Drown

 

He didn't know where this little boat was taking him, but he was glad to get some piece of quiet from the dark nights back home. His little ears couldn't take anymore gunshot sounds or wailing. His Papa always told him to put cotton in his ears and sleep, but the cotton itched his skin and he often spent nights scared out of his mind as he feel asleep to the wails of women all around him and firing. He always wondered if this is what children all over this world listened to as they too slept but Papa always told him that children across the big blue ocean from his house slept to the sounds of crickets and frogs croaking and on most nights to no sound at all.

Feeling sleepy, he hid his tiny head under his Papa's shoulder as the salty breeze tickled him to sleep. After countless nights of no sleep, he had a dream. He was sitting in a boat just the same as the one he was sitting in right now, as a big wave hit the boat as it rocked dangerously. He felt her eyes on him, burning holes through his tiny back, as she watched his family fall into the big blue ocean. He saw that his mother had stopped struggling to keep afloat, as she pushed him towards a bright orange tube. She suddenly went as still as the body he saw outside his pavement of his house back home, except his mother smelled of salt and sea weed instead of the unbearable rotten smell that came out of that body. His papa was nowhere in sight. When she suddenly turned towards him and almost lovingly waved her arms around his fragile little body as though showering him with kisses. Almost as if she knew that he would fall from the boat and would need support. Not to mention, the stillness and peacefulness that came with her kisses and hugs, almost made him forget that she was a stranger and that she might be dangerous. Throwing caution to the wind, he took her cold but somehow warm hugs and clung to her as everyone else got washed away. He held on with both his tiny arms as she lulled him to sleep. Had he known his wasn't a dream and he had been lulled to death, maybe then his tiny body wouldn't have been washed ashore on the pearly white beaches of Turkey as Mother Nature swept his sleeping lifeless body on the beach, the waves kissing his cold cheek relentlessly, as he looked deep in slumber; for the whole of humanity to cry out in pain.