Through a Dari interpreter, Ahmad’s mother told me he began to stutter at age four, after he saw someone killed and tried to wake him. Ahmad and his family had been Afghan refugees in the U.S. for two years. I’d been his ESL teacher for a few months. One second-grade morning he asked me to read The I Love You Book. I sat on the classroom carpet with Ahmad on one side and his cousin Mahmood on the other. The book’s narrator assures kids they’re  loved when they dance, when they play, when they sleep, and so on, accompanied by bright illustrations of a safe childhood. On the page with a picture of a little boy crying I read, I love you when you’re sad and Ahmad said, My g-grandpa d-died and I was s-sad and I said, It’s very sad when someone we love dies and because I hadn’t understood, Ahmad said, My g-grandpa g-got sh-shot in the heart and I s-saw it. I closed the book and imagined Ahmad in that moment, just four years old, frantic to bring a dead man back to life. I looked into green eyes that had seen too much and said what you say to comfort someone, even when the right words don’t exist in any language. I put my arm around Ahmad’s thin shoulders and hugged him. Then the cousins leaned over my lap and began to talk about Afghanistan, about how scared they had been when bombs  pummeled their apartment building. But one time a bomb struck that wasn’t a real bomb. It was a pretend bomb filled with candy. That was the best day, said Mahmood, and Ahmad smiled and said, Yes, it was. It was the b-best d-day ever.

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Tess Kelly’s work has appeared in Passages North, Cleaver, BULL, and River Teeth, among other publications. She lives, writes, and works in the public schools in Portland, Oregon.

Artwork by Meera Lee Patel