bombs in the night

Yesterday he talked about the war, about the nights when the bombs came down. He said there was one night when the shaking of the house was too much and he ran out of the basement shelter into the garden and lay down on the patch of grass alternatingly covering his head and turning to look at the night sky with the trundling lights of the grenades and the hissing and roaring and the eventual thump of detonation. And then he saw the moon.
He was 15 years old.

Last night when sleep would not come I tried to picture him there outside his house on what is now the driveway below the little orchard, a skinny boy with scratched knees and a blond fringe.