A/N- I hate to put this in before the story, but just to let you know, the italics are Snitch's sister narrating, the plain type is Snitch himself. The bold is the poem, which Snitch's sister reads and without which the story makes no sense.
How odd that I didn't remember the poem until a few years later. We got the visit when I was in high school and I finally remembered about that poem when I was in college. My roommate had gone out with her boyfriend to some frat party, and I was left alone with my thoughts. It had been years since I had thought about my big brother.
Dan's friends called him 'Snitch' and when I grew up some I began calling him that, too. It was an old, stale joke about something he had done on a dare once. In their freshman year of high school, Dan's friends had dared him to 'snitch' the principal's toupee. He had done it with a fishing pole in the middle of an assembly. Being on tech crew, all he had to do was stand on the catwalk and lower the fishing line. It caught on the toupee, and he had yanked it back up, taken it off the hook and tossed it into the crowd. Unfortunately, everyone knew who had done it. He got detention, as I remember. I would have been about eight or nine at the time, and I thought it was funny. My parents thought it was funny too, but it was years before they would admit it.
I laughed, remembering the whole incident, as I dug in the boxes under my bed. I knew that the poem was there somewhere, pasted into a scrapbook. After spilling the contents of the box onto my bed, I finally pulled out a homemade scrapbook from my high school days. I flipped to the back, the last page. They day of the funeral was the last day I had put anything in the scrapbook. It reminded me of Snitch, so I stopped adding to it. I only put the poem in because it reminded me so strongly of him, and of how he had died. I pulled out the poem and walked over to the window to read it in the fading light of the day…
The diameter of the bomb was thirty centimeters
and the diameter of its effective range about seven meters
My parents wanted me to go to college. Instead, I left high school and joined the Peace Corps. It was there that, after a year, I met and married Diana. My family came overseas for the wedding, and it was beautiful. We were married near the sea, and you could see the water as we took our vows. I knew my parents were proud of me, in the end. They kept saying I'd regret not getting a higher education, all that parental crap they're supposed to tell you. Really, I never regretted what I'd done. I wanted to change the world, and I was ready to spend all of my life doing just that. Like John Lennon put it, "You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one. I hope that someday you will join us and the world will live as one." So Diana and I went to the Middle East, leaving behind my parents and my sister, Ashley. I'd miss them but, as I said, I had no regrets.
We'd been there for about a year and a half and had just celebrated Diana's twenty-second birthday when she told me that she was pregnant. We didn't want our child growing up here, and I didn't want Diana in potential harm, and so a few months later she left for the states. Just a few months after that, I went home for a well-timed visit and was there for the birth of my daughter, Carrie. I had a few weeks at home and then headed back, sorry not to be with my family, but sure I was making the right choice.
And then there was the bombing.
I remember riding on a bus, chatting with some of my buddies, when suddenly everything seemed to freeze. There was a huge, ear shattering noise and then the air was filled with screams…
with four dead and eleven wounded.
And around these, in a larger circle
of pain and time, two hospitals are scattered
and one graveyard
I woke up in a hospital. Someone was leaning over me, and it took me a second to realize that it was my friend Itey. Somehow, my buddies and I had gotten into the habit of using nicknames.
"Hey, Snitch," he said, smiling gently.
"What happened?" I choke out.
"Bus got bombed," he admits. I can tell he doesn't want me to talk about it.
There's something I have to know. "The others?"
"Bumlets and Snoddy are at another hospital across town, closer to where the bus was. There wasn't any more room there, so some people got sent here, like you. They're gonna be okay. I promise. Just rest, huh?"
Good, they'll be okay. But I won't.
But the young woman
who was buried in the city she came from,
at a distance of more than a hundred kilometers,
enlarges the circle considerably,
"Itey?"
"Yeah?"
"When I die, don't send my body all the way back to New York, okay? I want to be buried by the ocean, where Diana and I got married. In the graveyard there."
"You're not gonna die, Snitch."
But he's wrong, because two hours later someone was pulling a sheet over my face. Itey must have remembered what I'd said, because I was buried in the graveyard of the church where I married Diana.
and the solitary man mourning her death
at the distant shores of a country far across the sea
includes the entire world in the circle.
And I won't even mention the crying of orphans
that reaches up to the throne of God and
beyond
I'd never seen Diana more upset than the day we found out that Snitch had died. We (I, really) took Carrie for the day. We went to the park, and I sat with Carrie on the rides and sobbed. I kept getting odd looks from people. Finally, some Grandmotherly type took Carrie for a ride and let me have a few minutes to myself. It was then that it hit me- Carrie no longer had a father and I cried even harder. We'd been told that four people died and eleven others were hurt. One bomb had caused all that pain. One bomb had taken my brother, my parents' son, Diana's husband and Carrie's father. Three other people had died and I wondered, for a moment, who they were and what they meant to their families and friends, wondered who was there to miss them. I wondered who shared my tears.
I pulled myself out of the remembering and wiped a tear from my eye. Softly, just as the sun sank below the horizon, I whispered the end of the poem softly.
"Making a circle with no end, and no God."
Final A/N: I haven't written for months and then that came to me. Hope it was as meaningful as I wanted it to be. Here, just for clarification, is the complete text of the poem. Oh, and for all you sticklers for rules, it fits into the guidelines because the character is saying the words, they don't just interrupt the story, they're dialogue.
The diameter of the bomb was thirty centimeters
and the diameter of its effective range about seven meters,
with four dead and eleven wounded.
And around these, in a larger circle
of pain and time, two hospitals are scattered
and one graveyard. But the young woman
who was buried in the city she came from,
at a distance of more than a hundred kilometers,
enlarges the circle considerably,
and the solitary man mourning her death
at the distant shores of a country far across the sea
includes the entire world in the circle.
And I won't even mention the crying of orphans
that reaches up to the throne of God and
beyond, making
a circle with no end and no God.
Yehuda Amichai