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Literature Text
A Worn-Out Chechnya in the Dawn of Zachistka, Year 2000.
Caesura
The dust from the bombings was settling, revealing hints of forgotten blue skies high above. Bleak towns lay, their faces crumpled like those of weathered old men whose arthritic joints linked the country. The people of Chechnya were inching into a new day, crawling, wailing, barely intact.
In the atmosphere, tension hummed, a ubiquitous scent that permeated streets, swelled in the underground and erupted above wrecked properties and rubble. Eyes did not lock and glances were brief, for looming machinery, the murderer of thousands, reposed by the sidewalks like hibernating giants.
Potent.
Reminding.
Threatening.
People hurried by on calloused bare feet.
Domicile
Fathers and sons sat in their lonely apartments stripped of furniture, including television sets that used to air repeats of the Russian Premier League. FC Terek Grozny had disbanded due to the war and ergo, there was nothing for the families to root for, no reason to spring up from couches and hold one another, shouting in celebration. Fathers and sons stared at the frayed wires hanging out of empty sockets, at the waxing, gnawing space in rooms.
Then, one solitary boy put on his battered soccer boots.
He placed a small hand on the door.
In his wake, his father followed, clutching a soccer ball.
Rally
The little feet that had slapped against pavement as they carried their owner away from the schoolhouse dissolving into fumes were now tossing a ball, heels kicking it up, toes hitting it with a triumphant whack. The strong arms that had lifted dozens to safety were now spread out wide, embracing the open air, the war-torn sky.
Voices called out to each other across the scorched field, rousing debilitated spirits, drawing apart curtains. Men peered out of their hiding places tentatively. Women giggled coyly, ambivalence mingled with astonishment bubbling in their throats.
Father and son played on and on.
Anamnesis
Like migratory birds, the people of the district drifted out of their apartments, landing on the field, gathering their feather light wings around their trembling bodies. Enthralled by the game, citizens pulsed around the duo.
The boy stopped, picked up the soccer ball and made his way to a man in the front of the crowd. He narrowed his grey eyes.
He might have been a Chechen rebel fighter.
A refugee.
A politician.
But, notwithstanding whoever he was, he accepted the globe offered to him, ran a shaky finger down its familiar smooth surface. He appraised the emblem of the national sport that had grounded much of his childhood, reminisced summer days of romping about with his classmates now uprooted with the spades of time and the wrench of dissention.
There was silence as the cautious bounces of the orb echoed through the ravaged, broken town dosing in the wind. The airy sound ricocheted off graffiti scrawled on brick walls, eddying in the dust, finally rising to greet sunlight.
Nostalgia
People trickled in onto the field, some limping, some blind, but all of them children of Chechnya. The soccer ball bounced between their legs, a nexus, a planet orbiting histories highly disparate but intricately, convolutely connected, like stars aligning, shifting, every arrangement with a different myth stowed away yet all of the lambent specks scattered out within the selfsame sky that presently hung above the heads of the Chechens.
They played through the night, legs pumping, blood rushing, chests heaving. They looked up into the faces of their brothers, acknowledged the fighter in them for the first time in a long while. Their mouths were shut tight, their stories muted, drowned out in the roar of the game, the whoosh of the wind in their ears. They dedicated their rounds to the fallen, to the folktales they heard falling from the lips of mothers as they lay as infants in cradles and to the dreams, bright and distant, they had spun for their descendants.
In the darkness, glinting weapons that guarded the town faded away.
Homeward
The gibbous moon, so subtly pregnant with hopes, waned as the father gripped his son’s shoulder in an intimate, comforting hold.
We will go on, it seemed to promise. We will keep going.
The boy smiled at his father.
Caesura
The dust from the bombings was settling, revealing hints of forgotten blue skies high above. Bleak towns lay, their faces crumpled like those of weathered old men whose arthritic joints linked the country. The people of Chechnya were inching into a new day, crawling, wailing, barely intact.
In the atmosphere, tension hummed, a ubiquitous scent that permeated streets, swelled in the underground and erupted above wrecked properties and rubble. Eyes did not lock and glances were brief, for looming machinery, the murderer of thousands, reposed by the sidewalks like hibernating giants.
Potent.
Reminding.
Threatening.
People hurried by on calloused bare feet.
Domicile
Fathers and sons sat in their lonely apartments stripped of furniture, including television sets that used to air repeats of the Russian Premier League. FC Terek Grozny had disbanded due to the war and ergo, there was nothing for the families to root for, no reason to spring up from couches and hold one another, shouting in celebration. Fathers and sons stared at the frayed wires hanging out of empty sockets, at the waxing, gnawing space in rooms.
Then, one solitary boy put on his battered soccer boots.
He placed a small hand on the door.
In his wake, his father followed, clutching a soccer ball.
Rally
The little feet that had slapped against pavement as they carried their owner away from the schoolhouse dissolving into fumes were now tossing a ball, heels kicking it up, toes hitting it with a triumphant whack. The strong arms that had lifted dozens to safety were now spread out wide, embracing the open air, the war-torn sky.
Voices called out to each other across the scorched field, rousing debilitated spirits, drawing apart curtains. Men peered out of their hiding places tentatively. Women giggled coyly, ambivalence mingled with astonishment bubbling in their throats.
Father and son played on and on.
Anamnesis
Like migratory birds, the people of the district drifted out of their apartments, landing on the field, gathering their feather light wings around their trembling bodies. Enthralled by the game, citizens pulsed around the duo.
The boy stopped, picked up the soccer ball and made his way to a man in the front of the crowd. He narrowed his grey eyes.
He might have been a Chechen rebel fighter.
A refugee.
A politician.
But, notwithstanding whoever he was, he accepted the globe offered to him, ran a shaky finger down its familiar smooth surface. He appraised the emblem of the national sport that had grounded much of his childhood, reminisced summer days of romping about with his classmates now uprooted with the spades of time and the wrench of dissention.
There was silence as the cautious bounces of the orb echoed through the ravaged, broken town dosing in the wind. The airy sound ricocheted off graffiti scrawled on brick walls, eddying in the dust, finally rising to greet sunlight.
Nostalgia
People trickled in onto the field, some limping, some blind, but all of them children of Chechnya. The soccer ball bounced between their legs, a nexus, a planet orbiting histories highly disparate but intricately, convolutely connected, like stars aligning, shifting, every arrangement with a different myth stowed away yet all of the lambent specks scattered out within the selfsame sky that presently hung above the heads of the Chechens.
They played through the night, legs pumping, blood rushing, chests heaving. They looked up into the faces of their brothers, acknowledged the fighter in them for the first time in a long while. Their mouths were shut tight, their stories muted, drowned out in the roar of the game, the whoosh of the wind in their ears. They dedicated their rounds to the fallen, to the folktales they heard falling from the lips of mothers as they lay as infants in cradles and to the dreams, bright and distant, they had spun for their descendants.
In the darkness, glinting weapons that guarded the town faded away.
Homeward
The gibbous moon, so subtly pregnant with hopes, waned as the father gripped his son’s shoulder in an intimate, comforting hold.
We will go on, it seemed to promise. We will keep going.
The boy smiled at his father.
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Comments5
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When I said that I thought you have tons of potential, I meant it. Your prose reads like poetry, and your vocabulary is impressive for someone so young. I truly think you'll be a great writer, if that's what you want. 