Prism - By Rachel Moschell Page 0,4

Wara had tried so hard to learn to peel potatoes like a respectable Quechua woman should, but she usually ended up desecrating the potato, scraping half of it off into the scrap pile. She fiddled around a little with the knife and a bumpy yellow potato, then decided to put her grammar question out there.

“I was wondering about something one of the kids said. If you say that your family member is the missing, does that mean that person died?”

Doña Petronia’s long blade faltered mid-peel and she reached up with one work-roughed hand to flip a braid behind her back. Everyone fell silent. “You must have heard my son Edgar talking,” she finally nodded. “He’s only six but he is so worried about his older brother.”

“Or maybe it was my Juan Marco talking about his older brother,” interjected a more portly woman in a royal purple pollera. A thick layer of fat rolled out of the waist of her skirt, blanketed with the silky white undershirt the ladies wore under their short lace blouses. She jerked her chin towards Doña Petronia. “She and I both have older sons, teenagers. Three months ago, the boys both went away, never to be heard from again.”

“Went away?” Wara frowned.

“We call them ‘the missing’.” Doña Petronia looked Wara directly in the eye. “The boys went into Llallagua to sell some potatoes, but on completely different days. We never heard from them again. We do not know where they could have gone. That is why we call them and the other boys ‘the missing’.”

“What other boys?”

The two women eyed each other soberly. “From all over the mountains, many different communities. All missing.”

Wara didn’t know what to say. How could these women’s sons, and boys from other communities too, just be gone? The pain in the women’s black eyes was evident, and Wara felt horrible. How many of the people here at the Bible conference had a son or brother who had just disappeared?

I am really glad Nazaret is still off teaching somewhere. I hope she hasn’t already heard about this.

The Martirs were a busy household of six kids, but once upon a time there had been seven. Wara knew Nazaret’s older brother had run away when he was a teenager, and she knew the serious, skinny oldest Martir only from his faded photograph in a frame on Nazaret’s dresser.

Talking about missing kids was always enough to start Nazaret weeping.

Wara really hoped her friend wouldn’t hear about this. It would only make her think of her brother, the missing boy who was probably never going to come home.

She could identify a little with that kid in the picture, because sometimes, when she thought too much about things, Wara just wanted to run away from here and start over.

Except the past always follows you.

Noah was running up the hill panting, with a hundred screaming Quechua kids close on his heels. Even if she wanted to be with Noah, she would never deserve him.

There were some things that even time couldn’t erase.

2

gaudy gold

Peshawar, Pakistan

2017

ALEJO PERCHED ABOVE THE ANCIENT LABYRINTH that was Old City Peshawar, counting down the seconds until he would take a man’s life. The tri-colored apartment complex where he waited soared to the cloudless sky, cream, cinnamon, and pistachio. A giant block of Neapolitan ice cream, sizzling under the Peshawar heat. In a dusty courtyard with solid walls below, the three men who marched between grave Pakistani police were mere specks to Alejo. Gabriel was at the scope, reporting the details of the scene below; Benjamin lay prone as Alejo did, both of them one with the black rifles propped on sandbags.

“So, they just entered the courtyard,” Gabriel said softly. Sweat poured down his pale face from the tightly-wrapped black turban. They were alone on the cement rooftop high over Peshawar, and abandoned the Pashto language for their native Spanish. “The Paki police are pretty nervous. Ok! Here come the Americans. They’ve all got bullet-proof vests.” Gabriel’s bony fingers tightened on the scope and his voice rose with excitement.

Not surprising. The U.S. army wouldn’t want any crazy Talibs to take out their precious little prisoners before they get to “justice” now, would they? But how many years would the young soldiers get for murdering Afghan children across the border and posting bloody trophy pictures on the internet? Three years in a comfy cell with three meals a day? That was more than most Afghan children could dream of.

Security was tight around that little compound with the