event when I was much younger when my father drove that point home. My younger brother had taken a toy I was holding out of my hands. I tackled my brother and ripped the toy out of his hands. In the process of the fight, the toy broke. For a moment I had only stared at the broken toy in my hand. Enraged, I turned back to my brother and began to beat him with my fists and the broken toy. I ended up giving my brother a black eye and a bloody nose.

The sounds of my brother screaming must have been what brought my father. He pulled me off my brother and told my brother to go to my mother so that she could stop his bleeding nose. My dad gently took the pieces from the toy out of my hands, put them on the table behind them, and said in that quiet soft-spoken voice that I would not be getting the toy back.

I remember shouting that my brother had been the one to break the toy. My father said that was not the reason I wouldn’t get the toy back. He said that I wasn’t getting the toy back because I hit my brother. He said that I could have told him about the toy and given the broken pieces to him. He said if I had done that my father would have fixed the toy and the brother would have been in trouble for taking the toy. But because I hit my brother, I was now the one in the most trouble.

He lifted my chin so that I looked him in the eye and said simply.

“Only hurt people who have hurt you, and never hurt people because you are angry.”

Looking at my father at that moment, I understood what he meant. His face was flush, his body was a taunt and shook, and his hands were clenched so hard that his knuckles had gone white.

The man in the black shirt that my mother had hit stood facing the crowd. Blood from his nose stained his upper lip and chin.

“This man had been hoarding supplies!” He screamed at the people gathered around him. “He is the reason why we cannot feed ourselves! His family is healthy while ours are sick and dying! They think of themselves above us! They are the reason why we are dying!”

The man with the black shirt stood in front of my father, heedless of my father’s apparent rage. He stepped close to my father, smiled, and whispered something to him that I could not hear over the sounds of the crowd. My father closed his eyes and gave no reply. The man backhanded my father, knocking him to the ground. My mother reached down with her free hand to help my father up. He waved off the offered hand and picked himself back up. He turned to the man with the black shirt and slammed his open palm against the man’s bloody nose.

The man collapsed to the ground screaming in pain. No one from the crowd tried to help him up. Instead, they began screaming their disapproval. Several in front raised their arms to throw more stuff. I saw half-empty beer bottles, rocks, and trash held in their hands, but nothing was thrown.

The man in the black shirt stood back up after several minutes. He wiped his nose and saw the fresh blood running from it. He screamed again, pulled a gun from his belt, and pointed it at my father. The crowd roared their approval and began throwing their crude weapons at us. I pulled my younger brother close to me so that he wouldn’t get hit and turned my back to the crowd as I had seen my father do.

Several items hit me, and stars danced before my eyes as pain bloomed in the back of my head.

Over the roar of the crowd, I heard the man scream at my father. “Where is the food and water?”

Suddenly the crowd went silent. I dared a look behind me. The man stood with a gun pointed at my father, yet it was the man’s face that showed fear instead of my father’s face. My father stood with a triumphant smile on his face and his hand outstretched. He was holding something that had a steady red blinking light to it.

It was then that I remembered how several months ago, my father had come home one day with a strange black case. He had gone downstairs for several minutes before returning upstairs. He showed us the small black device in his hand and told us to never play with it. He then hung it on one of the key hooks by the front door.

Now he held that same device in his hand and for the first time in my life, I heard my father shout. “You have come here and attacked my family like thugs! You are nothing but children who have been given everything except discipline!”

The crowd was silent. My father’s voice seemed to thunder across the yard and all who heard did so with rapt attention.

“I have in my hand a detonator. There is enough explosive material in my home to blast it and every single one of you to hell. If even one of you comes toward me and my family tonight, I will push this button and we will all die together.”

When no one challenged him, my father took my mother’s free hand in his and walked toward us. He picked my brother up. I wrapped my arms around his leg tightly and looked up with tear-streaked eyes. He looked down at me and smiled gently.

“It’s not our fault.” The man with the black shirt called out. “We are simply tired of being treated so terribly by everyone. We are starving. People are sick and dying. We are afraid. If you would just give us your food, we would leave, and then you and your family would be able to go back to sleep.”

My father turned and stared back at the man. He looked at the man with the gun in his hand and then at the crowd that cowered before him with open disgust. He did not see the woman with the PEACE shirt come up behind him. I did.

“Daddy! Behind you!” I screamed. My father began to turn. The woman slammed a metal bat into the side of my father’s head. My father fell on top of me. A shot rang out and my mother fell by my father motionless. My baby sister wailed while my little brother lay in the grass stunned.

Unable to see anything but grass, I heard the crowd break out in a cheer. The man screamed. “Take the food!”

The ground beneath me seemed to vibrate as hundreds of shoes rushed past me. I could hear the sound of our windows shattering. Through a small space, I could see enough to see people carrying our television, clothes, and dishes out of our house.

Then there was a deafening roar that was entirely different from the crowd. A blinding light flashed across my vision. I felt a wave of heat roll across my face. The smell of burning wood filled the air along with another smell that I did not recognize. People screamed in panic and pain as they ran away from the house. I wormed my way out from under my family enough to see our house now engulfed in flames, black smoke rising high into the night. Over everything else, I was most surprised to find I could hear sirens in the distance.

Turning to look down the road, I felt rather than saw someone trip over my head. They fell on top of me, and I could see nothing.

It was sometime later before the person was lifted off me. I blinked in surprise at the bright light that assaulted my eyes. I heard the sounds of yelling and hissing. A dark shape fell across my vision.

“I found someone!” The shape called out.

Two people began pulling my family off me until one of them was able to grab my arms and pull me out. I tried to look back, but the man turned my head away.

“You don’t want to look back there.” He spoke.

My mother had always told me to listen to firefighters so instead, I turned to see where the man was taking me. At least seven fire trucks and six police cars were now parked where the mob had stood earlier that night. I saw a couple of vans with large circular dishes on top. Behind the police car and the fire trucks, another crowd of people stood with their phones out trying to see what happened.

Someone spotted me and several people shouted. People stopped staring at my house and turned their phones to me. One woman who was dressed like my mom when she went to work on the television ran over to me with something in her hand.

“Little girl,” she said, “can you tell us what happened?”

The firefighter roughly pushed past the woman and carried me to another man in dark blue clothes with a blue shirt. A strange-looking bed stood next to him, and an ambulance stood behind him. The firefighter put me on the bed next to the man.

“Can you tell me your name honey?” the man with the blue shirt asked as he shined a light in my eyes.
“Jessica,” I spoke. “Are my mom and dad going to be, okay?”

The man did not answer my question.

“Is there anything that hurts Jessica?” he asked.

“My head,” I said, “someone kicked me in the head. Other people hit me in the back when I tried to protect my little brother. Where are my mom and dad?”

The man looked at the firefighter. The firefighter shook his head.

The man with the blue shirt looked back at me. “Do you know what happened Jessica?”

“My dad blew up our house,” I told him. “He told the man in the black shirt that if they wouldn’t leave, he would blow up our house. The woman with the peace shirt hit my dad on the side of the head and then my dad blew up the house.”

The two men looked at each other. The firefighter looked back at the house. “He did try to warn them.”

“My dad says that if you say you’re going to do something, make sure you do it,” I told the fireman.

The fireman looked back at me and patted me gently on the shoulder. “It sounds like your dad was a smart guy.”

“If they had just left us alone, he wouldn’t have blown up the house,” I said as my vision blurred, and tears rolled down my face.

The man with the blue shirt patted me on the shoulder. He called for a woman dressed in dark blue clothes. He and the woman lifted the bed with me on it and pushed me into the back of an ambulance. The woman climbed in after me. I heard the man say to the firefighter, “we’ll keep her for a few days to make sure there is nothing serious, but I think her family protected her from the worst of it.”

The man in the blue shirt closed the door and pounded on it.

The woman said, “Let’s go,” to someone I couldn’t see, and I felt the ambulance pull away. Out the back of the window, I could see firefighters emerge from my house with badly burned people over their shoulders while others held big hoses that shot water at what remained of our house. Then the ambulance turned the corner, and I couldn’t see our house anymore.

“We just wanted to be left alone,” I said to the woman.