All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce Chapter One of "Hopewatch & The Art of Peace"
or portions thereof in any form without the prior written permission of the author.

ONE

Although his name was Hopewatch, everyone in his small village called him “Hopsy.” He was seven years old, medium stature for a boy of his age, with chestnut-brown hair, and an exceptional childlike smile. The very thought of a smile seemed to initiate a small dimple on his right cheek. He had tried pushing his tongue against the small dimple or sucking his right cheek to hide it when it wasn’t an appropriate time for him to be smiling, but after some time it became very obvious to everyone what he was trying to do. As he grew, he’d thought of many different ways to somewhat hide his odd behaving dimple, but finding all his efforts in vain, he finally gave up and learned to live with it. What he liked most about himself was his extraordinary big honey-brown eyes. They seemed to exert his true feelings at all times. One look into his eyes and his mother, Narkiz, knew instantly how he felt.
“You’re an open book,” she would say to him. “I know when you’re sad or happy, excited or content. One look into your eyes and I know whether you’re lying or telling me the truth.”
Hopsy thought that his mother was the most beautiful lady in his small village. She was slender and somewhat on the tall side for a girl. Her shoulder length charcoal-black hair prettified her oval face and her warm chestnut-brown almond-shaped eyes. He loved her  beautiful smile and her soft and gentle voice. She loved dresses. “Pants are made  for men and boys,” she would say smiling to him. “Do I look like a man or a boy to you?” Unlike some of the other women in his village, he’d never seen his mom in trousers.
The night before his seventh birthday, he had tried and tried to sweet-talk to his mother. He had offered the once-a-year occasion as an excuse to skip school just for that one day, but she just wouldn’t listen to his reasoning. He still had to do his homework. He still had to wake up early in the morning. He still had to attend his regular classes at the school. Her last words were, “You are going, Hopsy.” And that was that.
It was on this day when he . . . no, not he . . . when the vision came to him for the first time.
He was standing in front of the blackboard with a piece of white chalk in his hand, adding, and multiplying numbers. He was halfway through solving the math problem when he suddenly found himself nearly paralyzed. He felt like a frozen statue – a statue made of bones and flesh. He had tried to move his hands, his feet, and other parts of his body, but he could not. The only thing he could feel was his pounding heart as his unblinking eyes gazed at the blackboard. He also felt something calm and soothing taking hold of his mind and the huffing and puffing reactions of his bizarre thoughts. It seemed to him, standing there almost paralyzed, that his mind would fly apart if he brought no order in his confusion.
The numbers he had written, magically flew off the board one after the other, and as if parading, they vanished through the solid walls. He saw two ghost-like shadows looking at him as they loomed outside the classroom window. They emerged through the thick glass panels, hovered over his classmates, and finally landed gracefully in front of him. He caught their eyes not merely looking at him, but staring, staring. Staring at him.
Hopewatch couldn’t see their facial features. Somehow their faces kept changing and moving like tiny rippling waves on the top of a pond. He was sure that he could poke his finger right through their ethereal bodies. Their eyes reminded him of a big glass marble he once had. He couldn’t  tell their age, or even what they looked like, but he was sure that the figure of the tall ghost belonged to a man, and the short one to a woman. They faced one another, nodded agreement, then they turned and smiled at him.
The man ghost glided effortlessly over the polished wood floor without moving his feet, approached the blackboard, took the white piece of chalk from Hopsy’s hand, and started writing something. What was he writing on the board? Not knowing became unbearable. He felt as if nothing he had known was as important as knowing this. And there it was at last. A single phrase.
The ghost put the chalk back in Hopsy’s hand, smiled, glided back, and held the hand of the woman ghost. Holding hands they bowed their heads to him with respect. Then they floated through the air, waved their hands goodbye to him, flew out the room the same way they had arrived, and disappeared from his sight as suddenly as they had appeared.
“Well done, Hopsy!” The teacher’s lofty voice shattered his vision into nothingness. “Next time I’ll give you a harder problem to solve.” He chuckled. “You can step down and take your seat.”
As if in a daze, Hopewatch stepped down, eased himself into his small desk, and stared at the chalkboard. He saw his own handwritten numbers on it, and although he knew he had not finished solving it, the problem was solved. Not only that, but the man-ghost’s message was not on the board any more. Just like the two ghosts, it had vanished, too. Confused, Hopsy slipped his hands under his desk and pinched his legs to ensure himself that he was not dreaming. He was in the classroom, the teacher was there, so were his schoolmates. Did they not see the two ghosts – their message on the board? He looked around. The faces of his classmates seemed to look as they always had. Normal.
He looked at the blackboard again. He could see that the math problem was solved correctly, but he couldn’t tell how. He tried to remember how and when he managed to solve it, but couldn’t. Somehow, for him, time itself had been frozen during his vision. Or, was it the other way round? It had to be. No one had seen the two ghosts or the writing on the board. No one but him. He had to hide his dimple with his hand.
“Dream the Hopeful Dreams of your Destiny.” The seven words seemed to be carved into his mind. Although he couldn’t understand their meaning, the phrase was there, seen clearly with his mind’s eye. He felt a little strange, but also excited at the same time by the thought that the message was a secret birthday present for him. Yes!  A secret present from the two friendly ghosts. What else could it be? He made a mental note to thank his mom for not listening to him, for making him go to school.
On the way home he decided to tell his mother the whole story about the two ghosts. His mother would know what that symbolic phrase was trying to conceal and what it meant for him if it revealed itself in a simpler way. He trusted his mother’s judgement. She was always there for him; she was a good listener. She would listen to him without interruption, smiling, encouraging, holding his hand. He was very happy to have such a superb and understanding mother. He couldn’t remember ever seeing her angry; not with him. Not with anyone.
Without looking back he walked toward his home. A block away from school, Hopewatch recognized Lilly’s light footsteps approaching. The shepherd girl. His best friend since they were babies. Lilly’s flowing, long, curly red hair bounced on her slender body with each step as she walked next to him. For a while they walked in silence.
“Both Lilly and you are Sunday children,” his mother had said once.  “You were born first and the following Sunday, here comes Lilly crying.”
Everyone in the small village believed that Lilly was a very strange little girl. The villagers murmured flying telltales about her since she was a tiny baby. She would sit cross-legged in front of animals, her green eyes staring into theirs, whisper her thoughts to them. The animals would attentively listen to her, nod their heads, or wiggle their tails in response. The villagers believed that she could talk to animals.
“Can you read my thoughts, Lilly?”
“No.”
“You told me that you can read the thoughts of animals. How come you can’t read mine?”
“Because animals want me to read their thoughts, and because they never learned how to hide them from me or from other creatures. Somehow animals know what other animals think and feel. They can sense it. They have this extra sense that we humans don’t have. When they talk to me, I feel like I’m reading a book. It’s all there in the book. All I have to do is read it. I know it sounds weird. But just because I can read their thoughts that doesn’t mean I’m crazy, or something. Does it, Hopsy?”
“No, it doesn’t. Of course not.” He paused, then asked, “Do they tell you their secrets?”
“Animals don’t have secrets, Hopsy. They’re not like us.” Lilly touched his arm gently. “Hopsy, we don’t have any secrets between us. We’ve always trusted each other. Haven’t we?”
“Yes.” He sighed. Staring at his shadow in front of him, he walked on it step after step. “It’s funny,” he murmured as if talking to himself. “I step on my shadow but I feel nothing. Like a ghost it follows me wherever I go. Lilly . . . ?”
“What?”
“Do you think if I had stepped on a ghost, I mean a real ghost, would he feel something, like pain?”
Lilly grabbed his arm and they came to a stop staring at each other. “Hopsy, let’s sit against that shaded wall, and you tell me what it is you are not saying. I can see it in your eyes, but I can’t read your mind, remember?”
After putting their books on the ground, he sat down with his back resting against the whitewashed wall. Lilly sat in front of him and crossed her legs under her body. Her hair touched the blades of the grass. Her green eyes stared into his, intensely.
“Now, tell me,” she said quietly. “Everything,” she emphasized.
Hopewatch took a long breath and let it out slowly readying himself for the worst. Ghosts? He knew there were no ghosts nor did he believe in ghost stories. At best they were only imaginative and entertaining stories – stories to scare small children. Lilly would laugh at him. No, that was not fair to Lilly. Lilly would laugh with him, but not at him. There was a certain respect and understanding between them. Lilly was his best friend. He lifted his head and stared into her attentive green eyes.
“Thank you, Lilly,” he said.
“Tell me – when you’re ready. I’m not going anywhere.” An easing smile appeared  on her face. The same soothing, trust-me smile she always had when she talked to her four-legged friends.
“Today at school – did you notice anything strange when I was doing the math problem? Did you see something . . . uh . . . unusual?”
“No, I didn’t. But I felt something.”
“What, Lilly?” he said, excited.
“I felt as if the air-conditioning was blowing icy-cold air in the classroom. It lasted for maybe a few minutes, I think. I had to hug myself and rub my arms to stop shivering. When you finished the problem, the air was normal again. That was weird.”
They, his two friendly ghosts, were in the classroom. No! It was not just a vision. They were real. They were there, and Lilly had felt their presence but couldn’t see them. Why did the ghosts show themselves only to him? What was their message? Why him? His imagination, his young need-to-know mind ran wild.
“Lilly, you may think that I’m climbing up on the nut tree, or losing my mind, or something even worse, but it wasn’t the air-conditioning that made you feel the icy-cold air. It was them. And I didn’t solve the problem either. They did it for me.”
“They? I don’t understand you, Hopsy. Who are they?”
Looking into her eyes, he told her everything. First her eyes got big, then bigger, her mouth opened wide, and when he finished telling her his vision, she mouthed a soundless, “Wow!” After the initial secret-sharing excitement was burned-out somewhat, Lilly wrote the phrase on her yellow notepad. Then they manipulated the words moving them around, attempting to better understand the real meaning of the phrase. They ended up with two phrases, which they thought made more sense than the single one. Full of excitement they read the results of their combined efforts.
“Your Destiny / The Dream of Hopeful Dreams.”
“Hopsy,” said Lilly in a trembling voice, “you must be special to them. I think they’re preparing you for something very important.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know.”
They were so much engrossed with Hopsy’s vision and trying to solve the mysterious phrase that they didn’t notice a man sneaking closer to them until his tall figure was standing above them. He stood there, hands crossed in front of him, his right foot tapping on the soft grass, and staring down at Lilly’s notepad.
His name was Tito Sophfron. The right half of his face was severely burned from the top of his forehead to under his chin. A milky filmed, pupilless right eye gaped open through his burned eyelids. It seemed that it was always fixed on the same spot, as if staring through whatever his good eye was looking at. Both his mouth and nose were deformed and crooked terribly toward the burned side of his face.
“What are the two of you doing here?” he shouted with his throaty, raspy voice, his eye still glued on Lilly’s notepad. “Give me that,” he demanded thrusting his long arm towards Lilly.
“No!” Lilly said and jumped to her feet. “You can’t have it.” She started taking backward steps while holding her notepad behind her back with both hands.
“Give it to me, you animal freak, before I break your neck like a twig.”
“Leave her alone, Mr. Sophron,” Hopewatch said calmly. He stepped between them and faced Tito. “What she wrote on her notepad doesn’t concern you.”
“You crummy little punks. I’ll . . .” Mr. Sophron started to say, but left his sentence unfinished.
Buster, Lilly’s two-year old wolf was standing next to her, snarling and showing his sharp teeth to Mr. Sophron.
Lilly’s father, Antony, being a shepherd himself, had found Buster in the woods when he was still a tiny cub. He had watched the young white-haired animal crawling on his belly, its big golden eyes staring at the same spot, carefully moving toward its target. When it was close enough to his quarry, it leapt into the air and its paws touched squarely where the sparrow used to be. It looked up at the might-have-been meal as it flew into the thick branches of a tree. Despite this failed attempt, and with a renewed confidence, the cub then scrutinized the slight movements of the grass. He hopped in the air and landed on all four paws at the same time. Another futile attempt. He ran after the trail of the escaping lizard through the zigzagging grass.
Antony watched and smiled. The cub had stepped on Antony’s shadow, looked at him with his big, golden eyes, and showed him its small sharp teeth. Antony tried to scoop him off the ground. The cub moved rapidly, crawled into the bushes, and tried crudely to imitate the rumbling, growling sounds of his parents. The cub gave a fair fight before he was captured. Antony fed him some fresh milk, put the pup in his lunch sack, and knowing Lilly’s abilities with animals, he gave it to her as a present. From that day on, she took good care of him and named him Buster. And as if by a miracle, wolves no longer attacked or mutilated their sheep or goats.
“Keep that thing away from me,” Tito muttered. Terrified he walked backwards distancing himself from Buster’s teeth, then he was gone.
“Thanks, Buster,” Lilly whispered in his ear as she combed his gray hair with her hand. “Come, Hopsy,” she said smiling, “let’s go away from here before Buster gets angry.”

Tito Sophron paced to his door, pushed it open, and kicked it shut. He was furious. He had been humiliated by those two little punks. He was a soldier. He had fought and shed blood for his country. He had been deformed doing his duty – protecting his fellow men, his flag. What was wrong with the world anyhow? The Spartans knew exactly what to do with their children. Took them off the streets at age seven, taught them soldiering, taught them to be strong, taught them to fight, made killers out of them. Kill the enemy. They’re everywhere. Kill them all. Exterminate.
Tito’s blood was boiling hot. He forced his fingers into a giant fist, raised his arm  above his head, and hammered the table forcefully. The middle of the table caved inwards, broke in two, and with a final squeaking sound, fell on the floor. He stared at his fist as if he had never seen it before, then he chuckled aloud. “I still got it! God help me, I still got it,” he shouted and tried to smile at his image in the mirror, but he couldn’t. His smile looked more like it was frowning or mocking him. No matter. Although he knew that his smile looked crooked and ugly, it was his smile. He liked it. He’d earned it. Hadn’t he?
His eye stared at the broken table. Suddenly, an uncontrollable urge of wrath rose from the great depths of his gut. His right booted foot landed hard on the half table, sending it to the other side of the room. He watched it crash onto the floor. It squeaked and creaked like a dying creature as it fell apart. He smiled. Yes! That felt good. He kicked the other half even harder. It flew six feet high, traveling toward the kitchen window. It smashed the glass into tiny pieces, and bits of glass struck noisily down on the floor. It went through the broken panels, and landed outside on his small vegetable garden, destroying his tomato, onion, and pepper plants. Now that he had worked the anger and frustration out of his system, he felt much calmer, and nimbly justified.
Now he could pick up the phone and do his duty as he’d always done. No little punks would take glorious fighting warriors and make amicable citizens out of them. That was unacceptable to Tito. He could never permit that. As long as he had one drop of blood left in him, he’d be a fighting soldier, so help him God.
He picked up the phone in his huge hand, dialed a number, and tapped his boot on the floor, nervously.
“It’s me. Me, Tito. Yes, Tito Sophron. Tito in the small . . . village, you know. Yeah, that Tito. I think it happened. I heard him talking to his, uh . . . animal-talker friend. She freaks me out, man. I heard words . . . Something about destiny, ghosts, dreams. No, I didn’t have the chance. Sir . . . the wolf – she has a damn wolf for a pet. Unbelievable. Yes, I’m listening. I will, sir. Yes, sir. Goodbye, sir.”
He’ll show them punks and, at the same time, do his patriotic duty for his country.

Somewhere at the foot of the tall mountains there was a green oasis. Hidden under the shade of the enormous trees, a well preserved old wooden house was built on the banks of the peaceful creek. After entering through the window panel, fixing the math problem, leaving their message on the blackboard, and paying their respect to Hopewatch, the two ghosts flew hurriedly back home, and emerged into their living aged-old bodies.
“It started,” said the old man. Then he took his long stick and made a circle in the air. “Now let’s sit back and watch.”
Instantly, the circle became a giant, alive, viewing screen. They saw the puzzled face of Hopewatch as he walked back to his seat.
“Such a beautiful little boy,” the old lady said, giggling with joy. “He is the one, yes?”
“Yes, Mother. He is the one. We know that already. That is, if he doesn’t change, if he follows his destiny, if we can keep him safe from his enemies, if–“
”Look here,” she stopped him. “I’ve been married to you for how long now? I don’t know and I don’t care to know it either. I’ve lost a son and  a daughter for our cause. Your children. I want no more deaths. If you can’t protect the boy, then cancel the whole thing. You listening, old man? I have no more tears left to cry. Do you hear me?”
“Yes, Mother.”
She took a picture from the wall and stared at the faces of her son and daughter. Charles was six years older than his sister Henrietta. Like their father, Zoticus, they were tall and slender. “My tall cypresses,” Pheope used say to each one as she  looked lovingly into their eyes. They looked alike except for their eyes. Charles had inherited his father’s serious, pale-brown eyes, and Henrietta her mother’s, shining, gray-blue eyes.
Both, she and her husband, Zoticus, were devastated when the messenger had knocked on their door. The message was very simple, but explicitly clear. Their son, Charles, and their daughter, Henrietta, were both dead. Charles had died instantly from the powerful explosion of a claymore mine. For Charles the evidence was conclusive. Fingerprints and dental records showed, without a doubt, that Charles’ body was blown to bits and pieces. The messenger had ensured them that Charles had died instantly. As for Henrietta, although they couldn’t locate her body, she, the messenger had said, had either been eaten by wild creatures, or drifted away in the thick jungle, most likely injured from the powerful blast, and died elsewhere. After two days of searching and combing the immediate vicinity in the thick jungle of Vietnam, their investigation hadn’t produced any hopeful evidence that she might be alive. So, Henrietta was listed as MIA – Missing In Action.
With hardened hearts and saddened spirits the old couple had accepted the government’s explanation and looked no further into this saddest of affairs. Scratching their deep wounds would only make it  worse than their bleeding hearts could bear. It had taken more that three years for Pheope to accept the death of her children and to return their framed picture to the wall of their house. She placed the picture back on the wall, and after making sure that it was perfectly level, she turned and stared at her old man as if he was not there.
“Can you protect the child?” she asked at last.
“Yes! With my life.”
“Is that a promise?”
“Yes. It’s a promise.”
“Good.” She kissed his aged, wrinkled cheeks, held his hand gently, and sat by his side.  “Now we watch.”
After about two hours or so, Zoticus snapped his fingers and the screen disappeared.
“I believe they handled Mr. Sophron wisely,” Pheope said, giggling. “We have to keep an eye on that Tito. Such a mean man. Destroying his own furniture. Did you see that table flying out the window? I thought that was hysterical.” She stood up, still giggling. “Some tea?”
“Yes. That’ll be just fine,” he said, and made a mental note about Tito Sophron.