On the morning of the third day after the gunfire began, a man from Uwayl was found on the road to the village, shot repeatedly, his hands severed, set beside his head, sitting on end, steepled as they would be in prayer. For several hours, people passed the body and praying hands until a truck arrived, an old International pick-up carrying two men. Covering the body in a yellow blanket, they placed the dead man in the back. The oldest of the two men laid a towel next to the hands, kicked them onto the cloth, wrapped them quickly and placed them next to the body. The truck then turned back toward the town and drove off. A group of children witnessed the recovery, Jumma among them.
An hour after the corpse was removed from the road, several men on horseback appeared in the distance, all clustered together. Beyond them were two men sitting on what appeared to be camels. Jumma stood on a chair he pulled from his hut, the additional height giving him a better vantage point. “Jumma, get down from there,” his mother shouted from inside their home. Two of his friends were there, all three boys the same age, old enough to be frightened, yet trying to show some bravery, as they expected young men should . Turning, Jumma looked into the hut to see his mother gesturing violently, pointing to the ground, her hand tracing ovals in the air, a blue cloth in her other hand, eyes wide and then growing wider as she looked past Jumma. Whirling back, he saw the horsemen separating into two groups, the larger moving to his right, the smaller coming straight toward the village. Dust, the color of the dried grasses, rose behind them, drifting away to the right, following the riders moving away from the village, a spectral dust dog following its master. Behind him, he heard air escaping from his mother, as if someone punched her hard in the gut, the exhalation blunt, as the two boys standing beside the chair twirled where they stood, spun by the hand of fear, running away to their own huts. Jumma jumped backwards from the chair without looking, his quick motion tipping the chair over in the direction of the riders. Landing on his feet, his momentum carried him back into the doorframe of the hut, hitting his head hard enough to stun him momentarily. Jumma started to fall, his right arm extended to catch himself when he felt a hand wrap itself high on his arm, jerking him up and into the hut. His mother pulled him back into the large room that served for the family’s communal time together and into another smaller room, the kitchen. Shoving her children under the table, Jumma’s mother returned to the door of the smaller room and lowered a rough burlap cloth that was its door. Arming herself with a large, dark metal knife, she waited near the opening, wiping the perspiration from her face with the blue cloth. Jumma watched her mother, listening to the heavy breathing all around him, a harmonic chugging, fear’s chorus, singing the praises of the fate about to fall on them.
The young boy wondered about why he could feel the sounds of the horses hooves but not hear them. It is a strange thing, Jumma thought, hunched beneath the table with his two sisters. There is no storm coming, no thunder. Feeling the pounding of the horse’s hooves as much as hearing them, Jumma listened as his sisters’ breathing turned to sobbing, they clutched each other, their heads pressed hard together. Had he known it would be the last time he would see one of them, he would have studied her face, touched her hand, held her close in his arms. He wished he had done all of that and more. Her face was now lost to him. Trying as hard as he could, he could not remember his sister’s features. He tried drawing them, but couldn’t. Jumma carried his failure every day, a blister, raised and filled with remorse.
The first screams he heard were from a child. He tried to tell who it was, the shrillness masking the identity, it lasted but a few seconds, then stopped abruptly. For another second, there seemed to be a perfect silence, then gunfire, savage and large, hammering everything around them. Now there were screams everywhere. Jumma clamped his hands over his ears, squeezed his eyes shut, trying to block out the terror growing around him. He thought someone threw stones through the walls of the kitchen, then knew it was bullets hitting the floor and spraying dirt over his bare legs. The screams of his sisters loud in his ears, he opened his eyes to see his mother pulling the girls from beneath the table. Jumma scrambled after them, his hands clawing at the dirt, legs pumping, he seemed to go nowhere, the air thick, a crystal gel he could not move through. As his mother pushed her daughters through the burlap door, two men entered the hut, rifles held against their sides, pointed straight ahead of them, the bore of the barrel looking surprisingly small to Jumma. They were dressed in tan military fatigues and traditional headdress, the scarf wrapped over their faces, showing only heavy brows over large black eyes. Instantly, the men began shouting, ordering them to fall to the floor, spittle arching, cascading to the floor before them. Crossing
