..
after the myth of Hyacinthus
and for the children of Gaza
They found the radio-cassette player in the ruins of their school.
Not a real school anymore, just a broken husk of a building, half the roof gone, rebar curled like burnt hair.
But the head teacher’s office somehow still had walls.
Inside one of the cupboards, under a tangle of melted wires and singed folders, there it was. Dusty. Yellowed. Two knobs, one cracked. The speaker grille dented.
Yusuf pulled it out like he was lifting treasure.
“It still works,” he said.
“No way,” said Sami.
He opened the cassette door. There was a tape inside already, labelled in faded pen: Music, in Arabic script.
But like so many others – their parents, their siblings – the man who wrote it was gone. For ever. All they had now was each other.
They sat cross-legged on the concrete, waiting for the first notes, wondering which song would break the silence.
The battery compartment was ruined, but Yusuf held the ends of the wires together with a piece of chewed gum from his mouth, and foil. The speaker hissed. A voice broke through: tinny, distant, alive.
Marcel Khalife. Singing Ommi.
For a minute, neither boy moved. Then they both exhaled at the same time.
Sami pressed his hand to the speaker. “That’s your mother’s song.”
“I know,” Yusuf said, stretching his lips into a smile.
“D’you think the rest of the tape is like this?” said Sami.
Yusuf shrugged, trying to look casual. “Only one way to find out.”
The second song was Asfour. The bird. The one they used to sing in class, arms fluttering like a flock taking flight. Fingers spread wide, palms rising and falling.
For a moment, Sami could almost see his classmates’ hands soaring together.
“Freedom, ya asfour,” he whispered.
They didn’t speak for a while. The music said everything.
They kept the player a secret. Buried it under a pile of burned workbooks, wrapped in a cloth. Every other day, they came back to work on it, stripping wires and braiding them back together.
When the cassette player worked, they listened to the tape. When it didn’t, they just held it and talked.
“We’ll record something,” Sami said. “A real song. Ours.”
Yusuf nodded. “And if someone finds it…”
“They’ll know we existed,” Sami finished.
“Not just existed. Lived. Rock stars!” Yusuf swung his arm in a wild rotation, like he was playing the guitar on stage.
They wrote lyrics on scraps of paper. Rewrote them. Argued. Laughed.
It was mostly nonsense: rhymes about tea, about the stars. A verse about becoming rich from selling dates. One line about jumping the wall and flying.
They sang it in whispers, then louder. They only got through one full take before the tape jammed and they had to rewind it with a pencil.
Yusuf hit record again, grinning. “Say something.”
Sami stared into the condenser mic. “If you’re hearing this, you’re too late.”
“Too dramatic,” Yusuf said.
They recorded it anyway.
That afternoon, they were meant to meet again to try and finish the song. To see if they could get the radio to work and catch a broadcast from across the border. From across the globe.
But instead, they went outside to play.
It was late afternoon, that golden hour when the light turns heavy, and the world forgets what time it is.
They found a stretch of flattened ground between two half-fallen buildings behind where their school had once stood.
The ground was smooth there, sun-warmed, and for a while, it didn’t feel like a war zone.
Yusuf rummaged around in the wreckage and tugged something from the rubble, a metal disc, wide and flat, the size of a dinner plate.
“Lid?” he said. “Hubcap?”
“Doesn’t matter,” said Sami. “It flies.”
He snatched it from Yusuf and threw it sidearm. The disc whirled into the air in an impressive arc, wobbling once before thudding into the dust some distance away.
“Yeah!” Yusuf said, running over to fetch it. “My turn.”
He picked up the disk and threw it back, but it only bounced along the dirt and rolled to a stop like a coin toppling on a table.
“Too low,” Sami said.
“Too slow,” Yusuf shot back.
“Your mum’s too slow.”
“Your mum’s a hubcap.”
“Your mum’s a hubcap frisbee.”
“Your dad’s a song flower.”
They both cracked up. That was their latest joke: calling people things that didn’t exist.
They took turns. Sami threw it high. Yusuf sprinted under it. He was fast, always. Always the one who climbed first, jumped furthest, found the best hiding places.
“Farther!” he shouted. “Come on!”
Sami braced, swung hard, and let the disc fly.
It spun high above the broken walls, silhouetted against the pale sky.
Yusuf ran, ducked beneath a leaning girder, and leaped over a bank of sand.
The disc seemed to hang in the air for an age. He stood staring up at it, the way he’d learned to stare up and watch the drones, counting to five, so he knew which way to run for safety.
But the disc just seemed to hover in the air like a hunting bird fixing its prey.
Suddenly, it came down all wrong.
It bounced once, caught the edge of a cracked pipe, and veered hard and sharp.
Yusuf didn’t have time to work out which way to step. It struck him clean in the side of the head.
The silence afterwards was unreal.
For a second, Sami thought he’d missed it. That Yusuf was playing. He expected him to pop up with a curse, laughing.
But Yusuf didn’t move.
Sami ran over to where his friend lay on the earth.
Yusuf’s body was crumpled in the dust, one hand tucked beneath him, the other reaching toward something unseen. There was blood. Not a lot, but still too much. A dark line trailing from his temple to his jaw.
“Yusuf?”
No answer came.
Sami dropped to his knees, shaking his shoulder.
“Get up. Come on, I didn’t mean to…”
His fingers came away wet with Yusuf’s blood.
No one came. No one could come. The nearest adult was streets away. Or buried.
The air vibrated with the low sound of drones, constant now, like electricity.
Sami bent low and pulled Yusuf’s head into his lap. He rocked. He began to sing.
Not the songs from the cassette. The one they’d written.
He forgot half the lines. He sang the one about flying, twice. Three times. Over and over. His voice broke.
“We’ll fix it, Yusuf,” he whispered. “We’ll try again. I promise.”
But Yusuf didn’t get up.
The sun sank lower. The shadows stretched long. And then… something shifted.
Where the blood had soaked into the dust, a patch of colour began to pulse, faint at first, an almost imperceptible shift against the dull grey rubble.
It was not the rusty brown Sami expected. Not the familiar, dead earth tones. This was something else. Something alive. A deep, unsettling purple, rich and strange, as if the ground itself were bruised and breathing.
He blinked, unsure if his eyes were playing tricks. The colour deepened, curling upward, curling like smoke but solid – like petals unfolding in slow motion, delicate as paper, thin as skin stretched over veins.
The edges trembled, as if the flower might dissolve or burst into flame at any second.
His breath caught. The world held its breath with him.
There was something impossible about it. The flower was growing from the bloodied dust, fragile, yet defiant, pushing through the wreckage like a secret whispered by the earth itself. It was both beautiful and terrifying. Like life refusing to be extinguished, blooming right at the edge of destruction.
He leaned closer, drawn by a mix of wonder and dread, noticing faint markings tracing across the petals. Neither letters nor words, but something like a song caught between silence and sound.
His fingers twitched. Part of him wanted to touch it, to claim it, to believe it could bring Yusuf back. But part of him was frozen, knowing that some magic was too strange, too fragile to hold.
Maybe if I pick it, he thought, he’ll wake up.
But Yusuf didn’t. The street began to darken.
Sami laid Yusuf’s head gently on the warm rubble, stood, and wiped his hands. He walked back to the school, into the old office, where the cassette player sat beneath a pile of singed books. He carried it back to the flower.
He didn’t press play. He just set it down, beside the bloom, and sat. He stayed until the last light disappeared. Until the sound of drones faded into static. Until it was just the flower, the cassette player, and him.
.
Andy Brown
Illustration: Claire Palmer
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