Less Hyper
by Edward Salem
All six of the boys' fathers were arrested. The six boys separately wept a little with their families before stealing away after dark to meet at Abu Suf, a kind of makeshift haunt on the steep hillside of a fertile valley abandoned by Bedouins but still abundant with fig trees. The boys made a crackling campfire as they ate and punted plucked figs down the hillside into the crease of the valley's redolent nadir. They used the fig juice to chase the Arak, like cement hotly scraping their throats.
They drank too quickly and vomited under fig trees, Jerusalem's hazy lights blinking distantly in the warm night, blinking white and bronze, white and gold. A stray jackal nervously approached them, wanting figs or meat, or maybe just lonely. The boys discussed killing the jackal with their Intifada slingshots or kitchen-knives for a meal. The jackal retreated before the boys could surround him. They were secretly relieved they did not have to kill the scrawny jackal. The boys were too young to want killing after a day like this had been.
They were still drunk but less hyper, and they sat on the hillside, too lazy to feed the fire, and remembered aloud (without naming it) what it felt like watching their fathers wrestle defiantly as some forty Israeli soldiers sprinted out of tanks and humvees, shattering dishes and the Palestine-shaped clocks and plaques for dramatic effect, bludgeoning and dragging their overpowered fathers outside in white blindfolds, rounding them up on their knees in the middle of the street, everyone watching, for twenty protracted minutes, and photographs, before driving them away for the month.
The boys swore blood vows of revenge, smearing their pricked thumbs on the fig-littered hillside, consoled by the hypnotic blinks of Jerusalem's hazy lights.