If my brother lived in Gaza, a kite would have killed him.
He's loved them since he was four. That's the age he started, when the spool was still bigger than his hands.
I can hear him yelling up the stairs. Hafsa, come to the roof. Every time like the house was on fire, and it was never anything. A kite he'd caught coming down over the neighbour's wall, or new ones, held out fanned in his fist so I could see the colours.
Pink. Yellow. That electric green.
And I know exactly what his face did up there, because every child's face does the same thing.
He tipped his head back.
That's the whole joy of it. You let the string out and you follow it up with your eyes, and your neck starts to ache, and you don't stop, because the tugging in your hand is the most alive thing you've ever felt and you have to keep watching it.
You have to look up.
There is no other way to fly a kite.
Now I need you to stand in the sand in Gaza and hold that string.
Because in Gaza, up is where it comes from.
Up is the drone that hovers for hours over the tents. Up is the sound the children have learned to identify by pitch. Up is what they have spent two years teaching their bodies to hide from.
And a kite means you have to look directly at it.
Chin lifted. Eyes wide. Standing still in the open with your face turned to the exact place death arrives from. For a toy.
And the string in your hand is a line pointing straight down at you. A marker. A flag saying here, here, this is where the children are.
He is holding a rope to the thing that will kill him, and calling it a game.
Except it isn't a game.
A kite in Gaza is a scream.
It's the loudest thing a child there can still make. No voice carries out of that place now. No camera is left. So he sends it up as high as his arms allow, over the tents and the rubble and the grey, and what he's saying is here.
Here I am. I'm still alive. Look at me.
And they know. They know the pitch of a drone the way our children know nursery rhymes.
They fly them anyway. Because being seen is the only power they have left, and they'll take it in whatever form it comes. Even that one.
A sound. Then heat. Then a silence children describe as the world switching off.
And then a boy walks back to where his tent was.
He is nine.
He starts looking for his mother. Not a body. That isn't what's there. He's looking for the parts of her he can recognise, and he does recognise them, because a child knows his mother the way he knows his own name. He knows the sleeve. He knows the shape of her hand. He has held that hand crossing every road of his short life.
So he picks it up.
A nine-year-old, kneeling in the sand where the kitchen was, gathering his mother. Nobody helps, because in the next tent someone else's son is doing the same thing.
And then he has to decide whether he has found enough of her to bury.
He wraps what he has in a sheet and carries her out, and what will stay with him forever is how little she weighed.
The next morning he goes back. Gets on his knees. Looks again, in case there is more of her. Because he can't bear to leave any part of his mother out in the open.
That's the answer to the kite.
Mohammad Abdel-Salam Taha was four years old. The same age my brother was on our roof, with the spool bigger than his hands.
My brother tips his head back and sees nothing but sky.
They send up a signal every day. Paper, string, and everything they have left, held as high as their arms will go.
Something always answers it.
Let it be us this time.
Food. Water. Medicine. Delivered by women who never left.
Say Mohammad's name out loud, so it exists somewhere other than a hospital record.
And when a child in Gaza raises a kite tonight and screams here I am into that sky —
look up.
Still watching the sky, for both of them,
Hafsa