A Thanksgiving Turmoil

 A Thanksgiving Turmoil

Pebbles cushioned their fall on my scalp, the terrace howling from damage and the clatter of soldiers above tuning out the clatter of my heartbeat. German words were thrown around like fire, and it was arson that was the Nazi’s only intentions. My decrepit grandmother groaned from her bed, and my father rushed to suppress her with ailments while my eyes, a perturbed lake, trembled with the thoughts of death, doom, and destruction. My mother kneeled down in front of me, brushed the soot from my light hazel cheeks, and enclasped my head in like it was a ball of fur. The world zoned in on us, and for once in the last 3 months, I felt a little bit safer.

BOOM! An explosion convulsed my brief moment of tranquility, and my family huddled in a corner. A creak sounded, long and sonorous, the extension of the noise shattering my eardrums. The mossy viridescent hatch above our makeshift kitchen imploded from pressure, and two padded sable shoes descended the polished wooden stairs. Sneers of avaricious triumph, guns nudging paths, no care whatsoever as we were propelled into jeeps, and a bumpy road to add motion sickness as salt to our wounds. These events passed through my eyes, which were blinking back tears as I reconciled what they had done to all of my friends and relatives past. I was not going to survive this. None of us would.

Amidst my megalomania, a reverberation shrieked from beyond the narrow edges of the cliffs we were riding along, and the pale moonlight gleam whitened the moustached faces of the armed soldiers manning the lines of jeeps we we chained to. More incoherent German words were exchanged, this time weighed down by a sense of urgency. A man turned to us, regurgitated a few sloppy English orders to stay stationary(as if we could move), and jabbed his right DMS boot into the acceleration pump on his jeep. Coughing sarcastically, the jeep proceeded to budge ever so slightly before slowing to a steady 15 mph. It was then that the source of their consternation was made clear to me.

“Mom, mom look! Over there, on top of the mountains!” I resoundingly whispered. She saw it too. A Brobdingnagian boulder collapsed on the mountain edge, tumbling down like a child down a hill. The Nazis squeaked like furious mice, their executive orders less appealing than the whiteness of their face, and in a rogue effort to avoid the collision, the driver gyrated the wheel hard left, so hard infact the wheel popped off. Guess Hitler put the funding for you guys in the wrong place. The jeep paused momentarily like a deer in headlights, before the momentum of the boulder, mere feet adjacent, shoved it off the cliff, detaching it from the tailgate we were strapped to and spiraling the Nazis into the abyss below, with hell waiting for them on the other side. 

My fellow passengers and I sighed with a concoction of apprehension and relief. What just happened? Did they die? Had we really been saved by a coincidental force of nature? We started to rejoice. “We’re alive! We actually managed to survive this,” my mother’s eyes were a spring capturing tears of jubilation. We embraced each other, perilized by the warmth we felt in the other’s grasps.

“ and that is how I found gratitude- unusual place, unusual time, and unusual way. My intestines squirmed and my amygdala pinged as a new realization dawned upon me- I wouldn’t be able to unlearn this fear… or gratitude ever.”