The Boy On the Roof
The sun shone bright and relentless in the afternoon sky.
Unseen, the ten-year old boy quietly climbed the tree with a grace that belied
his young age. He was small, but compactly built, and as he grappled with the
branches to hoist himself up the tree and then onto the roof of the school
building next to it, his callused palms felt nothing of the hard bark that
cracked and splintered and cracked under his grip.
Below him, the Japanese soldiers were barking orders. The
boy didn’t understand the words themselves, but seeing the soldiers point at
the Filipino prisoners with samurai swords, the boy felt that the words were
bringing death.
The boy recognized some of the Filipinos. They were his
neighbors, hard-working folk who planted the fields close to where he and his
family lived. They were men who began their toil very early in the morning and
only came home when the moon was already fully in the sky. Now they were
digging holes in the ground with rusty spades and makeshift trowels.
"What could they be digging for?’, the boy asked himself.
‘There isn’t any gold there…"
The soil in the school yard was hard and stony, but with
jabbing motions, the soldiers continued to exhort their prisoners to dig
faster, deeper.
Soon the holes seemed deep enough to satisfy the soldiers.
They signaled to the exhausted and sweaty diggers to drop their implements. The
soldiers then proceeded to shove the men, pushing and kicking at them. They
pointed at the holes.
The boy on the roof felt a creeping horror: he realized what
was happening. The Japanese soldiers wanted the Filipinos to bury themselves in
the hole. They were digging their own graves.
It was all he could do to keep from falling. He clung to the
roof, his body warmed by more than just the afternoon sun. His eyes started to
water, and not because of the sunlight reflecting on the roof’s steel surface
burning his irises with white glare.
The Filipinos, five of them, were buried up to their chests.
They began to cry and weep, remembering
their wives and children. Their heads were bowed, their tears falling on the
hard soil. The air suddenly began to feel thick and viscous, and everything
began to move in seeming slow motion.
The soldier raised his samurai, then brought it down on
the neck of the Filipino at his feet. The sword made a downward arc,
cutting through the air swiftly, and then, cleanly, through bone and sinew.
The boy on the roof saw how blood spurted like a miniature
fountain. A sudden vertical stream that hit the air at five feet, and then
descended, hitting the dust at the soldier’s feet.
A severed head lay close, its eyes tightly closed; and its
lips half-open. From a distance, a rooster crowed, breaking the sudden silence.
The boy on the roof laid his cheek on the roof’s hot metal.
He felt cold. It would be another hour before he would be able to fully move,
climb down, and walk slowly home.
—–
This is the first page of something I’m working on. I hope to finish it by the second week of April, and I’m practically getting an ulcer worrying that I’m not good enough to finish it (or at least make a passable first draft). Wish me luck.
March 5th, 2007 at 10:00 pm
i think i know that boy. hehe.