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The American Girl
(conclusion)
My Flag
“I am going to meet Ibrahim to play.” I yelled to my aunt who was cooking apricot jam.
I put on my slippers and ran to the corner by the mosque to meet him. The street was less busy, so I spotted him right away. I shouted “Ibrahim!” and ran towards him. He got up and gave me a high five. That was how we would say hi to each other. His mom was sitting on the floor next to him, peeling pistachios and piling them over a little stove.
Ibrahim lived in the lot next to the mosque, in a clay house with a bunch of other kids who sold similar things, mostly slippers, to the passersby. But when I came he would just play with me. He said he would come to America when he made a lot of money. He wanted to go there with his mom. Everyone I talked to told me how they wanted to leave. It felt like we were all here waiting. All waiting. Maybe if I drew a flag, I thought, the American pilots would see it and come and get me like in Gilligan’s Island.
We sat cross-legged on the cement using the leftover white, blue and pink chalk to draw the American flag.
But no airplanes were in sight and when there were planes the Iraqis thought they were being attacked, because all Iraqi airplanes had been seized. Ibrahim tried to explain this to me. He knew a lot more about wars and government then I ever did.
I had forgotten my parents’ voices and their smell. I tried to remember but I could not. It had been six months and only twice had I talked to them on the phone. The line cut both times in the middle of me screaming and crying.
Ibrahim explained how bad the phone lines were here, but he said I was lucky to have electricity and gas.
"I will do the stars and you can do the lines."
We lay over the smoothest area we could find and drew an outline of a huge flag. I did not have red, so we settled on the stripes being pink and white. We split the flag, half for the stripes and half for the stars. “That looks more like a candy cane,” I laughed.
“A what?”
"You have to do it again so the pink will look more red, like the real American flag, dummy."
Saddam's soldiers from the military post walked over to Ibrahim’s mom and began taking pistachios without paying. They grabbed handfuls and watched her continue roasting.
Ibrahim watched them and put down his chalk. He left me for a bit and ran back to his mom and began helping her unpeel the nuts until the soldiers finished eating.
I lay in the flag and put my hand up to my heart and loudly started singing.
“Oh, say, can you see, by the dawn's early light,
What so proudly we hailed at the twilight's last gleaming?
Whose broad stripes and bright stars, through the perilous fight,
O'er the ramparts we watched, were so gallantly streaming?
And the rockets' red glare, the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof thro' the night that our flag was still there.
O say, does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave?”
“You are an American, stupid,” he giggled.
We lay on the chalky floor waiting for an airplane to pass by.
Hello Kitty smiled from my shirt on the ground. Don’t be sad, Sara. You are not alone, she said.
I do not think the soldiers heard her; they were busy. They were massaging me. Like my dad would sometimes do on my shoulders.
The room looked small but so much was in here. God, my two angels, Hello Kitty, two soldiers, and my friend Ibrahim, till only moments ago. He was probably waiting for me outside. Hidden somewhere. Where the soldiers would not see him. "Americiya," the soldier said as he pushed me to the floor. They did not call me by my name. They called me "Americiya." The American. But I was not American. I was Iraqi.
© Copyright 2010 Sara Qadr
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