Ghazal Mhanna, 15 — Trainers’ Academy, Tulkarm
He sat on his bench in the garden sipping his coffee quietly, enjoying the warm sunshine and the gentle spring breeze. Usaid glanced towards the wall to find that its shadow had disappeared…
The New Neighbour
Fatima al-Zahraa Khaled Qaraqra, 15 — Aida Camp
A lorry stopped in front of one of the houses in our neighbourhood, interrupting our football match. We all stopped playing and turned to look at the lorry. The door by the driver opened, and slowly out stepped a short man, slightly built and shabbily dressed, with a thin black beard. He stood still and looked at us with sharp eyes like a hawk’s. “Which of you will help me carry my things inside the house?” the man called out. “All of us!” we shouted back in one voice. We ran towards him to help — not out of kindness, but hoping for a bit of money or some reward. It took us at least two hours, and when we’d finished he reached into his pocket and our faces brightened. But when he pulled out his hand, it was full of strangely shaped but wonderfully beautiful glass marbles. He gave each of us a marble, and we stood there utterly baffled. He said: “Put them in your pockets and don’t lose them.” We slipped away from the place feeling hugely disappointed. We’d been expecting some money from him, not glass marbles.
Days passed, and that new neighbour never came out of his house. But something strange was happening to every child who’d taken a glass marble from him. We’d wake up in the morning and find some money in our pockets, sometimes. Other times, some sweets. And sometimes, some little treats. We realised that these marbles weren’t ordinary marbles at all — they were magic.
Whenever we played in the neighbourhood, or passed by his house, we’d see him watching us from his bedroom window, smiling. Then one day we woke up and none of us found anything in our pockets. Not only that — we didn’t find the marbles themselves. They’d vanished. My friends and I got together and talked it over, and finally decided to go to that strange neighbour’s house and ask him about it. We knocked on the door several times, but no one answered. We rang the bell, but it was no use. We called out to him, we shouted “Neighbour! Neighbour!” — nothing. Then we decided to tell our families about the story of the glass marbles and the strange neighbour. My father persuaded the men of the neighbourhood to go to that neighbour’s house, and they did. When the door wouldn’t open, they decided to break it down. They broke down the door, and then came the surprise.
There was no one in the house, and there was no furniture in it. There was nothing but an enormous glass sphere sitting in the middle of the living room. It was a sphere of beautiful colours, radiating light in dazzling shades. My father and the men of the neighbourhood moved closer to the sphere, and when they touched it, it crumbled at once and turned into pieces of gold. No one knew how this had happened, but the people of the neighbourhood agreed to use this money to build a school, a mosque and a hospital. When they’d finished the building, a letter from an unknown sender arrived in the neighbourhood head’s mail. It read: “Mission accomplished.”
The End
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