Parvana's Journey by Deborah Ellis

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    Then a bomb fell right outside Green Valley. The earth shook violently. The noise sounded right through the hands they clamped over their ears. Hassan screamed.
    Parvana and Asif moved the younger ones over beside the boulders on the edge of the clearing.
    “Grandmother! Come over here!” Leila yelled.
    But Grandmother had rolled back up into a ball and covered her head.
    Leila tried to go to her but Parvana wouldn’t let her. With one hand she held onto Leila. With the other hand she held onto Asif, who shielded Hassan with his body.
    Parvana held on tightly as the earth shook more and more. She held on even though Leila writhed and screamed to get to her grandmother.
    She was holding on when a bomb fell directly on Green Valley.
    Dust, rocks and debris fell on the children’s backs. Parvana couldn’t tell who was screaming. Maybe it was her.
    They clung to each other through the darkness of the night, as the bombs continued to fall all around them.
    Silence came with the morning light.
    There was a large crater in the yard.
    Grandmother was gone. The house was gone.
    Green Valley was gone.

SIXTEEN
    Dear Shauzia:
    We’re back on the road. It almost feels like we never left. Maybe Green Valley was just a dream. I should stop dreaming. All my dreams turn into garbage.
    As hard as it was before, it seems harder this time. It’s harder to sleep on the bare ground after months of sleeping on a mattress. It’s harder to be hungry after months of eating every day. And it’s harder to spend the days wandering after having a home again.
    I hope you are living somewhere wonderful. You will have to have a truly spectacular life to make up for the waste mine has become.
    Leila didn’t want to leave the clearing. She kept saying her mother would come back and not find her. She made me leave a note for her mother. I’m glad Leila can’t read much, because I had to put in the note that I have no idea where we are going.
    Hassan cries and cries and cries. I felt sad for him at first. Now I just hate the noise.
    As if he knew what she was writing, Hassan let out an extra-loud wail.
    Parvana threw down her notebook.
    “Shut up!” she yelled. “We’ve tried to help you and we can’t, so stop crying!”
    “He doesn’t understand you,” Asif said, taking the baby onto his lap. “He got used to eating, and he’s angry at us for not feeding him.”
    Parvana hated it that Asif was behaving better than she was. She picked up her notebook and put it back in her shoulder bag. Then she noticed that Leila was crying again, too.
    “Do you want a reading lesson?” Parvana asked her gently. “My father used to give me lessons when we took breaks.”
    Leila shook her head and wiped away some of the tears that were rolling down her cheeks.
    “I should have gone to Grandmother,” she said. “You should have let me go.”
    Parvana tried to hug the little girl, but Leila pulled out of her grasp. Leila cried quietly — not loud like Hassan — but Parvana was just as tired of hearing it. She walked away and sat down with her back to them. She had no idea what to do.
    A row of tanks rolled by in the distance, and two planes flew in the sky above her, although she didn’t see any bombs falling from them. Parvana didn’t pay them any attention. Tanks were normal. Bombs were normal. Why couldn’t eating be normal?
    They had salvaged what they could after the house was bombed. There was a bit of rice spilled on the ground. They picked it out of the dirt grain by grain. There wasn’t enough water to cook the rice, and no cook-pot, so the children had to chew the rice kernels raw.
    The food and water lasted them for a few days. Then it ran out. That was two days ago. It was longer for Hassan, because he couldn’t chew raw rice.
    Their only blanket was the blanket shawl Asif had been wearing around his shoulders when the bomb hit. That, plus Parvana’s shoulder bag, was all they had. Hassan had no change of clothing, and already