What the Olive Trees Remember - By Rizk Al Masri

Written By: rizk al masri

Category: Short Story

Competition: Global Poetry and Creative Writing Competition 2026

In a poignant portrayal of memory and resilience, Rizk Al Masri presents "What the Olive Trees Remember," a short story submitted to the Global Poetry and Creative Writing Competition 2026. This narrative, grounded in the deeply rooted traditions and experiences of a Palestinian family, eloquently explores themes of endurance, heritage, and the passage of time. Al Masri’s storytelling transports readers to a world where olive trees stand as silent witnesses to the trials and triumphs of generations.

About the Work

"What the Olive Trees Remember" weaves a tale of quiet resilience through the life of Um Khalil, a matriarch embodying the essence of survival amidst historical upheaval. The narrative is rich with imagery and emotion, capturing the enduring spirit of a family anchored by traditions and memories, as symbolized by the olive tree. Through evocative language, Al Masri delivers a profound message about the tenacity of roots and the legacy left behind, offering readers a glimpse into the nuanced tapestry of Palestinian life.

What the Olive Trees Remember

Original Submission by rizk al masri

WHAT THE OLIVE TREES REMEMBER · RIZK AL MASRI

HASHTAG KALAKAR LITERARY COMPETITION 2026 · SHORT STORY

What the Olive

Trees Remember

Rizk Al Masri

North American International School · Grade 10

"The tree is still standing. So are we.

Tell the children."

________________

I. THE COLOUR OF WALLS

Um Khalil had learned, over eighty-one years, to distinguish between kinds of silence.

There was the silence before the call to prayer - clean and expectant, carrying the faint warmth of cardamom from the kitchen. There was the silence after rain in January, when the earth exhaled and the whole city smelled of wet stone and something older than memory. There was the silence of early morning, before the neighbourhood woke, when she could still hear - or believed she could still hear - the sound of her husband Mahmoud breathing beside her in the dark, though he had been gone twenty-two years.

And then there was this silence: the silence that gathered between distant explosions. It was not a peaceful silence. It was a held breath. It was the particular quiet of a world that knew what was coming and had not yet decided whether to brace or to break.

She had learned not to be afraid of it. Fear was a young person's luxury. At eighty-one, she had been afraid so many times and survived so completely that fear had lost its authority over her. It visited still - she felt it occasionally in the soles of her feet, or in the quick contraction of her chest when a sound was too sudden - but it did not govern her. It had become simply another weather pattern, as ordinary and as uninvited as wind.

She was making tea.

She was always making tea. It was the single ritual she had refused to surrender, through every disaster the century had sent her way. When her firstborn son had been ill for three weeks with a fever the doctor said would not break, she had made tea. When she watched her neighbours leave in 1948 with suitcases and the wide eyes of people who believed they would return in a week, she had made tea. When Mahmoud died quietly in the blue hour before dawn, his hand cooling in hers by the time she realised, she had made tea. The ritual was not a comfort, exactly. It was more fundamental than comfort. It was an assertion: I am still here. The fire is still lit. The water still boils.

The house around her was the same house her husband's father had built in 1936, when the century was younger and more optimistic. Its walls were a particular shade of cream - not white, not beige, but something between the two that she had never seen replicated anywhere on earth. It was a colour that had absorbed nine decades of life: smoke and sea air, the fat of lamb on feast days, the breath of children who had been born inside these walls and gone out into a world that did not always deserve them. The colour was the colour of the house having survived.

She dropped three cardamom pods into the copper pot and listened to the water begin to change.

- - -

II. WHAT 1948 TAUGHT HER

She was four years old in 1948, which meant she had not understood what was happening - only that the air had changed.

The adult world of that year had the quality of a held conversation she was not allowed to hear. Fragments reached her: loaded words spoken quickly and then swallowed, the way her mother would interrupt herself when Um Khalil walked into the room. She remembered the sound of her neighbour Abu Yusuf loading his cart at three in the morning. She remembered the smell of jasmine that spring, which was the same as every spring before and every spring after, indifferent to catastrophe. She remembered that her mother had stopped singing in the kitchen - and that this absence, that particular warm voice absent from the space where it had always lived, frightened her far more than any sound at night.

Most of all, she remembered the key.

It had belonged to her grandmother's neighbour, an old woman called Fatima whose hands shook with age even in the best times. Fatima had pressed the key into Um Khalil's mother's palm the morning she left, asking her to keep it safe, because she would be back within the week - she was certain, the situation would resolve itself, these things always resolved themselves, did they not?

The key had passed through four pairs of hands over the decades, gathering the weight of its original promise - a promise preserved not as entry but as evidence that the door had once existed. It was made of iron and had a simple loop handle, the kind that fit warmly in the palm. When Um Khalil was old enough to understand what it meant, she began to hold it sometimes, in the evenings, not because she thought it would open anything, but because the iron remembered warmth. It remembered being useful.

She had thought about this for seventy years: the specific violence of taking a people's home and then insisting, to the world, that the home had never existed. The weapon was not only the soldier's rifle. It was the erasure that followed - the renaming of streets, the demolition of buildings, the slow reclassification of a people's grief as political inconvenience. To destroy a village and then deny the village: this was not merely cruelty. It was a calculated epistemic crime. It attempted to delete not just the physical, but the factual.

The key resisted deletion.

Um Khalil kept it in a blue ceramic bowl on the windowsill of her bedroom, between a small bottle of rosewater and a photograph of Mahmoud taken in 1971, when he was thirty-two and laughing at something outside the frame. Every morning she saw it. Every morning it said the same thing: the door was real. The house was real. The woman who left believing she would return was real. And you, old woman, in your cream-coloured house - you are real too. Do not let them convince you otherwise.

- - -

III. THE TREE MAHMOUD PLANTED

He had planted it the morning after their wedding, in March of 1977, while she slept.

She had woken to find him in the courtyard in his good shirt - the white linen one she had asked him to change before the mud took hold - pressing an olive sapling into the earth with both palms, his face set with the serious joy of a man engaged in something he considers sacred. The sapling was thin. It looked fragile, which struck her even then as slightly optimistic for a man who had chosen to plant his permanence in this particular land, at this particular time.

"You're going to ruin that shirt," she said from the doorway.

He looked up and smiled the way he always smiled at her - a smile that knew her completely and found her, despite everything, wonderful.

"It will outlive the shirt," he said. "It will outlive us both."

"Everything good outlives us," she answered.

She was twenty-three. She did not yet know how precisely and painfully true that would turn out to be.

The olive tree grew. It grew with a patience that shamed everything around it - buildings rose and fell, governments changed and failed, three children were born and two of them left for places with quieter skies - and the tree continued, adding rings to its interior the way the years add rings to a person: invisibly, incrementally, each one a record of what was endured. Its bark thickened and corrugated. Its canopy spread across the courtyard and over the wall and into the alley on the other side, where neighbourhood children had grown up filching its fruit in September and running away laughing.

Mahmoud had loved that tree with a love he could never quite explain in words, which was, Um Khalil thought, exactly right. The deepest loves resist articulation. They can only be demonstrated - by returning to the same place, year after year, by pressing your hands into the soil around the roots, by standing beneath the branches and looking up at something larger and older than yourself and finding this, somehow, comforting.

He died in 2004, in the spring, which was the season he had always loved best. She buried him in the cemetery on the hill with a view of the sea he had grown up swimming in. She visited and stood and looked at the sea on his behalf. Then she went home and sat in the courtyard under the olive tree, and that, too, was a kind of conversation.

- - -

IV. KAREEM

Her grandson arrived in the early afternoon wearing boots white with dust and carrying the particular expression of a young man who has seen things his face has not yet learned to absorb.

He was twenty-four - Mahmoud's age when they married - and he had Mahmoud's hands: wide and steady, built for doing things carefully. He worked with a volunteer medical team now, moving through the neighbourhood with a first-aid bag that was perpetually insufficient and a calm that Um Khalil recognised as a specific kind of courage - not the absence of fear, but the decision to proceed in spite of it.

He sat across from her at the kitchen table. She placed a glass of tea in front of him without being asked. He wrapped both hands around it, and for a long moment neither of them spoke. This, too, was a language. In her family, silence between people who loved each other had never been emptiness. It said: I see you. It said: you are not alone in this room. It said: the kitchen is still standing and so are we, and for this particular hour, that is what matters.

"Teta," he said finally, "you should come and stay with Aunt Nadia. Just until things are quieter."

She looked at him with the particular patience of a woman who has been offered reasonable solutions to unreasonable situations many times.

"Leave," she said. Not a question. She was turning the word over, examining its underside.

"Just temporarily-"

"Your great-great-grandmother's neighbour also left temporarily," she said. "In 1948. She packed one bag. She took the key to her front door because she was coming back in a week - she was certain. She went to Lebanon. She lived in a camp for thirty years. She died in 1979 still holding the key, still describing the tiles in her kitchen to anyone who would listen: blue, with a small white flower at the centre of each one, she had bought them from a man in Jaffa market in 1931." She lifted her tea. "I have watched this family leave. I have watched what leaving costs. I am eighty-one years old, Kareem. I am too old to carry a key for thirty years. I am too old to describe tiles to strangers."

Kareem said nothing. He knew, as all the grandchildren knew, that there was a point in Um Khalil's reasoning beyond which argument became simply noise.

He drank his tea.

She looked at him with something that was not quite sadness - it was larger than sadness, and also fiercer. It was the look of a woman who loved someone too precisely to pretend that the world was other than it was.

"You are a good boy," she said. "Eat something before you go."

- - -

V. THE BRANCH

The explosion came close to sunset, arriving first as a pressure change - a subtle wrongness in the air, the way the atmosphere rearranges itself around catastrophe - and then as sound, lower and closer than the sounds of the previous two days.

Um Khalil was in the kitchen preparing lentil soup when it came. Her body responded the way it always responded now: no panic, no paralysis, only the well-rehearsed stillness of someone whose nervous system had long ago reached its final calibration. She set down the wooden spoon. She listened for the particular quality of the silence that followed. Then she walked to the courtyard.

The debris had caught the olive tree on its eastern side. A shard of something fast and indiscriminate had taken one of the older branches - one of the ones Mahmoud had always called the grandfather branches, thick and grey-barked, heavy with the memory of fifty harvests. The branch hung at a broken angle, its silver-green leaves trembling in a way that communicated shock, or what Um Khalil could not help but read as shock. A wound in the bark wept sap: slow, clear, pale as water - the tree giving what it had.

She stood before it for a long time.

She thought about Mahmoud pressing the sapling into the earth with both palms and his ruined shirt. She thought about her daughter Nadia, who had climbed this tree at age seven and refused to come down until sunset, and who now lived in an apartment in Amman where there was no courtyard and no tree and where Nadia sometimes called at night and said nothing, just listened to the sound of her mother's breathing, which was apparently enough. She thought about her son Hassan, who had not come back from the fishing boat in 2004, whose absence was the single weight in her chest that had never shifted - not even slightly, not even after twenty years.

She thought about the first olive oil she had pressed with this tree's fruit, in the autumn of 1983. She had done it alone - Mahmoud had a bad back that year, the children were in school - crushing the harvest with a borrowed press in the courtyard, the whole house filling with a smell so ancient and so complete that she had stood still in the middle of it with her oil-stained hands at her sides and felt, for a few seconds, that every Palestinian who had ever pressed olives was standing in the courtyard with her, and that the dead were not, in fact, absent from the places they had loved.

She went inside.

She returned carrying a length of cloth: part of an old thobe, the blue one her mother had embroidered when Um Khalil was a child. The embroidery ran along the hem in the traditional pattern of her region - small cross-stitched flowers in red and gold on black thread, each one sewn by her mother's hands during the long evenings of Um Khalil's childhood, when the radio played and the family sat together and the world was, for a few hours each night, the size of a single room.

She tore a long strip from the hem. She did it slowly - both because her hands were less quick than they had once been, and because the act deserved slowness, deserved attention, deserved to be done as if it mattered. Which it did, and she knew it, even if no one was watching.

She tied the strip around the broken branch.

She worked with the care of someone splinting a wound: firm but not tight, supporting the wood against the pull of gravity, wrapping the embroidered flowers around the wound in the bark so that the branch was held by her mother's thread and her mother's flowers and the seventy years of her mother's hands contained within them.

"There," she said - to the tree, or to Mahmoud, or to her mother, or to all the particular dead who lived in the soil beneath her feet and in the walls of the house and in the oil that had come from this very tree's fruit.

Kareem stood in the doorway, watching.

He was not a sentimental young man - he had seen too much in recent months for sentiment to have survived intact. But he stood in the doorway of his grandmother's house and watched her tie her mother's embroidery around a broken olive branch, and he felt something move through him that he would not be able to name for years. Something that was grief and also its opposite. Something that was the precise feeling of witnessing an act so small and so absolute that it redefines, quietly, what it is possible for a human being to do in the face of destruction.

He thought: this is what resistance looks like when it has been refined for eighty-one years.

Not defiance. Not rage. Not the raised fist, though he honoured those who raised theirs. Something quieter and more demanding: the decision, repeated daily, to tend to what you love. To stay. To wrap the broken things and keep them company and refuse, with the full weight of your presence, to pretend they are not worth tending.

- - -

VI. THE LANGUAGE OF ROOTS

Later, after Kareem had gone with food she had pressed on him and a look she had given him that contained everything she could not say, Um Khalil sat again by the window.

She thought about what the world had trouble understanding: that for Palestinians, staying was not stubbornness, and it was not a failure to grasp the danger. Palestinians understood the danger with a granularity and a precision that people watching from the outside, with their clean headlines and their managed distances, could simply not access. They understood it the way you understand a thing that lives inside your body - not as information but as sensation, as the particular weight that settles in the chest at three in the morning.

No. Staying was something else entirely. It was the recognition that home was not an address but an accumulation: the colour of a specific wall in a specific light, the feel of a specific stone beneath bare feet in July, the smell of a tree in October when the olives darkened and the air turned and the season completed itself. These things could not be relocated. They existed in one place only, and if you left them, you did not take them with you. You left them behind - and sometimes, often, you did not get to come back.

The mathematics of Palestinian displacement were not complicated, but they were devastating: every generation that left, every family driven from its home with the promise that things would settle, had discovered that the settling took longer than promised. And in the interval, memory began its slow erosion. The children born in exile remembered their parents' stories. The grandchildren remembered the stories of the stories. By the great-grandchildren, the tiles in the kitchen had lost their specific blue, the tree in the courtyard had lost its particular height, and the village itself had become something closer to symbol than place - a photograph of a photograph of a photograph, the original brightness fading with each copy.

Um Khalil refused that erosion. She refused it by staying in the house. She refused it by making tea in the same copper pot every morning. She refused it by knowing the exact shade of the walls and the exact weight of the key in the ceramic bowl and the exact smell of the olive tree in autumn. She refused it by insisting, with her physical presence in this physical place, on the factual reality of everything that erasure attempted to delete.

She picked up her phone - her granddaughter Rania in Jordan had taught her to use it two years ago, in a different season - and she photographed the courtyard. The olive tree in the evening dark. The strip of embroidered cloth around the broken branch, barely visible, the red and gold flowers catching the last of the light.

She looked at the photograph for a long time.

Then she typed a message and sent it to every name in her contact list that she recognised: Nadia in Amman, Kareem, Rania, her nephew Faris in Berlin, her old schoolfriend Wafa whose granddaughter had created the contact for her, the women from the old neighbourhood who were scattered now across five countries, each one carrying in their chest the same particular geography that could not be mapped.

"The tree is still standing. So are we. Tell the children."

She put the phone down. She finished her tea. She washed the copper pot and set it to dry upside down on the cloth beside the sink, the way she had always done, the way her mother had done before her. Then she went to bed.

- - -

VII. WHAT ENDURES

Outside, in the dark courtyard, the olive tree stood the way it had always stood.

Its roots had been growing since 1977. In forty-seven years they had pressed through the courtyard stone and down into the deep soil beneath - through the layers of sand and clay and the remnants of older things, older walls, older foundations, the broken pottery of older inhabitations - until they found water: permanent and cold, many metres below the surface. A root that finds water does not let go. It thickens around the source. It sends the water upward into the tree with the patient consistency of a heart.

The tree did not know about borders. It had no opinion on the political classifications of the land its roots moved through. It did not know that the earth above it had been mapped and renamed and disputed and bombed and rebuilt and disputed again. It knew only what its roots told it: that the ground was there, that the water was there, that the light came from the east every morning, and that in October the olives would be ready - dark and fat, as they had been every October, without exception, for nearly half a century.

The strip of embroidered cloth moved slightly in the night breeze. The flowers of Um Khalil's mother's needle - red and gold on black thread - visited the wound in the bark the way memory visits the places it loves: quietly, in the dark, without asking permission.

In Amman, Nadia received the photograph and cried in a way she had not allowed herself to cry in months. Then she called her daughter and showed her the image and said: that is your great-grandmother, and that is the tree, and you will know both of them.

In Berlin, Faris showed his children the photograph and told them about the courtyard, the olive oil, the key, and Teta Samira who had left in 1948 with one bag and never came back. His youngest daughter, who was eight, asked if they could visit. He said yes - one day - which is the answer Palestinians have been giving their children for three generations, and which contains within it, still, despite everything, the structural components of a promise.

And in London, and in Canada, and in the Gulf, and in the camps in Lebanon and Syria and Jordan, and in the diaspora scattered across every continent of the earth, other phones lit up with the same image. Other Palestinians looked at the olive tree in the dark and recognised it - not because they had seen that particular tree, but because they carried inside them the memory of a tree, inherited from parents who had inherited it from their parents, all the way back to the first root in the first soil: patient and specific and impossibly deep.

Um Khalil slept. Her breathing was steady and unhurried, the breathing of someone at home.

The house around her held the dark the way it had always held it - with the particular solidity of walls that have survived more than they were built to survive and have, through that survival, become something beyond mere structure. Something closer to testimony.

Outside, the olive tree kept its roots. The embroidered cloth kept its flowers. And deep beneath the courtyard, beneath the stone and the old foundations and the cold water the roots had found, the earth kept everything it had ever been given.

In Palestine, the earth does not forget.

Nothing planted in love is ever entirely gone.

- End -

Rizk Al Masri · North American International School · Grade 10

Hashtag Kalakar Literary Competition 2026 · Short Story

About the Competition

The Global Poetry and Creative Writing Competition 2026, hosted by Hashtag Kalakar, is a prestigious platform celebrating the creative expressions of writers worldwide. This competition seeks to honor diverse voices and foster a global community of literature enthusiasts. It provides a unique opportunity for participants to showcase their talents and share their stories on an international stage, encouraging a rich exchange of cultural and artistic perspectives.

We extend our sincere gratitude to Rizk Al Masri for sharing "What the Olive Trees Remember" with us in the Global Poetry and Creative Writing Competition 2026. This evocative short story not only enriches our understanding of cultural resilience but also reminds us of the enduring power of storytelling. We look forward to witnessing more of your literary journey and contributions to the world of creative writing.

About Hashtag Kalakar

Hashtag Kalakar is a creative platform dedicated to providing artists, writers, singers and other creative talents with opportunities to showcase their work and reach wider audiences through competitions, features and creative initiatives.