My Pounding Heart

It was two thirty in the morning last night when I awoke to the sound of a gunshot. My heart was practically pounding out of my body and my muscles jerked into fetal position. I lay there with my eyes wide open not wanting to move. About thirty seconds later I hear the same noise again, only this time it was closer. I had no idea what was going on. I did not hear the sound of rocks crunching under human feet outside my house and there were no voices carrying in the wind. ‘If they were killing an animal,’ I thought, ‘there would definitely be some sort of noise. Maybe someone shot themselves?’ I had NO idea what was going on. I didn’t dare peer out my window and I didn’t dare move. Every muscle in my body was as tense as rock and I had no idea what to do. I was certain there was someone with a gun outside my house – I just didn’t know what was happening. I thought about going to my family’s house, but that was too risky. What if the person thought I was someone else and shot me by accident. I couldn’t go outside!

At about 3:15, still completely wide-awake with my heart beating a million miles an hour and eyes glued open I heard the sound again. It was RIGHT outside my house. I patted around my bed for my headlamp and clung to it as though it was for my life. My eyes filled with tears, but I didn’t let myself cry. As slowly and quietly as I could I slipped out of bed and crawled on the floor. I tried not to make a peep of noise and curled into a ball. The cement was cold and hard and the space under my bed was limited. Within seconds the noise struck again and I began shaking. What on earth was happening? Why were there no animal sounds or any sounds at all for that matter? Why does this person keep shooting a gun? What if he accidentally shoots a bullet at my house? This is horrible. Morning can’t come soon enough.

I laid curled in a ball with my head on my crumpled mosquito net for nearly 3 hours. The noises stopped for a while, but that didn’t the fear away from me. I might have fallen asleep for 10 minutes or so, but I couldn’t let myself; I was too terrified. When morning finally came and I heard the voice of my mother outside I quickly crawled out from under my bed and went outside to see if anything was wrong. I asked my mom if she heard anything last night, and she looked at my like I was crazy. “Nope, not a thing,” she said and continued with her morning routine. THEN, all of a sudden, as I was walking to the cookhouse, the noise happened again! I jumped about a foot in the air and quickly looked all around. Just as my eyes hit the roof of the cookhouse I saw a coconut sliding down the tin roof and tumble onto the ground! I had never felt so silly in my life. A weight of about 1000 pounds was lifted off my chest and I no longer had to be scared of not sleeping for the rest of the year; there was not really a gun and I was not going to be shot by accident. It was only coconuts falling on the tin roof of the cookhouse! Why it took me over two months to hear this for the first time…I don’t know. All I know is the noise those things make when they hit a roof is HUGE and sounds EXACTLY like a gunshot. To think I spent a night on the cement floor under my bed because of a COCONUT…haha well…I guess that’s what happens when you are a naive ri-pelle in the Marshall Islands.