A Child in a Tree

A True Story

This story cannot begin with once upon a time because it is a story of yesterday and today and tomorrow — a story of still again and again. Not a bedtime story, this story is what only nightmares can contain — one of thousands, 17,000 to be exact…and counting.

Because this story begins and will not end.

A child lay atop a lonely tree, limbs dangling over the rubble of lost love. Viciously cradled onto the branches by the blast of a bomb, this child is two days old.

A vision of hope and horror, this child is a alive, now an orphan, a statistic, one of the zeros in the 17,000 and counting. And like all zeros in numbers, this child becomes a mere placeholder indicating the absence of value — a quantifier to be filed away to the bottom of our collective consciousness.

But what happens when we qualify her?

Her name was child unknown to the rescuers who found her, and remained so the first two months of her life.

UNICEF named her the latest most popular baby name in Gaza: WCNSF (poetically pronounced Wheknseff) more commonly known as the acronym for the recently developed title: wounded child, no surviving family.

The media calls her an estimated 17,000.

But after a NICU transfer from one besieged hospital to the next, and after months of living in relative isolation within a massively overwhelmed and under-equipped medical facility under constant attack, she finally found a name.

Her name is Malak. And this is her story.

Perhaps, afterall, this is a bedtime story. Not one to tell our children, but one to tell ourselves — over and over again.

Once upon a time, in a faraway land of murder without mystery, there lived a miracle named Malak…