This story is by James Hipp and was part of our 2025 Fall Writing Contest. You can find all the writing contest stories here.
A psychedelic rug lays beneath a painting of a man breaking out of an egg-shaped Earth. Opposite me, two orchids in a glass display grow fresh roots atop the old ones. I’ve always loved orchids. And when my brothers teased me about how they look like vaginas, I loved them even more.
I feel my quivering hands clenching. Today’s my 20th birthday. Two years spent crushing buried truths. That changes today.
Dr. Amira Heydari emerges, clad in purple scrubs. Glasses with thick black rims sit on her ring-pierced nose. “Good morning, Noa,” she says, then slips back inside.
She keeps me accountable. On track. She’s the best therapist in Netivot. I follow sheepishly and shut the door behind me. Office chairs, leather stretched over bent steel, face Dr. Heydari’s desk. She’s seated already, checking over a tri-panel of nearby monitors for urgent messages. I sit down too.
Sunlight spills through a wall-sized window and spatters brightness across a Kashmir rug with a worn path from somebody pacing. Acoustic guitar emanates from secret speakers. Atop the desk sits a miniature sand garden with stones and fake plants.
“Glad you made it,” says Dr. Heydari. “How’ve you been?”
“Okay, I think.” I say nothing of the panic attacks that grip me all day. How I melt and die an hour at a time.
“How’s your sleep?” asks Dr. Heydari.
“I’m having issues with sleep.”
“Why do you think that is?”
Stay brave. Don’t get distracted. “I have to share something,” I say.
“Because it’s your birthday?” she asks. “Happy birthday, by the way.”
She noticed. I smile. Then I clear my throat.
There’s no time to speak of meds, nightmares, or repressed trauma. Only for unearthing. I’m ready.
I rise and approach the window. I place my palm on the warm glass and let the sunlight sting me. “Two years ago I turned eighteen. On the day they attacked.”
I point westward, past markets and gardens, past sand-blasted structures hiding forgotten bloodshed. “Over that hill, in Be’eri,” I say. “We grew sunflowers. I pressed a thousand batches of oil as a child.”
“You mentioned this,” says Dr. Heydari. “A family farm, right? A few hands, and the five of you.”
“Yes,” I say. “Mom, Dad, and brothers. It was called SunnyBee farms.”
“An English name, huh?”
“When I was about five, we rebranded, and they let me pick the name,” I say. “I said if we made it sound American, everyone would buy it.”
“Smart,” says Dr Heydari. “And cute. But I didn’t mean to distract you.”
I breathe deep. Then I start. “There was no warning in the kibbutz,” I say. “Just gunfire.”
“You were home on the day of the attack?” asks Dr. Heydari.
I shut my eyes, concentrating. I recall the courtyard. I see the sand-specked walls, my brothers in pajamas. It’s Simchat Torah, and they had slept in. Old palms stretch overhead, dappling the sunlight.
“In the courtyard,” I say. “My father and mother, my brothers. They made breakfast and brought out gifts. I felt so… complete.” My jaw grinds and my fuming breath feels like fire. “And they took that from me.”
Dr. Heydari’s face matches my intensity. “You can share what you want,” she says. “When you’re ready.”
“I’m ready,” I say. “They’d ravaged the kibbutz already, and when they flooded in, I couldn’t…” I curl up in shame and my hands rise to meet my face. “I was like a toy. I could only scream.”
My voice becomes a dry growl. “The butcher was there,” I say. “Khaled al-Rashid. His men held me while I screamed, while father cried, while they did what they wanted. I remember his fingers. Like claws.”
Eyes closed, I see his shriveled skin, ashen eyes, the wrap of the black keffiyeh around his head. I feel my cheeks bruise from his grip, now long-gone. “He called me ‘farasha’,” I say. “I found out it means ‘butterfly’.”
I barely restrain the urge to punch the glass. “He won,” I say. “Dammit, The bastards always win.”
I gulp, then continue. “My father was first,” I say. “They laid him out over the dining table and used a machete. They took his hands just below the wrists. I counted the cuts.”
One. Two. Three.
“Then my brothers,” I say. My face crinkles from the taste of old words and dead memories. “It was a week after David’s bar mitzvah. He’d be in high school this year.”
They are more than old words. More than mere memories.
“They were sobbing,” I say. “But I didn’t. I couldn’t feel sad. Just hate.” I chuckle wryly. “For all the good it did me.”
I sit. Urgent, color-coded messages populate Dr. Heydari’s screens, but she ignores them. She’s rapt.
“He says ‘eyes open, little farasha’, before they took my mother right there on the table. Right on top of the presents.” I try laughing, and an awkward cough arises instead. “They were even singing me happy birthday when they showed up.”
Heydari’s face is stone.
I hear my heartbeat in my ears. I breathe until rock-hard fear cracks into a flood of fresh rage. Until anger liberates my voice.
“They sliced her throat open,” I say. “Dad wailed and thrashed, but his skin was already turning grey and his hands were in the dirt somewhere.”
Those weathered hands that carried me. I see them in my dreams sometimes, covered in ants.
“And then I was next,” I squeak. Words die on my tongue. I shout, aggravated, to summon lost courage. Dr. Heydari doesn’t flinch.
“They tied me where my mother had been,” I say. “They just kicked her aside and pushed me face down into her spilled blood.”
I see Dr. Heydari’s face, empathy written into her twitching forehead. I’m grateful for her humanity. I’m buoyed by it.
“My father stopped crying eventually,” I say. “Then they killed him. They kept me awake until I couldn’t shout anymore. Then I pretended to sleep. They found our wine cellar they drank all they could. They celebrated, then there was a moment I was forgotten. So I ran. And I hid for a while in the brush.”
“That was when you got away?” asked Dr. Heydari. The sound of her voice shocks me from bound recollection.
I nod. “Yeah. I ran,” I say, still nodding like a bobble-head doll. “I ran.” My face crumples like old giftwrap. Hated, unstoppable tears arrive. “I ran,” I say. “I left them and ran.”
“You survived.”
“Did I?” I ask. “I’ve been living that nightmare for two years. My life, my mind, it’s twisted now. Those monsters took it all from me. It’s rubble. I’m rubble.”
I sob for a while in silence. When I’m finished heaving, I look Dr. Heydari in the eyes.
Hypervigilant, I try to read her face, but I can’t. I’ve never considered her politics. Gaza? The West Bank? The IDF? Do assumptions sway her guidance, as they do so many?
But I’ve said everything. Only trust remains. I’m vulnerable. Naked, like that day. I’m that same helpless victim, paralyzed panic laid bare. I cross my arms, covering myself.
Dr. Heydari removes her glasses. Her gaze meets mine. I look everywhere, but she’s silent until I focus back on her face.
“I’m proud to have your confidence,” she says. “That can’t have been easy to share.”
My wet eyes go wide. My breathing whistles past my leaking nostrils.
“I’d like to share some of my own experience,” says Dr. Heydari. “If that’s alright with you.”
I clutch my shoulders and nod.
“I grew up very nearby the settlements,” she says. “And I had the animosities of many young Palestinians.” She shakes her head. “I did well at school, and a family of settlers running the school sponsored the scholarship that led to my doctorate.”
My grip loosens on my arms.
Dr. Heydari continues, “I met a Jewish boy at Haifa. And loved him.” She sighs. “He’s in Gaza now, helping the sick and starving there.”
There’s a sudden intensity in her face. “Do you understand what I’m trying to say?”
“You’re saying that people are complicated,” I say. “Nobody’s all good or bad.” I grit my teeth, fuming. I see my mother, throat gushing.
“I will never forgive al-Rashid,” I say.
“And you don’t have to,” says Dr. Heydari. “I’m saying people aren’t a monolith. All people think a hundred things and suffer in a hundred ways. Everyone. What I’m saying, Noa, is that bitterness is all-consuming. It sinks inward.”
“Fine,” I say. “Still gonna gut the bastard.”
Dr. Heydari grins. “Goals are healthy.”
I laugh, a wry chortle that grows to an angry howl. I close my eyes, wet with tears of grief and relief, and keep them closed. On the back of my eyelids, a butterfly alights on a sunflower bud. I feel it strain to bloom.
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