A Mother's Heart

It would be such a shame to let the heart-shaped locket laced perfectly down her collar bone go to waste, the soldier thought. This night in particular the sky bled after a never-ending draught consuming southern Somalia. Lightning, accompanying the storm, echoed off the roofs of the village and seemed to catch the shine extra bright from her locket and the two tears escaping only her right eye.

Who would have thought someone from her position would have betrayed the order and had them turn on her to face the inevitable bloody conclusion to come? She had been the perfect beauty married as the wife to the Emir’s son. She would never worry being only second in line to power and perfectly protected by her family’s prominence. One day she let her instincts get ahead of everything they had taught her. Her child, a female, had been slapped for reading before her first born, a son. Without thinking, she stood her ground and cursed the elder who had struck her young daughter for saying the words reading over her brother’s shoulder in public. Just after the words left her mouth, it was as if the whole village cast their eyes on her. She could feel the judgement from the villagers’ eyes on her and her daughter. This precious being who had been her world from the second she laid eyes on her from giving birth was crying and ashamed after a stranger had struck her down yet her community could only think of the wrong for cursing this man. Who was this man who thought that her daughter was less than her son? Who was this man who thought women should not be capable of reading ahead of any male counterpart? What right or power did he have? He lived in a battered home, beyond the higher esteemed village where she and her husband had felt respected and safe.

That simple stand had shunned her from the village. As the lightning persisted east, her daughter tightly grasped the frill of her husband’s robe, forced to watch the execution. She cried ten times the tears of her mother, who was standing chin high to the firing squad, in front of a sand doom intended to catch the blunt of the bullets passing through their defenseless victims.

A simple jerk of the wrist, the soldier took the heart-shaped locket from the mother’s neck in a split second. Otherwise, he thought, she would take it to her death, dragged away into a mass grave reserved for rebellious women just like herself. It would be buried like her, only remembered by her family and crying daughter. He thought, “but if I were to take it from her neck I could tell her story to this village and the next and the next”. This small locket could represent hope to the women of Somalia and next the women of Africa. This is not how her story ends. He told her "halkaan sheekadaadu kuma dhamaanayso”.

One last lightning flash showed the understanding of the mother. She would be the martyr for generations to come. The soldier gripped the heart-shaped locket from her neck in the cloak of the stormy night to pace back with the rest of the line to carry out Sharia law. He steadied one foot behind the other, held his rifle against his shoulder as the commander shouted orders. The commander ordered “TOOGASHO!” and the soldier let a round of ammunition fly into the sand doom, missing his target. The rain finally slowed but that could not calm the smoke from the rifles down the line or the crying whimpers from over his shoulder. As he followed orders to come to attention, he felt the weight of the locket in the pocket of his military uniform. He imagined his early escape the next morning and thought “this is not how your story ends”.