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epitome of incomprehensibility
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I'm reading a news story about the time some Taliban-like group took over a place in northern Africa, as yet unidentified. In one house, they killed the younger two children and the older one survived.
Now I'm that older child. I'm not as scared as I might be because I'm just acting this out - I know it's not really real.
But for a while things are tense. Armed men enter what looks like my parents' house and I go to the backyard, doing chin-ups on what used to be a swing chair. It's now a chin-up bar. One of the not-Taliban soldiers sees me; like the Taliban, they frown on girls doing independent things - such as exercising, apparently - and this one aims a gun at me. I drop down behind the apple tree, waiting. Relief: the bullet pings off the tree trunk (as if it wouldn't just lodge inside it) but I don't get up yet. It's dark. I can play dead.
Now he's gone, and I sprint over to the neighbours' place. They're having a barbeque. I can mill among them undetected; I'm thirteen years old, I decide, but I can pass for ten.
All the while I'm thinking how it's a shame that the Maghreb population doesn't have more influence in the government. In this region, the Arabs are later settlers, so it's unfair that they wield more political power than the native population. At least, there should be some sort of compromise. But I'm one to talk! For years my family has enjoyed unfair privilege as part of a White minority settling in the more prosperous lands near the sea. And no group is entirely happy about the new invasion by this radical group, I reason.
(How am I thinking all this? I'm supposed to be thirteen.)
Anyway, I finally learn that I'm in Tunisia when my father calls to me. Gone is the neighbourhood with the embattled house (and the one next to it where everyone's chilling). Instead, I'm sitting on the floor with some toys next to a giant table in a giant room. My dad's face appears over the table's edge, thirty or forty feet up. He calls, "Kirsten, get back up here! Stop playing in Tunisia!"
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