Work Text:
In a school courtyard in Mosul, three boys drew aircraft in the dust with pieces of broken brick. Their teacher watched from the doorway while mothers waited inside to collect younger children.
The afternoon had grown colder after the sun passed behind the school’s eastern wing. Half the courtyard remained washed in a weak, colourless light, while the other half lay beneath the long shadow of the building. The boundary between them crossed the packed earth in a straight line, cutting through old footprints, a faded hopscotch grid and the shallow groove where rainwater gathered during the wet months.
Several classroom windows had been covered from within by blankets. Others were crossed with tape to hold cracked glass together. The lower panes reflected the courtyard in broken fragments: the mulberry tree without its leaves, the rusting goal frame, the children moving beneath coats too large or too thin for the season. Loose plaster had fallen from the wall near the drinking fountain and lay in pale chips among red brick and chalk discarded from lessons.
The school day had ended early, though few families had left at once. Mothers stood in the entrance hall speaking with the headmistress and teachers, asking whether classes would continue the next morning and whether the cellar was fit to use as a shelter. Their voices travelled through the open doors without distinct words, rising and softening beneath the occasional scrape of a chair or the sharp cry of a younger child who’d grown tired of waiting. One infant cried against his mother’s shoulder until she carried him farther along the corridor, where his voice became muffled by coats and bodies.
Outside the gate, a heavy lorry passed along the main road. Its engine labouring through the gears caused several adults inside to stop speaking until it had gone. The children in the courtyard looked up only briefly.
Mahmoud had chosen the smoothest patch of earth beneath the mulberry tree. He knelt with one knee planted in the dust and the other raised, his coat spreading around him. A jagged piece of red brick fitted firmly into his fist. He dragged it through the ground to make the pointed nose of an aircraft, then continued backwards in one long line to form the body.
Faris crouched opposite him. He carried a pale stone rather than a brick, and his marks appeared thinner and less certain beside Mahmoud’s broad red strokes. Qasim, the youngest, sat on his heels near the aircraft’s unfinished tail. His sleeves covered most of his hands. Whenever he leaned forward, the lowest button of his coat scraped through the drawing and left a faint trail.
Mahmoud extended the wings until one nearly touched Faris’s shoe. He swept both backwards sharply and drew engines beneath them, large round shapes with flames pouring from their ends.
Faris studied the proportions. “It’s too big,” he said, though his voice carried more curiosity than opposition.
“It’s flying close,” Mahmoud replied. He leaned across the drawing and made the cockpit larger. “That’s why it looks big.”
Faris looked along the aircraft from nose to tail. He didn’t know how large it ought to have been when close to the ground, and so he shifted his shoe rather than repeating himself. With the edge of his stone, he made three small squares beneath the nearest wing.
Mahmoud rubbed them out with his sleeve. Red dust smeared across the fabric and darkened his cuff. “You can’t see the bombs,” he said. “They’re inside. They open the bottom when they’re over the soldiers.”
Faris lowered the stone. “What if the bottom gets stuck?”
Mahmoud’s hand remained over the erased squares for a moment. Behind them, the door to one classroom opened and released a current of warmer air carrying the smell of damp wool and chalk. A mother emerged holding a girl’s hand, paused beneath the covered walkway, then turned back when another teacher called her.
Mahmoud drew a second line beneath the aircraft’s body, creating a pair of doors. “The pilot can kick them open,” he said. He pressed the brick so hard that the line beneath the aircraft became a trench. “There’s a lever by her foot.”
Qasim bent close to see it. “She kicks the bombs?”
“She kicks the door.”
“Then they fall?”
Mahmoud nodded and added a small boot inside the cockpit, its toe touching an even smaller lever.
Faris used his stone to extend a road beneath the aircraft. It began beside the drinking fountain and ran crookedly towards the shadowed side of the yard. He made two parallel lines, then marked little stones along either side to stand for houses.
Mahmoud drew longer flames behind the engines. “They don’t use petrol like our planes,” he said. “They fill these with snow.”
Faris looked at the flames. “Snow melts,” he said quietly.
Mahmoud’s brick stopped in the dust. Qasim’s face lifted towards him. Faris rubbed his stone against the earth without adding another mark.
A dry leaf skittered through the aircraft’s tail and lodged against Qasim’s knee.
Mahmoud drew a rectangular compartment inside the fuselage. “It’s Siberian snow,” he said. “They keep it in metal boxes so it stays cold.”
A fourth boy, Yusuf, had come from the drinking fountain and now stood behind Faris with both hands in his coat pockets. He looked down at the box Mahmoud had drawn. “It’d still turn to water,” he said, almost under his breath.
Mahmoud glanced at him. Yusuf’s gaze dropped to the ground.
Mahmoud made the engines larger. “The engines freeze it again,” he said. “They’re so cold that water turns back into snow before it reaches the wings.”
He didn’t wait for another objection. Above the first aircraft he drew a second, this one smaller and angled as though it were turning. Its wings were narrower, its cockpit rounder, and there were no doors beneath its body.
“That one doesn’t carry bombs,” Faris said.
“It watches,” Mahmoud replied. His brick moved quickly now. He placed a row of tanks beside Faris’s road and covered two of them with branches. “It sees the ones hidden under trees. It sees guns inside barns and lorries painted like ordinary trucks.”
Qasim pointed at the smallest tank. “Can it see the men inside?”
“It sees their heat.”
A girl named Haneen had approached from the school entrance with her cloth bag hugged against her chest. The strap had broken near one corner and been repaired with green thread. She stopped beneath the mulberry branches, following the aircraft’s red outline with her eyes.
“My brother said that,” she said. “He said they can see through roofs.”
Mahmoud nodded with immediate confidence. “They can see through walls too.”
Haneen lowered her bag beside the tree and knelt near the road. She found a yellow fragment of brick and began drawing small figures between Faris’s houses. Each had a round head and four straight limbs. “Then they can see children,” she said.
“They see everything,” Mahmoud replied. His voice had lowered, becoming more serious as the world beneath the aircraft filled. “They see children, mothers and old people. They see dogs in courtyards. They see babies sleeping.”
Qasim looked towards the covered windows of the school. “Can they see into classrooms?”
Mahmoud turned the smaller aircraft so that its nose pointed towards the school building. “Yes. They can see the desks.”
Haneen drew a square room, then filled it with rows of lines. “What if the curtains are closed?”
Mahmoud looked at the line she placed across the window. He pressed a dark circle into the centre of the house beside it. “They see the stove,” he said. “A family has a little fire. Soldiers have a big one.”
Faris glanced towards the school kitchen chimney, where no smoke rose. “Soldiers can have little fires.”
Mahmoud looked at him, then at the two circles. He widened the second until it nearly covered the barracks Haneen had begun drawing. Around it he made tiny boots and rifle barrels. “Not when there are this many,” he said.
Faris watched the larger mark absorb the smaller details. His stone hovered above the road, then moved on. He drew a bridge over the narrow concrete drainage channel, turning the empty groove into a river.
Qasim leaned across the houses. “They don’t bomb children,” he said.
Samira heard him from the doorway.
She stood beneath the entrance arch holding a stack of arithmetic books against her hip. The doorway framed her in shadow, but the courtyard light caught the loose strands of hair beside her cheeks. She had spent much of the afternoon answering questions for which the school had no reliable answers. The cellar had been swept but not reinforced. The windows could be taped but not replaced. Lessons would continue unless an order came from the municipal offices, though the telephones had worked only intermittently since morning.
One of the mothers came to stand beside her. She followed Samira’s gaze towards the mulberry tree, recognised her son among the children and folded her shawl more tightly across her chest.
Mahmoud dragged the brick around the houses, drawing a broad boundary between them and the tanks. “They only put bombs outside this line,” he said. “The pilots know where people live.”
Faris marked another tank close to Haneen’s nearest house. “What if soldiers park here?”
Mahmoud’s hand slowed.
Haneen looked at the tank pressed against her yellow figure. Qasim shifted around the drawing, leaving a shallow groove where his coat brushed the ground.
Mahmoud drew a second line between the house and the vehicle. “They make the soldiers move first,” he said. “The plane comes down low and the pilot points away from the houses.”
Haneen looked up from the dust. “Can they see her pointing?”
“She comes lower than this roof.” Mahmoud raised one hand above the ground, measuring the height against the school building. “She looks through the glass and points towards the desert.”
Yusuf frowned. “She’d hit something.”
The words were soft, almost swallowed by the voices coming through the entrance hall. Mahmoud gave him a brief look, then enlarged the cockpit so the pilot’s face and arm could be drawn inside it.
Haneen added the face. She gave the pilot two dark eyes and a long line of hair trailing behind her seat.
Faris watched her hand. “Her hair would get caught.”
Haneen held the yellow brick above the line. The wind shifted the ends of her own scarf against her shoulder. She crossed the pilot’s hair several times and turned it into a braid tucked beneath the helmet.
“If the soldiers don’t look at her, she has a horn,” Mahmoud said. He drew a wide cone beneath the aircraft’s nose. “She speaks through it, and everyone in the city hears.”
“What does she say?” Qasim asked.
Mahmoud drew tiny open doors in the houses. “She says, ‘Go inside. Leave the tanks. Don’t stand near guns.’ Then she waits until the streets are empty.”
Faris rubbed dust from his fingertips. “She’d run out of fuel.”
Mahmoud looked at the aircraft. The open doors, the pointing pilot and the horn remained in place. A pair of girls ran across the far end of the courtyard, their shoes striking the concrete beside the classrooms. One of the waiting mothers called after them without leaving the entrance.
Mahmoud drew three more aircraft at the edge of the yard. “They take turns,” he said. “When one has to go, another comes. Some of them are always here.”
Noor joined the group carrying a stub of white classroom chalk. Her blue hair ribbon had slipped down beside one ear. She knelt without asking, chose the open space above the aircraft and began forming clouds. The white lines appeared fine and bright against the packed brown earth.
“They hide in these,” Noor said. Her words came quickly as she thickened the first cloud. “The soldiers look up and only see white.”
“There aren’t clouds every day,” Yusuf said.
Noor looked at him. Her chalk stopped against the ground, leaving a small white mound beneath its tip. Then she widened the cloud until it covered one of Mahmoud’s tanks.
“They bring their own,” she said.
Mahmoud immediately drew containers beneath the watching aircraft. “They open these, and the clouds come out.”
Haneen put black openings inside Noor’s clouds. “The pilots can see through these parts.”
Faris sat back on his heels. His gaze travelled from the containers to the white cloud and then to the pilot’s round face. He said nothing. The cloud now existed in front of him, and the gaps through it were already visible.
Noor drew rain beneath it. Fine drops fell over the barracks, the bridge and the row of tanks. “They make rain first,” she said. “Then people go inside before the bombs.”
“The soldiers go inside too,” Mahmoud said.
Noor’s hand paused. She looked at the tanks.
Haneen used her yellow brick to draw soldiers crouching beneath the vehicles. “They don’t go inside. They hide here.”
Noor resumed, lengthening the drops into streams. Water crossed Faris’s road and filled the shallow drainage channel. She covered the tanks’ wheels until the vehicles appeared trapped in floodwater.
Qasim smiled down at them. “The planes make floods.”
“The rain comes out of the snow boxes,” Mahmoud said. “After the engines use the cold.”
Faris glanced at him. Mahmoud was already drawing more clouds. Faris returned to his bridge and widened it so the flooded road could still be crossed.
More children drifted towards the mulberry tree. Some remained standing around the edge, their shadows falling across the aircraft. Others found fragments of brick and began adding what they’d heard at home. A boy drew dogs beside the houses because the pilots watched animals to tell whether people were frightened. A girl made a mosque with a domed roof and left the ground around it empty. Another child put a hospital beside the bridge and marked its roof with a cross.
The original drawing spread rapidly. The rusting goal frame became the edge of Baghdad. A crack in the courtyard became a mountain pass. The drinking fountain stood for a reservoir. Loose plaster became snow. The concrete drainage channel widened into the Tigris beneath the children’s hands.
Mothers began emerging from the entrance hall with schoolbags, coats and exercise books. Some called their children immediately. Others stopped beneath the covered walkway and watched. The drawings were too broad now to be understood from one place. Aircraft crossed clouds and rivers. Tanks stood beside houses. Tiny people raised their arms from rooftops. One plane carried bombs; another carried bread and medicine. Mahmoud moved between them with red dust on both hands, joining separate stories into a single map.
A distant engine sounded beyond the school buildings.
The children lifted their heads. The noise was low and continuous, concealed behind rooftops and the outer wall. It might’ve been a lorry on the main road or an aircraft travelling far south. The mothers beneath the walkway became still. Samira turned her face towards the sky.
Nothing crossed above the courtyard.
The sound faded slowly.
Qasim looked down again. In an open patch of dust beneath the aircraft, he began drawing a circle.
The smallest boy, Qasim, drew a circle beneath the aircraft.
“That’s the moon,” he said. “They land there between attacks.”
Mahmoud shook his head.
“They don’t land. The pilots sleep while flying.”
“They’d fall.”
“They tie their hands to the controls.”
Faris stared at the circle. Its lower edge crossed the road and swallowed part of the bridge. “They’d still have to close their eyes,” he said, his voice low and uncertain.
Qasim drew two small hands curled around the aircraft’s controls. Haneen widened the cockpit and added a second window behind the first.
“There are two women,” she said. “One sleeps and one flies. Then they change.”
Yusuf shifted nearer. “My cousin said there’s only one seat.”
Mahmoud looked at the two windows. Haneen’s second pilot already had a face and a braid.
“This one’s bigger,” Mahmoud said. He lengthened the aircraft’s body and added another engine. “It was made for long nights.”
Qasim divided the moon into rooms. His lines were uneven, and several crossed through one another. He made beds along one side, a kitchen on the other and a locked square where the pilots kept bombs until they were needed.
Noor drew lamps around the moon’s edge. “They follow these when they’re coming back.”
Faris looked at the little white circles. “They’d look like stars.”
Noor’s hand rested above the last lamp.
Mahmoud leaned over and drew several more across the sky. “Some stars are their lights,” he said. “The pilots learn which ones belong to the moon.”
Qasim added women waiting beside the beds. One stood taller than all the others, her head extending beyond the circle.
“She’s the oldest,” he said.
“How old?” Haneen asked as she reinforced the woman’s coat with yellow.
“A hundred.”
Yusuf looked down at the figure. “People aren’t usually a hundred.”
Qasim made the woman taller. “She flew in the first war.”
Mahmoud drew a map beside her. It showed mountains, roads and rivers, though many intersected in impossible places. “She taught the new ones every road in Iraq.”
“She knows Mosul?” Noor asked.
Qasim placed a dot near the edge of the map. “That’s Mosul.”
Haneen made the dot larger and drew the school beside it. The courtyard became a square within a square. She put children beneath a tiny mulberry tree and mothers beneath the covered walkway. Samira appeared as a tall yellow figure in the doorway with books held against her side.
Faris looked from the drawn teacher to the real woman watching them. “They can’t see arithmetic books from the sky.”
Mahmoud lowered the red aircraft until its nose nearly touched the school roof. “They can when they fly this low.”
A boy named Bilal squeezed between the standing children and crouched beside the guns Mahmoud had drawn earlier. His uncle had served near the northern positions, and the story had reached Bilal in several forms before he brought it to the courtyard.
“My uncle said the guns only get one chance,” he said. His words tumbled forward as he took a brick from Qasim’s pile. “The plane goes so fast that if they miss, she comes back before they put another shell in.”
Mahmoud’s attention shifted from the moon to the gun emplacement. He placed three men around the cannon and drew shells in their hands.
Bilal drew a broken line from the gun towards the aircraft. The shells passed behind its tail.
“She waits until they fire,” he continued. His voice became quieter as he bent closer to the ground. “Then she knows exactly where they are.”
Mahmoud carried the aircraft beyond Noor’s cloud, curved its route around the moon and brought it back from the opposite direction. The gun crew remained beside the empty weapon. One man had dropped a shell. Another bent over the loading tray.
“What does she do?” Haneen asked.
Bilal pressed his brick into the dust beside the gun. “Sometimes she bombs them. Sometimes she flies over so low that they fall down, and then she leaves.”
“Why?” Qasim asked.
Bilal looked at the little men. “So they know she could’ve killed them.”
Mahmoud began a crater over the gun, then slowed. He rubbed away the centre with his palm. Beneath the red haze, the cannon remained visible.
“She gives them one chance,” Mahmoud said. “If they stay, she comes back again.”
Qasim scattered the soldiers along the road. Some ran towards the houses. Haneen redirected them into the empty field. Several stood with their arms raised.
Faris leaned over the figures. “The plane can’t take prisoners.”
Mahmoud drew trucks approaching from the north. “The ground soldiers come after.”
The Soviet vehicles grew from rough rectangles into armoured trucks with roof lamps, chains and wide wheels. Haneen placed women in the cab of the first. Noor filled the second with doctors and drew a red mark across its roof. Qasim packed the third with bread, water and folded blankets.
“The lamps won’t help in daylight,” Yusuf said.
Haneen looked at the white circles. She added covers above them. “They open them at night.”
The children widened the northern road to admit the trucks. Faris reinforced the bridge beneath them. He’d added fewer wonders than the others, but he carefully restored every line damaged by a sleeve or knee. Whenever Qasim’s coat erased part of a wing, Faris redrew it. When one of the younger girls stepped on the flooded road, he remade both banks without scolding her.
Noor darkened the pilots’ faces around the eyes. She smudged white chalk and red brick together until each face appeared masked.
“They wear this so the night doesn’t shine on them,” she said.
“Faces don’t shine much,” Yusuf murmured.
Noor glanced at him and continued to the next pilot. “These ones do because they’re high up.”
Haneen gave each pilot a braid beneath her helmet. Qasim rolled blankets behind their seats for sleeping. Bilal drew knives on their boots because his uncle had said every pilot carried one in case she landed behind the lines.
A mother called Noor’s name from the entrance. Noor twisted towards her but remained on her knees long enough to finish the last black mark around a pilot’s eyes. Her mother called again. Noor set down the chalk and ran across the courtyard, leaving pale fingerprints on the front of her coat.
Other mothers began collecting children. Bags were lifted, scarves tightened and dust brushed from knees. The expanding map forced the adults to step carefully, though several roads and clouds were inevitably crossed beneath their shoes.
Mahmoud remained beneath the mulberry tree. He extended Faris’s road beyond the moon towards the school wall.
“It has to go through the mountains,” Haneen said. She knelt beside him and added yellow ridges along both sides.
Faris examined the direction. “The mountains are more that way,” he said, pointing towards the far corner of the yard without much certainty.
Mahmoud bent the road. It crossed Noor’s river, passed the moon and curved north beside the goal frame.
Qasim crawled alongside it, his oversized coat dragging through a row of tanks and reducing them to red shadows. He drew another bed beside the road.
“That’s for a pilot who’s too tired to reach the moon,” he said.
Haneen placed a lamp beside it. The white circle was nearly as large as the bed.
Faris looked at it. “She might not see one little lamp.”
Qasim found Noor’s discarded chalk and pushed it hard into the dust until the lamp became broad and bright. Chalk gathered beneath his fingernails.
Mahmoud turned an aircraft towards it. “She sees this one because it’s only for her.”
Bilal added another plane behind the first. “They don’t fly alone after they cross the mountains.”
Haneen drew a pilot waiting beside the roadside bed. “She brings hot food.”
Qasim built a wall around them to keep out the wind. “And she knows when the other plane’s coming because the moon tells her.”
Faris repaired the road where Qasim’s sleeve had crossed it. “The moon’s far away.”
Mahmoud extended a narrow line from the moon to the bed. “They have a telephone wire.”
“It’d hang through the sky,” Yusuf said.
The children looked at the line.
Haneen drew birds sitting upon it. “Then the birds hold it up.”
Qasim added more birds. Bilal placed a guard beside the lamp. Mahmoud turned the leading aircraft towards the road, while Faris widened the bridge again so the doctors’ trucks could pass.
“The bridge needs another side,” Haneen said, drawing it before anyone answered. “The trucks go one way and the planes’ people go the other.”
“Pilots don’t drive over it,” Faris said as he reinforced the supports.
“They do after they land,” Qasim replied. “The tired ones walk.”
Bilal extended the line of lamps towards the mountains. “Then they follow these all the way.”
Mahmoud bent the aircraft’s path down towards the first light. “This one’s coming now.”
Haneen added another woman beside the bed. “She has soup ready.”
Qasim drew a bowl between them. “It stays hot because there’s moon fire under it.”
Faris looked at the bowl, the roadside bed, the birds holding the telephone wire and the two aircraft descending through Noor’s clouds. He pressed his pale stone into the bridge and continued strengthening it while the other children crowded closer, their coats touching, their dusty hands moving over the same widening world.
“The second plane’s carrying bread,” Bilal said.
“And medicine,” Haneen added, drawing another box beneath its wing.
Mahmoud brought a third aircraft down behind them. “This one watches while the others land.”
Qasim made room beside the lamp. “Then another bed has to go here.”
The children continued speaking as they drew, extending the road beyond the wall, adding lamps through the mountains and deciding which pilots slept in the planes, which slept on the moon and which stayed awake above Mosul to make certain every child reached home.