Born of Rubble (aka. Tragedy)

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

The year was 2023.

Shelly and I had been physicians for most of our adult lives, anaesthesiologists to be precise, working at a private hospital in the US and had built a quiet, respectable existence in the suburbs of America.

Then came the news that shook up our humble existence. Shelly’s father was murdered in Israel, and we had to return to the homeland we had no ties to go pick up his remains.

My father-in-law was a retired businessman caught in the wrong part of the West Bank on the wrong day. The details… well, they were too ugly for the press to recount in all their dismal particulars. The whole nation erupted to say the least, but we flew back anyway since our grieving family demanded it, especially since both Shelly and I were the only ones with Israeli passports.

But once we arrived, a full-scale war broke out, and we were soon trapped. The airports shut down, and everything we thought was secure and would bring us safely back home faltered and meant nothing.

It was an inferno to say the least, and everywhere we went, the smell of charred flesh followed us like a second skin. If this was not hell on earth, then what could be? Our homes were destroyed, our windows smashed into thousands of shards. 

“Resistance”, the world called those atrocities; I called it “antisemitism” against our peaceful people who wanted nothing but peace and safety in the wake of World War II.

So what if thousands of children were killed in the Gaza Strip? What if children were detained by the most moral army in the West Bank just because we occupy it? No, the real question is what of our children who have to endure those human animals roaming among our kind? What of Shelly’s father, who built homes and businesses with sweat, blood, and tears all over the country and beyond?

Still…

I remember what I thought when I first saw her, this malnourished girl buried beneath the concrete, whose face was caked with dirt and dry blood: Hamas terrorist. It was Shelly who heard her amid the cheering, laughter, and dance as an entire Palestinian neighbourhood crumbled under our bombs.

She ran. I followed. It was a miracle we were not shot.

It was an Arab human waste, barefoot and bleeding from one leg, who helped us pull her free from the ruins. He lifted a plank off her tiny form with those filthy Arab hands, shouting warnings in a language I refused to learn or listen to, even if I was on the brink of death. 

And yet, beneath him, cradled in what was once a father’s embrace, lay our beautiful daughter. The man’s body had shielded her from collapse, his back bent over hers, arms tight around her as though he would never let go. And, surprisingly, he had not, either. Instead, he had died holding her like the human shield he was for our bombs and guns. And, I was the one she smiled at, that poor and unfortunate child, and not the one who had looked death straight in the eye to protect her.

Even back then, staring into her wide, brown eyes, I felt nothing for the Arab invaders; not for the man who saved her, not for the neighbours whose bones and flesh now fed the rats. My only thought at the time was that I had been handed something impure and filthy, yet so precious at the same time. A child that I could easily shape to my liking; that I could cleanse her and raise her as my own, as one of the chosen people and watch her turn against those who shared her filthy blood.

Shelly didn’t share my thoughts, not entirely. She just wept and cradled the girl, whispering promises in Hebrew. But I saw something in her I had not seen in years – hope. That child was Shelly’s way of seeking absolution for the atrocities our corrupted government and military did to the Palestinian people. Perhaps, even her purpose… her only purpose in life.

But for me, she was something else. A weapon and a living proof to those who failed to see our superiority against other ethnicities, proving every one of them wrong who said we couldn’t take one of them and make them better and more like us. Because, as everyone knows and should be aware, being a jew is a race of its own – one that is superior, at that. To think people see and compare us with other nations and nationalities is a disgrace to our heritage and the purity that runs in our veins.

Anyway, we wrapped her in Shelly’s coat and walked back through the ruins, back to the apartment we were hiding in three storeys above a “deserted” Palestinian bakery, until the situation had become better and we could leave for the US.

The girl hadn’t spoken a word the whole walk back, though she had stopped smiling at some point. Her tiny body was stiff, and her eyes were alert and wide open. She flinched every time the distant thunder of gunfire echoed from the horizon, yet she never cried. Even when Shelly gently wiped blood and ash from her face with water from our dwindling supplies, the girl watched her in silence.

“She needs a name,” I said that night as I was sitting at the window, counting flashes of artillery in the east hitting the human wastes.

“She has one, remember? That man said her name was—”

“We’re not naming her after one of them.”

Shelly didn’t answer; she just cradled the girl in her arms, rocking slowly in the candlelight. She looked older in that moment, or maybe just thinner. War had made her gaunt; her softness had melted away, except when she looked at the child.

“I always liked the name Reena,” she whispered. “It means joy.”

I almost laughed. “Joy?”

“She survived, and now she’s our joy.”

“She won’t if we get caught keeping her, you know that, right?”

“She’s a child, not some illegal good for import, for fuck’s sake, Ethan! Can you, for once, answer without trying to crack a damn joke?”

“What? Don’t tell me you’re really thinking of keeping her? Shelly, look at me. Is that what you want?”

“She’ll die out here, Ethan… I—I can’t let that happen…”

I didn’t argue. There was no winning that battle. Shelly had already made the decision. She’d already named her and made the kid her own, so who was I to protest? Besides, I had my own reasons for wanting to keep that child, as I mentioned earlier.

Reena never once showed her true emotions to us, even at such a vulnerable age and time; I could tell that much. How old could she be, even? Three, five? Older? She was too malnourished for me to say something for certain, but the way she listened and observed us told me that she at least understood some Hebrew.

We stayed in hiding for another month or so. Shelly bribed some soldiers for documents, and I pulled strings with distant colleagues back at home. When the skies opened and we were finally allowed to board a relief flight, Reena slept the whole way strapped to Shelly’s chest beneath a heavy coat. The checkpoint officers never asked.

Back in the US, we told no one the truth; there was no need to, honestly. Most people we knew had stopped asking questions about the Middle East anyway, since such things were too complicated to even keep in memory and too far removed from Sunday barbeques and white picket fences. And we just… made it easy for them, you know? What was the harm in that?

We even told some distant relatives we had not seen since forever that Reena had Shelly’s eyes, that she took after my sister, who died young. And Reena, well, she made it easy, too. She took to Hebrew like water, learnt our customs with ease, memorised and sang prayers louder than the other children at the local synagogue. No one questioned where she came from. Why would they? She was bright, well-behaved, and devout. 

Still, there were nights I’d find that kid awake in the dark, curled in bed with her eyes open, listening, as if waiting for a voice she had forgotten but still expected to hear in the darkest hour of night. Perhaps she knew she was adopted, just not aware of the exact details, since it was difficult to keep children from running their mouths.

I told myself she would forget sooner or later… that memories under five years of age rarely stick, and that she would never be able to remember the man who died for her, or her childhood home now in ruins and forever destroyed – as should be the case for our people’s safety against those terrorists.

By the way, did I mention that Achmed the Dead Terrorist is literally the true face of those human animals? Man, the ventriloquist hits the nail in the coffin like no one does with his shows, depicting those human wastes as what they are and will forever be: terrorists, terrorists, and I’m going to repeat this once more since stating the truth is never enough: goddamn terrorists. 

Shelly, on the other hand, did not feel the same. Although she never mentioned anything about her true origin to Reena, I could see it in her, you know? That devastating guilt ate her heart out every single time Reena took pride in her Jewish heritage.

I even caught Shelly lit a yahrzeit candle one night several years ago. I confronted her about it that same night. But she wouldn’t say to whom she lit the candle for, and so I blew it out, and that was the last time Shelly ever did anything like that behind my back. 

And Reena? Well, she was a wonderchild, and her every action fascinated me in ways no words could capture. You know how they say children absorb everything they see and hear, how they mimic and mirror the adults around them? And Reena – oh, she mirrored us beautifully! She was clever. Too clever, sometimes.

She picked up accents, subtle rituals in Hebrew that even we hadn’t taught her. By age seven, she was correcting my pronunciation of the Torah’s verses, asking why her dolls didn’t wear skirts below the knee like the other girls at shul. She even begged for braided challah on Fridays and took her prayer books to bed like other children held stuffed bears.

The other parents in our community adored her. They called her gifted, that she was indeed one of God’s chosen and a blessing to not only us, but the whole community.

When she turned twelve, she had already learnt the Torah by heart. She even stood at the bimah during her bat mitzvah and read in perfect Hebrew. The congregation beamed, save for one person: Shelly. She stood in the corner, weeping quietly into her sleeve, trying not to be seen for the guilt of raising such a perfect child.

And me? Well, I watched my precious daughter raise her hands in blessing, heard her speak of our people’s return to strength, and felt nothing less than pride! Because she was our daughter, and not some human waste, and no entity could take that from us!

Shelly, on the other hand, always looked at our daughter with an expression halfway between pride and dread. I think she feared the purity of it, the absoluteness with which Reena believed what we told her and what the community taught her. She was becoming everything Shelly had hoped and feared she might become.

Mind, we didn’t teach her to hate Arabs. Not directly. But we didn’t stop her, either. I remember once, when she was about nine, we were driving home from the local Hebrew school, and the radio was on, giving out some news segment about escalating violence in the West Bank. Reena was in the backseat, kicking her shoes off, eating some dried apricots, when she suddenly said aloud:

“They should just send them all away! If they hate us so much, why don’t they just leave? Let them go rot in the desert!”

Shelly’s hands had tightened on the steering wheel. I turned to face Reena immediately, just as alarmed by what I was hearing as Shelly was.

“Who told you that?” I asked.

She shrugged. “Everyone at school says it. Why? Are they wrong?”

Shelly said nothing, neither did I, but her hands shook on the wheel and the colour drained from her face. I could tell she wasn’t feeling well, but didn’t dare to say anything in front of our daughter, just in case we might reveal more than we ought to at the time.

When we arrived at home, Shelly went straight to her study and closed the door, locking herself up and crying the whole night. I tried a few times to knock and plead with her to open it, but she wouldn’t let me. I knew what was going through her mind, and that she thought it was all my fault for talking badly about the Arabs, but how could I hide from my tongue what my heart preached every waking hour?

Reena grew into her teenage years with grace and bloomed into a beautiful young woman. She excelled in school and wrote essays about the dignity of the Jewish resistance, the pain of the diaspora, and the need to protect what was ours. At the community centre, she even volunteered to lead youth prayer groups to organise food drives for soldiers returning home from Israel. 

She never asked about her past. Not once. And that, I think, was the most terrifying thing, yet at the same time, the most fascinating thing, too. But Shelly tried, now and then, to hint at things. She would leave a book in Reena’s room: one copy of a memoir by a Jewish-Arab woman recounting her life after the Nakba, and a translation of Palestinian poetry published before 1948. She even suggested they watch a film together, one that didn’t portray the war in favour of our people, but Reena refused to do so. And so the books gathered dust, and the movies were never watched.

Several years then passed in a blur.

She was eighteen when she brought him home, Naim. He had the posture of a soldier and the eyes of a fanatic. He spoke to me in broken Hebrew and offered Shelly flowers she never touched.

Once, during supper, the guy started recounting stories of his terrorism and time in the Israeli army: of his time guarding the border and killing children like it was some kind of game among the dispatched soldiers, of his time distributing flyers calling for the annexation of the West Bank, and of his plans to join a kibbutz outside Bethlehem “to reclaim what was stolen.”

Shelly said very little that evening. I expected that much, given how she felt about Reena’s stance on the Palestinians. Later, however, in the kitchen, she turned to me and whispered, “We need to tell her. It cannot let this go on like this! Before it’s too late, we must—”

“It is too late, Shelly. Look at her, just look at her!”

“No. Not yet! But if she leaves, if she moves to Israel with him, she’ll become someone we can’t reach anymore! We need to tell her before she does something she’ll never be able to forgive herself for! You know it’s the right thing to do, Ethan.”

“You think she’ll forgive us, then? That she won’t turn against us once she hears she shares blood with those animals she hates? Shelly, darling, do you want her to hate us?”

“We owe her the truth, Ethan! Now more than ever. As her mother, I must tell her, even if it means she… she’ll end up hating me.”

“You’re not thinking straight! What good will come out of telling the truth? Why don’t we just… just let her be? Hmm? Shelly, look at me.” I cradled her face, wiping away the spilling tears. “Please, don’t say anything, Shelly. Please…”

“I must, Ethan… I have to. For her sake.”

She didn’t ask me to help her, just to accompany her as she told the truth two days before she was meant to leave for Israel with her boyfriend. The house was unusually quiet that day. Shelly had barely spoken all day and moved through the rooms like a ghost, cleaning things that weren’t dirty, folding blankets that hadn’t been used. It was as if she were trying to suppress the dread creeping closer with each passing second.

When Reena finally arrived late at night, all jittery and excited to leave for Israel with Naim tomorrow morning, Shelly sat across her and gestured for me to come over not long after. It was one of those few moments in my whole existence that I would never forget.

“Reena,” she said, “can we talk to you for a moment?”

“Yeah, sure. What is it?”

Shelly reached for her hand. Reena let her take it, although her bright smile was now fading and being replaced with something wary and on alert.

“I need to tell you something… something I should’ve told you long ago but couldn’t.”

“If this is about Naim, then I already know you don’t like him—”

“It’s not about Naim. It’s about you. About where you come from.”

“Where… I come from? What’s that supposed to mean?”

I wanted to stop it. I should’ve stopped it. I should’ve grabbed Shelly’s hand and said it was too late, that it would do no good. But I just sat there like the fool I was and watched as she cracked open the shell we’d so carefully built around our lives.

“You weren’t born here,” Shelly said. “Not in this country… not to us.”

“I already know that, Mum. It’s no big deal; it really isn’t! You don’t have to—”

“We found you,” Shelly continued, “during the war. In the West Bank.”

“What? Did you just say… West Bank?” She now looked at me, trying to get a confirmation. “Dad, what’s going on?”

I looked at Shelly, sighing, then finally broke the silence, too.

“You were buried under the rubble of an airstrike by the Israeli military. Your father had shielded you with his body, and he died making sure nothing happened to you. Reena, you’re not like us, you’re not a Jew.”

“No,” Reena said, her voice now visibly shaking. “No, you’re lying! You both are!” She stood up, worked up and was shaking. “Why would you… Why would you say something like that? Something so horrible… Why would you—”

“Because it’s the truth,” Shelly said. “Because you deserve to hear the truth before you do something you regret.”

Reena laughed, still refusing to accept the truth as is, finding excuses on our behalf she so dearly hoped we would confirm – even if that meant to keep her in the dark forever.

“Ah, now I see why you’re saying stuff like this! But, Mum, Dad, do you think this will stop me from leaving? But even if that’s why, how could you say such a disgusting lie? Me, an Arab? Come on! It’s impossible… it’s—”

“Reena,” I tried, “it’s not…”

“I told you, you can’t keep me from leaving by saying those… those horrible lies…”

“I wish it were, but it isn’t. Your mum and I only ever wanted the best for you. But when you took pride in our heritage and looked down on the Arabs, neither of us knew how to—”

“Stop it!” Reena snapped, her voice cracking and her breathing shallower by the seconds. “I said, stop it! Don’t you dare say that! Don’t you dare!” Tears poured down her cheeks next, and her face flushed red with confusion. “All this time…” she whispered, as if to herself. “You made me hate them. Hate… myself? I’ve said things—no, I’ve done horrible things that… Oh God...” Her hand shot up to her hair, the confusion in her eyes mounting as the realisation that we were telling the truth finally dawned on her. “What have… what have I done?”

She dropped to her knees, clutching her head still and in deep shock. Shelly tried to comfort her, but our precious daughter pushed her away. “Don’t,” she snapped. “Don’t you dare touch me! You—you did this to me! You people did this to me!”

Shelly sobbed, collapsing too. “We only loved you! We love you still! But your dad and I—I know, we should’ve let you know much earlier, and I’ll never forgive myself for not telling you—”

“I can’t believe this… this is happening to me. I can’t—” She then shifted her eyes filled with hatred towards Shelly. “Love… me? You dare say that? Love me? You’re disgusting! You people disgust me!”

“We saved you, Reena,” I retorted upon hearing her raise her voice at Shelly. “Had we left you with those animals, you would’ve died just like those children in Gaza! We gave you a haven and a roof over your head! You do not raise your voice at your mum—”

“No,” she snapped. “You stole me, and that woman…” She pointed at Shelly, who was hunched forwards and sobbing, “Is not my mum,”— then at me—“nor you my dad!”

That was the last thing she told us before she left home, and for years, she just… vanished. We couldn’t reach her. Not even Naim knew what had become of her. And so, the years went by.

Shelly took it the worst; she stopped lighting candles on Friday nights and withdrew from the community altogether. When people asked about Reena, she would just give a small, sad smile and then say no more. It was her own way of saying “I don’t know”, I suppose. I kept expecting her to return, though. Part of me hoped she would, yet another part feared it.

There was no news of what had happened to her, our beautiful and innocent daughter whom we should’ve shielded from the truth, after all. Neither Shelly nor I expected her to just… abandon us. That she could just turn a blind eye to our past, the beautiful memories we shared, and just… disappear without a trace. Shelly regretted it the most and kept saying over the years that I had been right, that we should just have let her be and let her live her life as a proud Jewish woman.

In our last year of retirement, Shelly grew sick, quickly and terribly, a cancer neither of us had seen coming, and it was quickly eating at her, turning her thinner by the day and into a living corpse. She didn’t speak of Reena during those years, but I knew she reminisced about those fleeting years of her childhood and relished in those merry moments.

And then, one autumn morning, Reena did come home.

She arrived on a Sunday, just after dawn. I heard the knock first, three short taps, then silence. I was in the kitchen, microwaving water for tea at the time. The last person I expected to see when I opened that door was my beloved daughter, and so my limbs turned numb and I was stunned into silence.

She had grown older, much older than I remembered or expected, like one year of her life was equal to several. The angles of her cheekbones were hollower too, like she was a living skeleton, but most shockingly, a hijab now covered her hair. She didn’t even say hello or ask me how I had been; instead, she stepped past me into the house.

“I didn’t think you’d ever come back,” I finally managed.

She didn’t answer. Her eyes swept over the furniture, the photographs on the wall, and the books that Shelly never returned to the shelves. Everything was as it was the day she left, except dimmer, dustier, and emptier.

“I heard she was dying,” Reena said at last, yet without once looking straight at me as if I were some plague like those human animals she shared blood with, “that she asked for me.”

“She has. Would you want to see her one last time? I’m afraid she hasn’t much time left…”

She said nothing, only her gaze landed on the framed bat mitzvah photograph hanging on the wall, where twelve-year-old Reena was smiling brightly in a white dress with the Torah clutched to her chest.

“I hated her for what she did to me,” she said. “But I loved her too. That’s the worst part of it, you know? That I still did.”

“But she’s never stopped loving you; neither of us did.”

“No, you’re wrong, Dad. She didn’t love me. She loved the version of me she created. You both did.” Then, she finally met my gaze before carrying down the hallway. “And you made a fool out of me, did you know that?”

She paused at the threshold of her old room, one hand on the doorframe, refusing to enter although her feet seemed to have dragged her there on command. Everything was exactly as she had left it. Her bed was neatly made, her old scarves in the top drawer, and a small prayer book on the nightstand.

“I can’t believe you left everything as is…” She stepped inside. I followed closely behind her, ready to respond, when she suddenly turned and addressed me through gritted teeth, a crooked smile playing on her dry lips now covered in tears. “After everything you put me through, you really thought… I’d one day return and pretend like nothing happened?”

“Reena, we—”

I never finished my sentence; instead, I looked down as she reached into her sleeve and brought out a knife. I just listened to what she had to say, or rather, what she had come to say to us one final time. 

“I wanted to forgive you. I really did, Dad. I told myself that maybe you didn’t know better… that you were thinking you were saving me. But you knew, Dad. You knew what you were doing, and you just let it happen!” She stepped closer, wielding the knife. “How did it feel? To see me praise my people’s slaughter like it was no big deal? Did that make you feel like you had succeeded in your little project?”

“It wasn’t like that. Both me and your mum loved you, we really did. What happened was an unfortunate—”

“Accident? You… killed me, Dad! Not once, not twice! Every time you let me hate my own people, you let me die over and over again! And yet… you say you love me? Do you really expect me to believe that?”

“Believe what you want! I have no reason to lie to you!”

She briefly looked away, wiping the trickling tears with the back of her hand. “I hate you. I… fucking hate… you!”

“Reena, why are you here? The real reason…”

“You already know, Dad.”

“You’re going to kill us? After all we went through for you? Because of those human wastes, you try to copy? We raised you as a free and proud Jewish woman, Reena! And you hide behind that abysmal cloth on your head like those terrorists? Why would you degrade yourself like that?”

“Because I’m hurting, Dad! In here,” she pointed at her chest, “it stings. It burns! And it won’t go away! Not even for a second! Can you imagine that?” She then pounded repeatedly, shouting. “Can you feel the burn through me!? How it aches and stings like fire through my chest every time I recall the past – the one you created for me!?”

“Reena, I’m sorry, I…”

I never finished my sentence or asked her for forgiveness, not that I meant it anyway. I just wanted to save my wretched existence like the cowards shooting at helpless children in Gaza, like the most moral army to ever exist in this world under the lead of corrupted people with blood on their hands, preaching of our shared belief in a Greater Israel. 

She lunged and swung the knife at me; her whole body snapped forwards, grief-fuelled as she was and blinded with anguish. I stepped aside. I knew this would happen; I had always known it might.

The knife grazed my shoulder. She turned to strike again, but I grabbed her arm and wrestled her into a hold, my arms now around her neck and squeezing with all that remained of my strength.

“Let it go,” I said through clenched teeth. “Reena! Stop this madness and return to us! Leave the past behind and let us start anew!”

But she would not; instead, she fought. God, how she fought! She even screamed, bit, and scratched like the vile terrorist she had become! For once, she truly looked like one of them – a human animal! But even as her heels kicked at my shins and her whole body twisted with muscles I hadn’t known she had, I held on.

I held on as her screams turned to gurgles.

I held on as her limbs weakened.

And I… held on until she went still.

Then I held on long after that, too.

Shelly wanted me to place her in her childhood bed before she too closed her eyes to this wretched world, so that was what I did. From where she now lay, motionless, she began to decompose within days.

I didn’t report her missing or anything like that. I didn’t even bury her; I just watched as her skin turned waxy, then grey, then black with fluid. After a while, her lips too shrank from her teeth, her cheeks hollowed, and her hijab no longer fit her head; it sagged off like discarded skin, and when it slipped at last, I burned it in the garden and placed a Star of David above her bed in the hopes that she would be forgiven for her sins.

Shelly would’ve wanted that too, even though she’d stopped believing in Judaism long ago. Me? I just prayed. To Yahweh, to the silence between his names, that Reena might be forgiven for what she did, what we made her do, and that her soul might cross over into the Olam ha-Ba, The World to Come, against all odds. And if that place truly exists, if mercy still lives somewhere beyond what we made of her, she might be allowed to return to the people who wait for her in the rubble in another life. Not to us – never to us – but to the human animals she so wanted to belong to.

Yet even then, only after making sure she swears loyalty to our people, acknowledges our superiority, and spreads falsehood in favour of our shrewd beliefs of a world ruled by paedophiles seeking refuge in our Holy Land as well as corrupted imbeciles running countries like it is some kind of game with our donations and their dirty little secrets forever safe with us on some remote island for the depraved – so long as they kiss our Wailing Wall, play the part we demand, and, of course, be our bitch, because why not when people are so eager to serve us?

A Promise Kept

Photo by Mohammed Ibrahim on Unsplash
”Please reopen the case! My daughters have been hurting for too long,” Chung Mi-Suk collapsed to her knees and clasped her hands together in a relentless, heart-wrenching plea that twisted the onlookers’ stomachs with guilt. “Please! My daughters are hurting! Please help me put them to rest!”

The milling police station was on pause, watching the tragic spectacle of a mother pleading on behalf of her deceased daughters to the police. But no one could quench the fire burning within the poor woman, for the sexual assault case had long since been written off by the attorney in charge, and two decades had gone by in a heartbeat. There was nothing they could do. Nothing but watch. And as Mi-Suk realised that her prayers would fall on deaf ears today as well, as they had done so for the past decade, she staggered back up on her feet and exited the station.

The rain poured down ruthlessly and drenched everything in ice-cold water. She lifted her shoulders and chafed her arms from the cold yet did not try to flee from the rain or seek shelter somewhere where it couldn’t reach her. Instead, she stood her ground at the steps of the police station and watched the world go by before her in a rapid sequence. In those fleeting moments, while watching the common people go about their routine, she broke down and wept from the helplessness.

The evidence she so carefully collected over the years and put on pen to paper, an entire dossier with files upon files, now lay on the wet ground, the paper crumbling and eventually melting away like the seething fire in her heart consuming her resolve.

She was dying. A whole lifetime had come and gone in the blink of an eye, and before she realised it, she had become a mother, a widow, and now just an old lady whose only purpose was to seek justice for the twin daughters she raised so tenderly, whom she shielded from this cruel world, only to see them melt away just like how these papers now faded to the cadence of the heavy rain.

“Hey, ahjumma, you okay?”

She didn’t answer; instead, she looked on without moving as two young men rummaged through her pockets and ran away with the few coins she had, leaving behind her purse and an old photograph of her family before the tragedy took place and everything fell apart. With shaking hands, she picked up the photograph and smiled, wiping away her tears.

“I won’t leave this world until they’ve all paid. Umma, promised you, remember? Even if I have to keep on living and cheat death, I won’t break my promise to you, so sleep tight, my angels. Umma will soon join you and your appa. I promise.”

Rising back up on her feet, she trudged through the crowd of people from all walks of life as they fled the pouring rain, their movements in the background a blur of motion and their presence almost negligible.

The only thing Mi-Suk could see, the only thing that arrested her, was the large LED display with an award-winning movie director and his up-and-coming press conference and subsequent movie premiere for his newest blockbuster. And when she finally was close enough to it, staring up with hollow and detached eyes, her tears blended in with the salty rain and something in her expression changed – one that gave away nothing yet told a chilling story all at the same time.

Then, like the undead, she dragged her feet through the bustling capital, towards the studio where the press conference would be taking place later that night. She saw or heard nothing but the angelic voices of her beloved daughters, the way they called her umma, and those blissful days back in time when this cruel world did not blacken their purity and fill them with hatred and shame.

One and a half hours; the press conference was only one and a half hours away now.

Her eldest said the director was always the last one to arrive on time, that he would let all the filming crew and staff wait for him on purpose to relish in his ego. Such people never changed, only became worse over time. Their ego was so high, their sense of reality so low, yet they actually dared to believe themselves as nothing more than the filth they were, for they had become so used to tramping on and deriding those unable to fight back that they thought they were invincible, that they could stave off justice by paying those willing to accept the money thrown at them like the barking bitches they were.

And perhaps, they were right to think so, now that she thought it through, from where she lay in wait at the underground parking lot of the studio with a metal pipe tightly in her bony, wrinkled hand. Perhaps they were indeed right to think so….

Half an hour passed. Then, gradually, forty and fifty minutes. No one showed up in the parking lot, not even other people. Eventually, she decided to wait the entire length of the conference, approximately two hours or slightly more than that. She spent those hours just waiting and doing nothing else, counting the seconds, getting lost in thoughts and old memories, then restarting from the beginning on a never-ending loop.

At around 10 pm., things started to shift, and the solitude and harrowing memories gave way to other kinds of thoughts, the kinds that only a grieving mother could tolerate without losing her sanity along the way. She followed each person, tracing their movements, while keeping an eye out for the one she was looking for. But even as the minutes ticked away, the director remained elusive. Had he not come to his own press conference? But then she recalled the LED display she saw earlier tonight and knew that couldn’t be the case. Perhaps this wasn’t the parking lot used by the people who attended the conference?

Feeling the pressure of time, Mi-Suk hid the pipe in her bag, her youngest gifted her with her first pay through sweat, blood, and tears – and as she learnt after her passing – with her body.

She started for the stairwell leading to the lobby.

The entire place was filled to the brim with newspeople, overly zealous fans with no regard for their own or other people’s safety, and the few celebrities who were now standing at the centre of the red carpet posing for the paparazzi. Overwhelmed by the blinding lights and recurrent shutter of the cameras in the background, she noticed a young woman screaming her head off a few feet away and quickly made her way through the crowd, showing each one of them aside, and then grabbed hold of her.

“Director. Where is he?”

The young woman cast her a side-long look, judging and eyeing her down, before replying with a hoarse voice. “Director Kim? He’s still backstage, I guess. Why, are you a fan or something—”

Mi-Suk grabbed both of her hands—“Thank you, thank you!”—and slipped past security unnoticed, perhaps due to her old frame and those seventy years of agony that had hunched her back, turned her hair grey, and made her lose her teeth prematurely. After all, what harm could a seventy-year-old pose to anybody?

Only if they knew… only if they knew the fire burning inside her, the one that flared now and then, and ate through the deepest chamber of her heart, body, and soul like she’d entered the inferno even before shutting her eyes shut to this wicked, corrupted world.

Navigating the backstage was harder than she thought it would be. She passed by an entire corridor lined with doors for the third time by the time she heard what she could only describe as the sound of a muffled scream. Before she knew it, she found herself in front of a door with no label on it and perked her ears. She’d gone deaf once due to a vascular issue in her right ear, way before she lost her daughters so untimely, but had managed to get it back after treatment. She still had issues with that ear, but despite her hearing loss, those screams were so loud that she, for a few seconds, was stunned into silence.

Yet, as she looked around the corridor and the passersby, she noticed that no one even cast her a glance or inquired about the screams coming through all the louder with each passing second. She thus grabbed a crew member talking loudly over the phone, trying to bring his attention to the strange sounds.

“Young man, listen. You must call security!”

The young man tried to shake her off. “Ahjumma, how did you get in here? Huh?”

“Someone asks for help, in there, listen,” she tried, pulling the crew member closer to the unlabelled door. “I’m not lying. Listen! You must hurry and call—”

“Shibal!” The young man pushed her away so hard she hurled towards the walls, hitting her head. Gliding a hand through his sleek hair, staring her down with an annoyed look, he crept closer with a look that gave away that he indeed heard something but pretended not to.

“Hey, ahjumma, I don’t hear a damn thing, so stop the crazy act and leave before I call security. Do you hear me? Hey, I’m asking if you heard me? Shibal! Bitch, I said—”

“Always the same thing. It never stops. It never does. Why? Why doesn’t it ever—”

“Huh? What’d you just say? Never—what? You cursed me or something? Fucking bitch—”

Mi-Suk reached for the metal pipe in her bag. She didn’t hesitate, not even as the young man lay in a pool of his own blood, begging for mercy. Instead, she repeated her words, just as he told her to do moments ago, and kept bludgeoning his face until he stopped begging for his wretched existence and lay motionless on the linoleum floor. She then left his body to bleed and turned her attention to the unlabelled door, the pipe dragging at her side, as she twisted the knob.

A young woman lay naked, drugged, on the lap of the director whose wasted life she’d come to take. The filthy perpetrator stood up as he noticed her at the door, pulling up his trousers. She locked the door before anybody could intervene and save the director’s life.

Then… she took one step at a time. Slow and steady. Seeing nothing but darkness before her, hearing nothing but her angels’ voices in her ears, feeling no other emotion but that of a grieving mother who had gone without getting justice for far too many years.

“You want money? I’ll pay you! I’ll give you my entire fortune! I’ll do anything!”

Mi-Suk couldn’t help the smirk playing on her lips. “Then tell me, Director Kim, can you return my daughters to me? Let me see them one final time so I can ask for forgiveness?”

“…What? Daughters? Hey, ahjumma, you,” he pointed at his head, mocking her sanity, “you’ve lost a screw or something?”

“When I kill you, the world will know, finally, the monster you are… the things you’ve done… those horrible, horrible things you’ve done to such pure souls, who wanted nothing but recognition for their hard work, to repay their parents with their first pay, to give back to the world…”

“Huh? What’s this about? I’ve done nothing! Yah, ahjumma, you think I’m the only one who does things like that?” He paused, his eyes darting from the pipe in her hand and the young woman now getting back her senses. “Besides, you think fame at a young age comes at no cost? We all pay the price, in our ways, and bitches like this with their bodies. What’s so bad about it, huh? Nothing’s for free in this world, shouldn’t someone of your age know that the best?”

“That pay!” she snapped, her eyes turning wild with the anger festering beneath the surface, “has cost two precious lives! Tell me, Director, what kind of price tag requires forty counts of rape, derision, and sexual abuse by several men, of whom the majority are married and have kids of their own!?”

“This is just the way of the world! You think killing me will stop the system?”

“Then I’ll break the system, too, until none of it remains, if doing so I must until the very second I cease to exist! For killing people like you… it is not justice. It’s an obligation.”

The door behind them flung open as security entered. By then, however, the director had already succumbed to his injuries. They found Mi-Suk cradling the young woman, wiping away her tears and lulling her into comfort; her face and clothes covered in crimson, and her eyes wet with tears she didn’t know she still had. When she saw the security guards with their weapons aimed at her, she released the young woman and picked up the metal pipe on the table before her, advancing.

“Stop! Stop moving! Stop moving and put the pipe on the floor. NOW!”

But she didn’t stop, nor did she let the pipe fall. Instead, she let it down to the side, letting it drag on the floor, and then brushed past the security and the crowd of onlookers as she continued down the hallway aimlessly. Several people followed her, capturing her movements with their cameras and livestreaming. But the crowd didn’t stop her, not even as the security tried to step in. Instead, they became her live shields and blocked anybody trying to intervene.

She came to a halt at the centre of the red carpet, now directly facing the shutters, those blinding shutters that kept capturing her every single move and livestreaming. For a while, she just stood there and said nothing, not even as the crowd grew larger and the number of cameras only increased. Then she released her grip on the metal pipe, collapsing on her knees, addressing the nation and the police that failed her.

“I, Chung Mi-Suk, hereby plead guilty to the murder of Director Kim, the perpetrator in my daughters’ sexual assault case that was written off before the investigation could even begin. My daughters… my poor angels, when they heard of this, blamed by the authorities for being raped on several occasions by several men, including Director Kim, killed themselves before justice could be served. My husband died not long after, unable to live with the grief, and I tried decades – decades! – trying to make my voice be heard! Yet no one heard my pleas, bought for and paid with dirty money! So, what else could a mother do but kill her daughters’ abusers herself? To make sure they rested in peace, wherever they were, to finally be able to let go of the past, and say: “I did my best, the only thing I could, and kept my promise to you.” I do not ask for leniency but for my daughters’ case to reopen, as well as other similar cases the prosecutors wrote off in return for bribes and lavish gifts, or perhaps, buried secrets. I, Chung Mi-Suk, thus plead guilty to all charges against me…”

A delayed applause erupted through the crowd of people, of whom some couldn’t keep their tears in, while others, infuriated by the prosecutors’ failure to follow proper protocol and capture people like Director Kim, demanded justice and for all cases related to sexual assaults to reopen despite the statute of limitations.

While Mi-Suk never wanted this to be the case, spilling blood was her last resort, and she did not regret it. Not one single second of it. Even the inmates at the prison she was sent to broke out with cheers as she was escorted to her cell by two female guards, praising her strength as a mother and her unwavering love for the children she lost too soon and in such a short time, one after the other.

She died of old age only a few months short of spending a year in the prison, where she became the light of beacon for the inmates and the nation as a whole, recounting her twin daughters’ merry childhood as well as those harrowing years before the light in their eyes shut forever, bringing the whole court to break down and the prosecution to admit to their negligence and failure to follow proper protocol in front of the public, convicting those who deliberately took bribes and wrote off cases to hide their own skeletons in the cupboard.

But this was far from over. As with everything in this world, behind the scenes, new cases of exploitation and abuse occurred. Director Kim was right. There was no stopping the systematic abuse going on in plain sight; this was indeed the truth. But one thing was certain: every unpaid deed resurfaced and justice served sooner or later. No man was safe, and sometimes, all that was needed for that to happen, was someone like Mi-Suk who stared death in the eye with conviction and forced the world to open its eyes and see the ugliness behind purple-tinted glasses, even on the account of her own livelihood and health, for heroes needed neither fame nor comfort, only the will to force the system to reboot now and then.

Whether this deed was the unjustified murder of children, leaving them to rot from hunger, or the atrocities of barbarians with no empathy towards people other than their own, or the numerous world leaders watching a whole population burn yet choose to turn a blind eye like the cowards they were and would forever be as long as yet another innocent life was taken before it has a change to bloom like the flower they were meant to be – neither a terrorist nor a human animal living in open sewages…

 

 

 

 

 

Human Animals

Photo by William Gullo on Unsplash

I cut ties with my estranged parents when I left home in my early twenties, and I hadn’t spoken to them since. As a second-generation immigrant, I wanted to distance myself from my Muslim roots as much as possible to pursue a career in show business.

Although I had built a significant fan base over the years, I never landed a lead role. With bills piling up, I had to take a part-time job at a downtown funeral home to make ends meet. I wasn’t exactly thrilled about the job, but I was grateful for the steady income it provided.

While the job required me to work long hours, it was the nature of it that left me feeling drained by the end of the day. Washing the corpses and preparing them for their loved ones took a serious toll on my psyche. No amount of soap and water could remove the stench of death that hung in the air for days. It clung to me like a foul, invisible cloak.

During my first week, Mr Ahmad helped me get used to the routine tasks, so we did everything in pairs. As time went on and I settled into my role as a budding autopsy technician, he entrusted me with maintaining the funeral home and handling the deceased.

He treated me as if I were truly his son – even giving me a place to stay when I couldn’t pay rent and got kicked out of my one-room flat. But he had a biological son, one he missed dearly and grieved every waking hour. Whenever Mr Ahmad prayed, he asked me to join him, and together we prayed for Allah to forgive his son’s sins and welcome him into janat – paradise.

His son was one of many who lost their lives in 2023. His death was gruesome – nothing was left of his body. The flames singed his flesh, liquefied his organs and skin, and reduced him to ash in the dead of night at a displacement camp. He was brutally murdered and became one with the twinkling stars, crying blood. That year, the world watched in silence – and some even cheered – as yet another atrocity was etched into history.

Locals buried the dead in shallow graves, hoping for an end to the occupation – but even the dead weren’t allowed to rest in peace. The entire place was bombed into oblivion, razed to the ground, and the few who still fought for freedom were deported to the desert and left to die.

Several weeks passed since the siege that tore through his homeland when Mr Ahmad was finally allowed to enter the country and bring back what was left of his son to the United Kingdom. That poor man begged his occupiers for entry like a dog – a barking dog devoted to its torturers. And for what? Just to enter his country. Or what remained of it.

I couldn’t imagine what that would feel like – to be denied access to the very place your ancestors called home for centuries – by radical forces who twisted scripture to justify the unimaginable, claiming superiority over the very lives they erased. What a joke.

The previous employee said Mr Ahmad’s son left behind a widow and two children, but their whereabouts were unknown. They were most likely murdered – just like all the other women and children in the occupied country, whom the occupiers claimed were human shields.

It’s always the women and children – treated like dirt, denied opportunities, subjected to Islamophobia and racism, and seen as weak and oppressed because of a single cloth on their heads. When was the last time a Muslim woman harmed anyone? When she refused to remove her headscarf to enter a bank or get a job at an airport?

Whenever I thought about what happened in 2023 – and how the world watched – I felt my blood run cold. What sort of people could kill with such cruelty? Leaders with skeletons in their closets, trying to dominate every corner of the Middle East? Power-hungry icons rewriting the truth to suit their image? Artists and moguls backed by shadows we’ll never see? Or people so corrupt they turned the vulnerable into pawns – trading dignity for dominance?

Then again, what else could it be? Nothing else made sense. Only the most twisted minds, consumed by power and greed, could justify the murder of children – children they’d rather destroy without remorse than spare from being used as human shields. Their crimes should be carved into history – not erased – so future generations can marvel at how evil once wore a suit and tie.

Where was I? Ah, yes, now I remember.