The morning began with multiplication tables
and the soft scrape of chairs
a room full of futures at
Shajareh Tayyebeh Elementary School.
Backpacks and organizers held pencils,
parent notes folded like quiet secrets,
half-finished doodles and dreams
tucked between pages.
10:45 a.m. -
a time that meant
recess was fast approaching,
to playful plans,
to the small negotiations of childhood.
And a decision was made.
A Tomahawk flew.
And Minab boomed.
Not thunder..
but something colder, more deliberate -
a violence that does not announce itself
as a warning, but as a consequence.
They say it was meant for something else -
an adjacent target,
a miscalculation of distance,
A misidentification.
A margin of error drawn
in “someone else’s” ink.
And it stinks…
Because the children and their adults
were not margins.
Names were still on attendance sheets.
Some present.
Some already echoes.
The walls didn’t fall all at once.
They hesitated -
as if even the concrete knew
this was wrong.
One hundred and more -
Numbers that should belong
To their morning math problems,
not to tallies of the innocent dead.
A little shoe by the doorway
Waiting for a foot that won’t return.
A notebook lies open -
The last word written: “tomorrow.”
And that is the shock:
Not just that they are gone -
But that the world kept using that word
As if it still belongs to them.
Chalk dust lifted like breath,
and for a moment,
even the air tried
to hold them together -
tried and failed.
Desks stood in rows of learned obedience
but nothing could prepare a classroom
for a sky that chose “targets”
and found children.
Seventy-three boys.
Forty-seven girls.
Teachers who stayed
when the sky would not.
Their names -
almost still warm on the paper..
Become something colder than silence.
This is the violence:
beyond the blast -
the quiet paperwork
that follows,
the statements,
the sudden end of bedtime stories,
and the beginning of one
recurring, endless nightmare,
a fever dream.
As distance becomes measured
in regret and fury, instead of responsibility
or young possibility.
Somewhere, it is called collateral.
Somewhere, it is debated.
Somewhere, it is explained away
until it sounds like it makes sense.
But it doesn’t.
This math will never math.
And in that room,
time broke its own rule -
refused to move forward
instead carrying their silence.
A deafening silence.
A classroom
still reaching
for its students
while barely intact.
A tomorrow
with one hundred missing answers.
A truth that should never have to be said -
They were innocent children.
And someone decided
with violent carelessness
that this was alright for “some people,”
That some children can afford to be missed.
As my stomach gets sick.
And the sky fell.
For a moment,
receiving its new angels
while we are stuck down here,
searching for accountability
and empathy that may never come.