Below is the a creative, non-fiction vignette written by Erjona Gashi about Maki’s interview.

It started with hesitation. 

Makfire’s Facebook message was careful, almost apologetic. She wasn’t sure her story was worth telling. She hadn’t lost a family member in the war—not in the way others had. No executions. No massacres. 

I told her it mattered anyway. 

At 6 p.m. on a Wednesday, I dialed her number. 

She picked up. A pause. A deep breath. And then, the past opened. 

Makfire: 

“Only a few of our neighbors came back. A few. 

The streets felt abandoned, empty.  

There was a fear of waking up one day and realizing we were the last ones left.  

We didn’t want to be alone. So, we were thinking of leaving too. 

There was a direct line from Prishtina to Shkup, but it was expensive.  

And worse—men were dragged from buses and killed in front of their families.  

They made their families watch. 

My older brother helped his wife and children onto a bus, but he came back.  

He couldn’t leave because, at the bus stop, the soldiers caught him.  

They lined him up with the others—young men standing in the last moments of their lives. 

Then—something. A voice, a name called from the crowd. A soldier changed his mind. 

And they let him go. 

He was lucky. 

My father also refused to leave home. 

 My mother and my brother were too afraid to take the bus, to join the caravans of people moving south. 

So, I stayed with them. 

I couldn’t leave either.  

I didn’t know if they would remember to eat, I didn’t know if they could survive without me. 

We went back and forth with our decision to leave. Our neighbors did too. 

We planned to take the train to Macedonia. We heard people were leaving from Fushë Kosovë. 

But to get there, we had to walk. 

And my parents were old. 

So, we postponed it. Just for one more night. 

We said we’d leave in the morning. 

And the morning was the last time I saw my father alive. “