“Do you know the story of the two brothers?”

She sits across the table in front of you, dressed in rags. She pushed the question through split and swollen lips. Once pretty, the blood has matted in her hair and dried brown against her face. Soot piles rest in the corner of her mouth and eyes, in the creases of her skin, along her collar bones. She is tall, willowy in the chair, but sat as though she would rather stand. As though sitting hurts. Her fair skin, beneath the dirt and blood, is distinct for Najda. As are her eyes, bloodshot and green, huge. You wonder if she doesn’t have outsider blood in her, if she’s a foreigner, even though her accent is perfect. Maybe that’s why her captors have beaten her so furiously. To see the outsider in pain, to have her green eyes dull.

You shake your head. You’ve heard stories of two brothers, but don’t want to guess. It’s best to let her talk. To explain and clarify. You look at her pain, the discomfort in her face and the way she holds herself and you buy her more time. In here, she is safe. Outside this room, where they beat her and tear at her clothes, where they force themselves on her, she is a body. She represents ransom or entertainment, neither mutually exclusive. You may be the last kind person she ever sees.

“It is a folk tale, a fairy tale almost, among the Najdan people,” she stops and looks around, “it began in a room much like this one. They were born into prison.”

She leans forward, into the single halo of light, thrown off by a bare and yellowing bulb. You look away as her bruising is no longer a hint, but deep and multicolored. Around her eyes and neck are the worst, the purple and reds becoming black. Her cuts are shiny and milky with gangrene. The room is only the one light and two chairs, mismatched and wooden, on the brink of collapse. The walls are made of the local mortar, dirt mixed with water, stones, and sticks until some semblance of structural integrity. It gives the room a sloped appearance, more of the mortar having pooled at the bottom and thinning as the wall goes up. You are sitting in a man-made cave. It is frigid and the darkness is inky.

“Their mother was a prisoner, taken days after the boys conception, forced to watch her beloved hacked apart.” She finds your eyes, forcing you to hold her gaze. “Have you ever seen someone cut apart by machetes? Axes? In what you do…”

You shake your head, as much to drive out the image as to decline.

“There’s a metallic slice, and a dull thud. It’s a sound that lingers. It stayed with the boy’s mother. The sound. More than his screaming or his begging. And in her anger, the boys grew strong and convicted. Bent on revenge they’d been born into. But they split, darkness and light, one bent on avenging their father through blood and violence, the other through compassion and change.”

You’re drawn into her voice, melodic and soothing. You feel yourself sinking into it, a cool lake on a hot day. Her story surrounds you, envelopes you in its rhythm. This is why you were brought in, for the green eyed witch that spoke English. You can understand why they thought she was magical. You can feel it. She sinks back into the shadows, hiding her face. Letting her voice roll out into the darkness. It’s as though the walls are speaking. The mud, the dirt of the land, whispering in your ear. You can feel her voice in your chest, in your lungs, in your heart.

“The brothers were closer than blood, closer than family. They were bonded in tragedy, joined in horror. But after years of hard toil, years of surviving on slop and the casual violence of the guards, their mother decided it was time to break free. To risk all that was left to them, for freedom. And when she died in their flight, her body degraded from years of neglect, the brothers fought. Raged into the night at fate and each other. Neither was right, nor were they wrong. They were men in pain, seeking action in a time of helplessness. But when you demand better of fate, when you demand justice, something is listening. As they raged, fate heard them and answered their lament. With further torment and bitter justice. They both received what they demanded of the world, thrown at their feet and covered in mud. And they were made to feast on the rotten fruits of their lives.”

She rocks forward into the light, and you recoil. Her green eyes are wild, on fire.

“The brothers are coming. Here, now. And their rage will be furious.”

****

The war came without warning. There were no air raid sirens. No explosions in the distance. No static on the radio. The screaming came eventually. But not before the panicked phone calls, to loved ones and informants, confidants and colleagues. The darkness came last, the anticlimactic finale of rising fear and paranoia. The light of society simply popped. And the night that settled in was the real, true dark. The kind found in the wilderness, beyond the scope of man and civilization. Profound in its nothingness. But this dark, the dark that came with the war, was made eerie by the presence of a whole nation hidden. Wiped out of view as the sun set.

It began with murmurs. The buzzing of cell phones. A few calls were taken in hushed tones turning shrill.

“…fired on protesters…”

“…martial law…”

“…rioting in the capital, and shooting…”

Wars tend to build, slow boil for years, before a catalyst ignites conflict. World War I was as much about the assassination of the Archduke as it was in the political maneuvering in the decade that preceded it. With the gracious aid of hindsight, the threads of war can be picked up almost from their creation. But in Najda, there were too many threads. Poverty across the countryside, an entire government rife with corruption and feudalism. Each fiefdom full of loyalists that were ready to maim and kill to scrape ahead, to claw a little comfort out of life. Roving bands of men patrolled the expanses outside the cities. Some calling themselves rebels. Taking on military titles that were earned in blood. But most recognized them for what they were: men with no opportunity beyond slow starvation or malnutrition taking up arms to feed themselves with their country-men’s bread.

Najda was a failed state. And war came in the spring with the rains. The locals took both as the natural progression of the world. But when the lights went out, when the public was robbed of all modernity, fear set in. Civil war had come to Najda.

I've mourned family and friends,

old schoolmates.

I've mourned opportunity lost

and change.

I've cried, reminisced,

laughed at the same story.

The one I knew,

the one they told me.

But the loss I felt after

leaving.

When you lose someone

you miss them first.

A grandmother's laugh,

a schoolmate's smile.

But the what fades,

until you're left with their absence.

You stop remembering them.

You only feel where they used to be.

I saw a knitted hat

and wanted to call my aunt.

The one we lost young,

the why we wear pink.

As a groom, frightened in a room full of my friends,

I needed my father's advice,

and found silence.

The past, when they were still around,

becomes their only reality.

But she took a future,

a whispered promise,

a joke with a careful smile,

dreams and wants kissed out.

Maybe love does take

a part of your heart.

Somehow you are finite.

And when the person you love,

you promised, dies.

May they take more

than you had to give.

And you don't just mourn them.

They didn't take a part.

They took more than you had to give.

Emptied, blank, you've to find a way to live.