In this infinite space, silence is deafening, darkness thick as black strap molasses, and stinks of burning sulphur. 

Who are you? 
Where are we? 
I don’t know. 
You, dead like me? 
Yes, I’m Ibrahim, I’m Palestinian, and you? 
Ukrainian. I’m Victor and dead, along with my family, since 1933. I’ve not seen or spoken with another … I was going to say person, for years. Why meet you now? 
No idea. Are we ghosts? 
Must be. 
Ghosts. Bit of a shock. Where is here? 
No idea. 
You, died in1933? Impossible. This is 2025; you look thirty, like me. 
Maybe, time doesn’t exist here. 
How did you die? 
Genocide. Starvation, on the orders of Stalin, along with four million other Ukrainians in the Holodomor. 
Why? 
We disobeyed him. And your death? 
Genocide, just like you, along with my family and many thousands of other Palestinians were starved to death by Netanyahu’s Israeli government. 
Why? 
It’s a long story. In 1947, Britain and its allies, who’d defeated Fascism gave away Palestine, our country, our land, out of guilt for not stopping Hitler from murdering millions of Jewish people. Our land was stolen and now they call us the thieves.
We still fight Russia for our freedom. Stalin then, Putin now. He’s a murderous dictator and wants to re-establish the USSR’s empire. He claims Ukraine belongs to the Russian Federation and he’s waging war to steal it from us. We have a lot in common like killing our children.
Cynical bastards it kills tomorrow’s freedom fighters. 
Where are they, our dead children?  
Lost like us? 
Ghosts, yes. Lost? No. 
I wish.
Listen! Ibrahim shouts 
Look! Victor gasps. 

Fresh air swirls. Darkness vanishes. The void fills with twilight. The ghosts of children beyond number materialise; they are all intact as they were before their murder; babies are carried. The massed children chant, Peace! Justice! War no more!

Victor and Ibrahim gape as two girls walk forward.
Father, the first child speaks.
Is that you, My love? Victor sinks to his knees and embraces his daughter.
Ibrahim opens his arms, Come to me, Aisha. They kiss.
What are we to do? the two men ask. 
Stop war, the girls reply. 
How, we’re only ghosts?
We ghosts can haunt as we choose. Aisha says. 
Ibrahim says, Make peace not war. 
Victor adds. Do no physical harm. 
No need, Aisha says.

Simultaneously, the ruins of Palestine and the wreckage of the towns and cities of Ukraine are overwhelmed by swarm after swarm of the children’s ghosts as dense as a million locusts but totally silent. Soldiers, settlers, collaborators, government apparatchiks, and murderers panic; trapped, struggling for air, defenceless, realising their sudden impotence, and certain their victims, the massacred children, will hold them to account; ‘Just obeying orders’ not being an excuse. 

The Knesset and the Kremlin are totally inundated by ghosts. Netanyahu and Putin, seen as the embodiment of self-serving evil, are escorted by throngs of children to imprisonment and eventual trial for their crimes against humanity.

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© Phil Cosker 2025
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