The short old man with a long, grey beard was standing on the lone mountain, seeking solitude. The sun was setting, with the sky being painted with a beautiful cream orange like it were a canvas and the setting sun: the artist. Just as he was about to lose himself in his deep thoughts, his eye caught a very different orange. With his state of meditation broken, he turned his attention to the orange which had disrupted the sky and saw an orange-yellow cloud rising towards the sky. The machines had come back.

As he was walking home, he thought to himself, ‘how much more will these machines torment our village?’ He arrived back at his home just as the twilight of the sky had passed and the isolation of the night had come. His house, just like many other houses in the valley village, was nothing more than a simple dwelling, usually only one or two moderately sized rooms with open-cut windows to let the warm air in to cool themselves. The houses were made from sandstone and wood, much of which has been worn down throughout the years. As he opened the door to his home, he smelled the smell of food and saw his wife cooking over an open fire in the main room on the stone floor.

‘Come, you’ve been out for a long time, you need to eat,’ she said.

‘Yes, yes… I’ll eat a bit, but I need to head to bed straight after – I need to clear my head.’

The wife knew exactly why he was feeling like this, everyone in the village did, so she simply nodded.

The next day the man woke early in the morning, even before his wife. He dressed himself and head out to the market to go to work. He set up his stall and sat down patiently, waiting for customers to come. As sky changed from the same creamy orange of the evening to the blue of the seas of day the flow of customers continued to increase. There was mutter all around the market about the large, sudden sound yesterday.

‘Did you hear that sound yesterday?’

someone said to their friend. Another passing woman said

‘I think the machines are back.’

At midday, the man was still sitting by his stall not having had taken his break yet, and just as he was about to get up to eat his lunch, two boys approached his stall.

‘Hello Sir,’

the boy said. He was accompanied by a slightly taller boy with dark hair.

‘Hello young boys. What can I do for you two?’

the old man asked the two young boys.

‘We heard another explosion yesterday. We think that the machines are back and we will take one out. We just need one more thing, like something shiny…’

The boy paused for a few seconds and then resumed,

‘Do you have anything?’

The man nearly went white in shock and felt faint. He reminisced to the previous day and the thought of these children dead was something he could my live with. After all, they all knew eachother there; it was a small village.

‘No, I don’t. – don’t go after that drone,’

he said sternly. The boys frowned and walked away.

The man was very old and it was well into the Muslim month of Ramadan. The man, who was content on keeping his fast closed his shop early to rest, at the expense of profits. He arrived at home, changed his clothes from his work clothes into to his much thinner home clothes. It was beautifully woven which felt like as one was being smothered by dozens of sheep.

The old man woke at twilight in time for Iftar. He and his wife broke their fast with dried dates and water. He then hiked up to the mountain once again to clear his head. He has been doing so every night for the last twenty years. Once more he stood on top of the mountain in solitude. Once more the beautiful canvas of the sky was destroyed by a yellow-orange cloud. He would not allow his mind to drift to conclusions. All he knew was that violence never changes and ignorance is bliss.