Paranoia ✓

II: Rashad - Unclear Skies

The jets roared like flying beasts in the dusk, drowning out the cries of the villagers below. With each jet that passed by, a whizzing sound resonated across the air, as if the sky was whistling a solemn tune. At the end of the tune came a loud bang, followed by a bright light that stunned the air. When the blinding light cleared, a small mushroom cloud remained.

Rashad was with his mother and sister when the final jet delivered its payload. They managed to avoid each and every target, but they couldn't say the same for many others. As they roamed the streets, Rashad saw many familiar faces in great pain. He saw Ginjay, the only local doctor, helping a woman with a missing leg hop her way towards the side of the road. Ginjay himself had a gash atop his forehead that was gushing blood. Mud covered the gash as a temporary bandage, but the blood was seeping through it.

The woman with no leg was crying out, and Rashad recognized her screams—he heard them all too often in the small classroom at the edge of town. It was his teacher, Ms. Reyes, a humanitarian volunteer who ventured to this far out rural town to become the only legitimate teacher this town has ever had. Before her, the local mage taught what he knew to a group of children—which were basic agricultural techniques and herding practices. Up here in the mountains of Yemen, wheat was grown and mountain goats were herded for meat and milk. Small water runoffs provided what little water the town could obtain, and as the runoff descended below the mountain, it would evaporate in the heat of the Tihamah. What Ms. Reyes didn't realize was that what she was volunteering for was a death sentence dealt to her by her very own country of origin.

While the machines cleared the sky, the smoke still choked the air. Rashad's mother tried leading him into a cave up in the mountains—an emergency hideout she had cultivated in case the conflict traveled its way up into their rural mountainous settlement. His mom would secretly confide in him her deepest concerns about the situation they were in. She was unsure whether she should be mad at the Kabish for hiding in their village and painting a target on their backs, or the Americans for sending bombs to wipe out everyone in the village—a village that wanted no part in this conflict.

Rashad has never met his father, and his mother would never say what happened to him. He had his suspicions that he left her and this life for a better life in the capital. Yet Sana'a has its own problems. For starters, the most basic necessity of water. Sana'a is one of the few capital cities in the world (and probably the only one at that) that has no water. There's a rumor that the wells in Sana'a only yield dirt, mud, and animal feces. They say the mud tastes the best.

Whatever happened to him, Rashad knew he wouldn't be here if it weren't for his mother—who became both mom and dad to him and his sister. His mom took to working the fields with the other men. Of course she got dirty looks and even was verbally abused (and although she would never admit it—physically abused) at her job that made barely enough money to pay for food and a roof over their head. That roof over their head was actually a tent that she had made from wool she had brought from the local fabrics merchant. For the first two years of his life, Rashad and his mother had no home. Later when he turned five, his mother came home from work one day with what would be his younger sister. As he grew older he would ask her where she came from, but she would never say a word. The topic made her flinch as if a shadow was lurking behind her and grasping her shoulder.

It was when he turned ten that the conflict started to trickle into the village. The Kabish came searching for young boys to train. They would talk to the fathers of local families and somehow convince them that their sons were needed to provide a necessary service to the country and to their God. When the Kabish approached his mother, his mother refused.

He remembered the moment clearly. He was eleven at the time they started recruiting wildly. A hooded man, dressed in a brown robe with a rough sandy rope tied around his waist, came into Rashad's tent one day and spoke to his mother about enlisting Rashad into the service of the Kabish—to defend their homeland from the Westerners who sought to destroy their culture, rape their land, and kill those who do not conform to their way of life. His mom wouldn't have it—she wouldn't send her son off to die.