“Yakov? Is that really you?”
“Yeah, Mum. It’s me.”
The grey-haired woman hugged her disheveled son tightly.
“Is that you, boy?” Hans stomped into the entry and glared at his son. “What? You didn’t bring any­thing?”
“Hans, be nice. Your son is back. Quickly, gather the town.”

*****

Yakov was lean­ing against the rail­ing look­ing down at the assem­bled crowd. It seemed to him that the entire pop­u­la­tion of Kilda had turned out to hear him speak.
“Where’s the oth­ers?”
“They..umm…didn’t make it.”
“What do you mean?”
The fat man was stand­ing to close to Yakov. He could see every bead of sweat rolling down his pink, bloated face. He was wring­ing his hands and fid­get­ing at the same time. Almost like he was try­ing to dance.
“I..err…that is too say…they never made it back here.”
“What?” Yakov began to hyper­ven­ti­late. “I can’t do this. I just need to rest for a while. Maybe I’ll do this tomor­row.”
The crowd began to stir. “Tell us what you saw!” Shouted a woman cradling a baby.
“Yeah! What are you hiding?”

Yakov turned back to the crowd, closed his eyes and took a deep breath. When he opened them the first thing he saw was Pietra stand­ing in the mid­dle of the crowd gnaw­ing at some­thing black and gnarled. An apple maybe? His shoul­ders stiff­ened. He knew what he had to do.
“You want to know what I saw?” The crowd yelled it’s approval. “O.K. I saw lush, green plains. Open space as far as the eye can see. Peo­ple farmed this land. Grow­ing what they needed instead of scavenging.”

The crowd seemed to wane. He wasn’t grab­bing their imag­i­na­tion. He noticed his sis­ter again.

“And I saw apples. Huge, red apples. So big they bent the branches that they hung from.” His sis­ter looked up at him, dropped the apple from her mouth and shouted up to him “Show me!” Then quickly added, “Please.”

A mur­mur went through the crowd. Then was sud­denly silenced by, of all peo­ple, his father.
“Stop this. Stop this lying, Yakov.”

The old Yakov, the one whose life expe­ri­ence was dis­tilled from his father’s would’ve backed down. But not after every­thing he’s seen. He was his own man now.
“You stop, Dad. You think you’re the voice of rea­son? You’re not. You’re the voice of fear. You’re afraid.”
“I have every right to be. You for­get that you were the only one to come back.” Yakov felt a lump rise in his throat.
“I did, and now I’m going back there.”
“To what? A land of milk and honey? Where apples fall from the sky?” His father snorted.

“I’m going back. And there’s not a damn thing you can do about it.”

Every kid in the crowd cheered. They’d never heard of any kid stand­ing up to any adult before, and now, right in front of their eyes Yakov had stood up to his own father. They began chant­ing his name as loudly as they could.

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