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Abdou loved to gaze with envious eyes at the mountains that surrounded the family house. Well, not a house so much as a shack, so fragile that it may as well have been blown away by the wind, if it weren’t for the massive dune of rocks protecting it.

Abdou was fascinated by the heap, maybe because of the curiosity of his young age, maybe because it represented the threshold between him and the real world.

His mother always stopped his many attempts to climb the mountain, claiming he might fall and die, but Abdou had the intellect to realize there was something else. He saw every once in a while his father crawling out of the valley, his valued pistol and knife tightly gripped in his fists. At times, smoke could be detected from the horizon at nighttime. But never a sound.

One day Abdou tried to go over the hill, expecting his mother to catch him and bring him back. But for the first time, she wasn’t there to right his wrongs. Abdou paused at the prospect of having the choice of leaving to the real world. That was what he wanted. Right?

At last, after exerting himself, he reached the top, and felt for the first time the luxury of looking as far as the eye could see. But the glee that he had imagined during most of his childhood wasn’t there. Instead, Abdou froze. Something… Something was standing at the bottom of the hill, on the other side of his home valley.

*Deep narrator voice* what DID Abdou see?

FIND OUT, ON THE NEXT EPISODE OF — nah, I’m not continuing this story.

Feel free to finish it though. Write it down in the comments. If you don’t know how to comment, check out the allocated page at the top of the blog.

Julien out.