Blast | June 04, 2026

L.F. Khouri’s heart-wrenching microfiction details a father’s reflection on the hardships of war, the weight of survivor’s guilt, and the deep desire for safety and normalcy. “Was Home Always This Bad?” reveals the profound lengths to which one will go to protect their loved ones.

TMR’s online-only prose anthology, BLAST features prose too vibrant to be confined between the covers of a print journal.

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Was Home Always This Bad?

Back then, home was just a war zone, plain and simple, and it still had something tender about it. Something of a fatherly face that would smile at me from the olive groves when the young checkpoint soldiers shouted at me to get out of my car and strip naked in front of my kids, on our way to school, to check all the things I was not hiding underneath. 

It also had the crackling melody of a motherly voice on the radio that would stitch me together late at night after I would jolt awake in the dark next to my wife, as our bed and the window frames rattled from the bombs blowing up our neighborhood, and the F-16s raping our sky. 

Back then, I would pray for the bombs and the rockets to miss our home. Each time, I would shamelessly pray that it would not be us this time, but another family living at the far edge of town. A family whose kids I had not taught math or grammar. A family I had never shaken hands with, nor set foot in their house. A family with no kids. A family that was on vacation in Jordan or Turkey. A family that, for all I knew, was not really a family but an abandoned house. 

Later, when I was fat with relief—when the sky was no longer shrieking, and I could hear my kids snoring and mumbling in their sleep—I would start to feel like myself again. Small. Ugly. Evil. How many families had been wiped out because of my prayers all these years? 

I would get up and pray until I could no longer stand on my legs. I would promise Allah to be less flawed the next time. I would be more considerate and loving. I would have more faith. I would remember the Prophet’s Golden Rule: “None of us has faith until he loves for his neighbor what he loves for himself.” I would plead for Allah’s forgiveness throughout the early morning. 

When the sun was finally out, I would shower and shave. I would whip up some breakfast and give my wife and kids a good morning kiss. I would watch my kids eat and bicker, and I would drive them to school. I would step out at the checkpoint, and I would not resist them stripping me naked. I would smile at my kids as they stared at my nakedness anxiously from the back seat, and I would keep on making silly faces until they cracked a smile.  

At their school, I would double their allowance and wave at them until they waved back. I would watch them disappear behind the blue rusty gate under a canopy of pine trees before I closed my eyes and gave myself, all of me, to the blooming sounds of children humming, chatting, racing, teasing, screaming, cursing, chewing, slurping, laughing, and arguing as they made their way towards the gate. 

I would keep my eyes shut and for a moment, or maybe two, I would start to feel like myself again—an almost normal father, going through yet another almost normal day, in an almost normal country, under an almost normal sky. I would pray for another almost normal night tonight and in the days to come.  

I would keep on praying until the morning bell blared. Until the birds escaped the canopy. Until the sounds, all of them, started to wilt, then fade away.  

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L.F. Khouri is a Palestinian writer whose work explores war, memory, and the inheritance of silence. His creative work has appeared or is forthcoming in literary journals such as New England Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Wigleaf, Alaska Quarterly Review, North American Review, Guernica, Brevity, The Rumpus, The Adroit Journal, Massachusetts Review, Booth, Consequence, The Offing, SmokeLong Quarterly, Another Chicago Magazine and elsewhere. Two of his pieces were selected for Best Microfiction 2026.