Children Far Away by Jacqueline Holland

Children Far Away By Jacqueline Holland

May 11, 2017

They will die, she and her husband—Samah knows this.Their three children wear life-vests bought off the smugglers for three Euros a piece—the men wanted four, but she begged and wept until they agreed to three; it was all the money she and Imad had left in the world. They could not even afford vests for themselves, so while their children turn blue, and their little limbs shake in the icy, December water of the Aegean, she and Imad will sink.

The water, so cold it scalds, is pooling already at the center of the raft. The plastic has become like mud, clinging to their feet when they pull them up to move, but all the people’s movements—some forty of them on this raft the size of a large area rug—are just the frantic churning of a flock of sheep that has already heard the screams of the first to the slaughter. There is nowhere to go but the black bottom of the sea.

Imad clutches their four-year-old son, Hassan, to his chest. The boy is shivering and his tiny, searching fingers pinch at the goose-bumped flesh of his father’s arms. Imad’s dark eyes are blood red, and tears stream down his face. He clenches his jaw, his every muscle, willing wings to sprout from his back. He will fly away. He will grow talons, and like an eagle, carry their children—little mice—to safety. He clenches and clenches, but the wings do not come, and still he clenches.

Samah pulls their baby girl, not yet two, and their six-year-old son close. Her daughter’s mouth is wide in a gasping wail she cannot hear for all the screaming around them, but her breasts hear it. They clench and seize, and her milk gushes forward, the only warmth left in the world. She pulls their small bodies into the nooks of her own, but she has no warmth left to give them. The wind whips the stinging sea spray in their faces. Her tongue is moving in her mouth, and she realizes the stream of prayers that’s been pouring from her this whole time, prayers begging Allah to spare her children, to send a boat to them, to fish them up out of the water before their tiny hearts freeze in their chests.

The people move too much in their panic. The first one goes in with a splash. Then a woman across from them falls back into the water screaming. A man begins to slide into the water. He grabs a teenage boy by the shirt sleeve, and they both go down. She prays and prays, a reel of words too fast to comprehend. She will have to swim away from her children once the raft capsizes, she thinks, so that she doesn’t pull them under as she drowns. She kisses them, kisses them again, and again. Her son is screaming, Baba! Baba! She kisses his tears, and his screams, and the screams of her baby daughter. She kisses them now, in hope that she’ll be able to swim away instead of clinging to and kissing their little legs. She begs God for the lives of her children. She begs God. She knows that she will die, but she begs God only for the lives of her children.

Half the raft is submerged. There is a writhing, screaming mass of bodies in the water. They cling and pull at what little of the raft remains afloat, but they are just pulling it down with them. The water moves up her legs. Within arm’s reach, a young girl, maybe twelve, is clinging to a fold of plastic that is already underwater. Her head dips. The water shifts and gleams above her face; it shines across her forehead, cascades down her hair as she lunges upward for air. The girl wears a life vest—Samah was there when the girl’s father bought it from the smugglers; they fitted it on the girl before they fitted the others onto Samah’s own children—but still she is dipping below the water, still it is only the plastic of the sinking raft that is keeping her from a cold, quiet descent. She has a life vest, Why is she sinking? Samah is screaming this now to Imad.

“She’s sinking! Why is she sinking?”

But Imad cannot hear her words or make sense of them. He is still working at growing wings, still pressing their son into himself, and anyway, Samah knows as she asks, why the girl is drowning in a life vest. She sees the smugglers’ faces, their black eyes, their hands rough around money. The girl makes a last lunge for the surface. Choppy waves fill her mouth when she throws it wide to breathe. She goes down again. Under the water, her arms are waving at her sides. Her eyes are white terror. The thing they were told was a life-vest is strapped to the girl’s chest, as she sinks, and sinks, and disappears.

They will die—all of them—her husband, and herself, and her children, too. Samah knows this now, and she also knows that she will no longer swim away when the raft goes under. She will cling tightly to her babies. They will drown in their mother’s arms.

Somewhere far away, on the other side of the world, mommies and daddies are tucking their children into warm beds. They tell their children a story of when the God of mercy came to Earth, and they do say that there was a mother and child, but they don’t mention the color of his or her skin, and they do say that they fled from a violent king, but they don’t use the word “refugees,” and they don’t worry now about Samah and her children, when their own children are right there, safe in their beds. As long as their own children are safe, everything is okay. After all, the best kind of dying children are the children dying far away.