Page 16 - To Family with Love

floor to the twelfth floor, until you get tired of riding it so much that TV becomes interesting to you again. It is practically impos- sible for you to find any time for studying in between so many engaging activities. For that reason, I guess, we go to school.
− You rascal, I’ll tell on you to your parents! You’ve been riding the elevator all day long, so I had to walk all the way to the fifth floor with all these bags, old and sick as I am.
− It’s not true, Mrs. Ljubica, bless your heart, I just brought one kilogram and three hundred and fifty grams of bananas to that poor woman in the wheelchair from the ninth floor.
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By now, you should’ve figured out that all sorts of people live here – the place is teeming with friends, as well as some enemies. My best friend moved in a long time ago, to the twelfth floor, just before a now historic barbecue that we will surely re- member for all our lives, maybe even longer.
As the chicken wings were starting to change their appear- ance, color and edibleness, getting all bronzed up and crunchy, and the afternoon was slowly and lazily extinguished and dis- solved into the evening calm, us boys continued to chase the ball with undiminished zeal across the field, and the girls were jump- ing rope. We were all eagerly waiting to hear that diner was r e a d y!!!, so that we could rush to eat like a stampede.
In the midst of that idyll, suddenly, unexpectedly, like a wounded beast, Zagreb plunged, shook and roared wildly from all its city sirens to put on a red alert, announcing a disastrous war that would change and take so many lives, a war that im- mediately started with savage destruction – when we got out of the shelter two hours later, we saw that the meat on the grill was completely destroyed. Even stray dogs didn’t want it anymore.
Anyway, as the city roared as if the devil himself was chas- ing it, I shat my pants like a turtledove out of fear and panic. And
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