I woke up to a loud noise. The earth shook, and all around me, I could hear people screaming. I jumped out of bed, wondering what possibly could have happened. It was only 7:51 in the morning. I was still wearing my clothes from yesterday. I must have fallen asleep doing my homework.

I flung open the door and ran into the kitchen, where my mother was yelling for us to go into the basement.

That planes were coming in.

I was confused, but I did what she said, and ran down the steps into the dark basement with my older brother right behind me, yelling for me to move faster. Then, there was an ear-shaking noise. I had never heard anything as awful as this in my whole life.

Henry yanked my hand and pulled me up. I hadn’t even realized that I had fallen.

“Maggie, come on!” He exclaimed as I trailed further and further behind him.

“But where’s Mama and Dad?” I asked as I sat down in a corner of the basement.

“Don’t worry about them. I’m sure they’re fine.” But there was an uncertainty in his voice that made me worry even more. There didn’t seem to be any movement upstairs. I knew that because the floors in our house creaked whenever someone walked.

From the corner of the basement, we could hear the screams of people on the street and the big splash of water in the harbor. I could hear buildings falling and ships exploding, and I pressed myself against the wall, hoping that whatever was happening wouldn’t reach Henry and me.

After twenty minutes of hiding in the basement, Henry stood up and began walking towards the door. I stood up and caught up to him. We climbed the stairs as quietly as possible, but they still creaked loudly.

“Mama? Dad?” Henry called cautiously. Dad was at work, so we didn’t expect a reply from him. But there was no answer from mama, which scared me even more.

As Henry began to search the house for mama, I made my way over to the big window in the front of the house. What I saw was complete chaos. We lived very close to Pearl Harbor, less than a mile. All the big ships were kept in the Harbor. But the air was smoky that I couldn’t even see the ships that floated there. Half of our house was completely gone and was sitting in a big pile on the side of our property. And destruction was everywhere. I turned around and went to look for Henry. I found him looking for mother one of the bedrooms.

“Henry? Have you looked outside yet?” I asked. He still hadn’t found her.

“What do you mean? What’s wrong?” He asked, but it didn’t seem like he cared all that much.

“We were bombed.” He stopped.

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Henry turned and looked at me, eyes wide open.

“Bombed?” He repeated quietly. I nodded. For a minute, he just stood there, and then, all of the sudden, he started running back towards the front of the house, and I ran looking after him. By the time I had caught up to him, he was looking out the window in complete horror. I stood next to him, and for a few seconds, we stood there in silence, looking out at the dismay our small town was in.

“Should we go out and help?” I asked quietly. Maybe that’s where mama went. She always seemed to put others before herself.

“I don’t know. It doesn’t seem safe for you to go,” He answered. I raised my eyebrows.

“If you’re going, I’m going,” I told him. No way was I going to sit in this house while my whole family could be dead. As far as I’m concerned, Henry’s all that I’ve got. And I wasn’t going to leave his side until I knew that it was safe.

Right now, the word safe seemed like it had been erased from the human language entirely.

“Maggie, if a bomb really did drop, there’s got to be some pretty bad stuff in the air. Mama wouldn’t want me bringing you with me.” He responded. Since when had he ever cared about my safety or my health?

“Henry, for all we know, mama could be dead. We have to go find her!” I argued back. He sighed, and I knew that I had won the argument.

“Fine. But don’t leave my side.” He groaned as we walked towards the gaping hole on the side of our house.

Henry was right. After only a few minutes of being outside, we began coughing as our lungs filled with smoke. A house just around the corner had caught fire, and the town’s a few of the firemen were hurrying to contain and put out the fire, but most were at the Harbor. The neighbors said that the bomb had hit the ships and that they were on fire. People’s houses had completely collapsed, and I worried that people had still been inside them when they fell.

“Mommy! Mommy!” Two little children cried out, looking around desperately for their mother. A woman came rushing from inside what remained of their house and scooped the younger one up. She looked as though she was torn between the decision to bring her children back inside to the standing section of their home or stay outside.

Henry pulled me around the corner of the street, craning his neck as he looked around for mom.

“Shouldn’t we go down to dad’s office? Just to make sure that he’s okay?” I asked. Dad only worked about two miles away from home, so his building could have been affected by the bomb.

Henry nodded, and we started back home. It was now almost eight-thirty in the morning. I hopped into the passenger seat of the car, and Henry backed out of the driveway. He had only had his driver’s permit for a few months, and I didn’t trust him too much, but I didn’t think too much of that now. This was the quickest way to dad’s office, and we needed to find him so that he could help us search for mama.

Ten minutes later, we pulled into the parking lot, and jumped out of the car and ran towards the building. The woman who was sitting at the desk made us stop for a visitor’s badge, even though we had come into the building before and she knew who we were.

Henry and I hurried up the stairs and opened the first door on our right side.

“Dad! Do you know where mama is?” Henry asked. Dad stood up.

“What are the two of you doing here?! It isn’t safe for you to be outside of the house, let alone my office. What is all this nonsense about your mother? She’s at home with you!”

I shook my head. “No, she’s not. She told us to go to the basement when she saw the planes flying in, and when we came back upstairs, she was gone. We looked everywhere for her, but we couldn’t find her.”

“And there’s a huge hole in the side of our house, so staying inside was as safe as staying outside,” Henry added.

Dad sat back down in his chair.

“So you mean to tell me,” he began slowly, “that you don’t know where your mother is, half of our house is in pieces, and you’ve come here because you didn’t think that it was safe at home.” He finished. The two of us nodded in response.

“Dad, you’ve got to help us find her. She’s gone. We thought she might have gone out to help people who were trapped, but we walked up and down the street, and --” He stopped.

There were more planes flying above us. Dad raced over to the window.

“Get down. Now.” He said quietly. Henry yanked me down to the floor. Dad opened the door, and, despite our protests, walked out into the hallway to tell people that the planes were back.

“Henry…” My voice trailed off. He told me not to talk, and then there was another noise, even louder than the first. I looked up. The earth shook, and I the ceiling started to fall. First, only a few tiny dots, and then bigger chunks.

“Maggie, GO!” Henry yelled. I knew that the bomb hadn’t hit the building, but the ground didn’t stop shaking. The both of us got up and started to run out of the building. I looked behind me. Henry wasn’t there.

“Henry!” I screamed. The building began to fall. I still couldn’t see him.

Then, the building fell.

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There were more screams now then there were before. The ships in the harbor were on fire, and houses and workplaces were collapsing on top of themselves. I sprinted back to the remaining chunks of dad’s office and began looking for Henry. He had to be in here somewhere.

I bent my head down and started lifting what had been a ceiling just a few minutes before. I saw something moving about twenty feet away. Then, a hand appeared, then an arm.

My heart seemed to stop. Henry?

I moved over to the person as quickly as I could, which was unfortunately not very quick since my feet kept sinking into the debris of the building. When I finally arrived over there, I lifted the large chunk of ceiling up and threw it out of the way. And there was Henry, his face pale, but he was moving, and before I knew what was going on, he was standing up again and searching through the rubble for dad.

But I had this horrible feeling in my heart that brought me to an even worse realization. Dad was gone. And there he was, laying on top of the remainder of the building, not moving, not breathing. Henry sank down to sit next to him, and tears rolled down my cheeks. I sat down next to him, and we didn’t move for hours.

I don’t know when mama got there. All I remember is her not being there, and then, all of the sudden, there she was. Weeping next to dad, sitting next to us. Only a few hours ago, everything was the same. And then, all of the sudden, the world seemed to have fallen apart. What was going to happen now? Mama didn’t have a job, and we needed money somehow. Not to mention that our house was in two pieces, and we had lost almost everything.

And what about the war? Would it get worse? The flames from the fire at the harbor were still climbing higher and higher into the sky. People were still yelling. From what I had overheard, hundreds of soldiers were dead. Even more were injured, and many people were still lost.

After a while, some men came and lifted dad onto a carrier, covered him with a white sheet, and began to walk away. Mama jumped up.

“Where are you taking him?” She asked, tears still running down her face.

“They’re counting the dead. Don’t worry, you’ll be able to bury him. They just need to report the number,” One of the men replied calmly. I wonder how many times he has said those words today.

Mama sits back down, not because she’s given up, but because she’s angry.

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The next day, I woke up, smelling the smoke that was drifting through the hole in the kitchen wall. Most people spent that day looking through the remains of their houses, trying to find the things they had lost.

Down the street, the children who had been crying for their mother yesterday were silent. They knew their mother would never come, she would never stop their crying or feed them when they are hungry, or tuck them into bed at night.

Mama went down to the town hall to ask if we could bury dad. They said we could, so we did. After a week, and engraved headstone for dad’s grave arrived in the mail, and Henry propped it up real nice so that people could tell that it was daddy’s resting place.

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TWENTY YEARS LATER

Two men walked into the final room of the house. It had been abandoned for nearly twenty years. The owners had left after Pearl Harbor had been bombed, seeking safety. In the corner of the room lay a piece of paper. It read:

To whom it may concern:

My name is Margaret Raren, and I am fourteen years old. This house was one of the many buildings that were a victim of the bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7th, 1941. Almost a year has passed since this day. Like many, I felt the first-hand effects of the bombing. My father was one of the sixty-eight civilians killed during the attack.

It started out as a day just like any other. The sun rose just like it always did, and there were hardly any clouds in the sky. But it would soon turn into the worst day of my life. During the attack, it is estimated that over two thousand people died. People in the future who did not feel the effects of this bombing will never truly know the pain that it put people in. That December day has changed my life.

You will never understand the panic that people were thrown into. My mother left the house during the bombing to help people. My older brother and I thought she was dead. We went down to my father’s office. Only a few minutes later, the second bomb was dropped, and the building collapsed on us. My brother and I were lucky. My father wasn’t.

But then, something miraculous happened. Despite the terrible turn of events, people lent out a helping hand to others. To this day, I believe that those people saved my life. Without them, I would have had nothing to eat or drink, and no place to call home.

It was these people who will make a difference in the chaotic world we live in today. They are praised for the work they have done and the steps they have taken to help those who needed it. If you ever find yourself in a place like this, reach out a hand to those who need it. I promise you, they will grab it.

Sincerely,

Margaret Raren