Franca
“Women are scum!” Rasheed thought, and for good reason. Or at least he thought it was.
They cried tears of deception, misleading everyone. They didn’t fool him, he thought. His wife didn’t fool him. Those tears did nothing to him. He spent the whole day trying to keep their bellies full. But he always came home to either poorly prepared meals or nothing at all for dinner. It wasn’t fair.
Sometimes, he was away for weeks at a time, with nothing but memories of his wife to hold onto. Rasheed consistently fantasized about his wife’s naked body. He longed for when he would return to the warmth of her embrace, the feeling of tenderness as her delicate skin brushed against his, the smell of her hair and the fragrance of baby oil oozing from her sweating body to pleasure his nostrils.
He remembered her naivety the first time he brought her home from her parents. She had spent days crying and pretending to miss her parents but had always held tightly on to him when he let himself into her. Her soft tears had turned into loud moans. She was skilled at pretending, he thought. He liked how her default response to everything he was sure she wanted and fantasized about was “No”.
“Why do they do that?” he asked his friend at work. “Why do they say no when they actually mean to say yes?”
His friend shrugged.
“Women don’t know what they want,” the friend responded, “That’s why it is our duty to help them understand.”
“That makes total sense,” Rasheed agreed. “Especially my wife. Sometimes, I think she is just being wicked. The other day, I came home after two weeks of working on the field to find her crying her eyes out. I spent the rest of the evening asking her what was wrong, and she kept saying nothing.”
His friend raised a hand to stop Rasheed.
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“What’s that?” Rasheed asked.
“I thought I heard something.”
Silence.
“Okay, go on please.”
“So as I was saying,” Rasheed continued, “I queried her and pressured her to tell me. She stubbornly insisted it was nothing. That night, as she served my food, her tears fell into my soup and I lost it. Let’s just say she’s still got the marks on her back.”
“That’s how to handle them,” his friend said. “Okay, here he comes.”
Both men looked into the scope of their rifles and waited for the teenage boy with ten grams of C4 explosives to walk into the market. From their elevated positions, it looked like a cloud of dust enveloping a settlement, followed by a very loud bang!
When Franca saw him coming in a distance, she knew he had just killed again. She covered herself with her wrapper and ran inside to hide behind the door, hoping her husband didn’t see her playing outside. She began to cry as she remembered how he beat her. She touched the welts on her skin and cried softly. She remembered the horror in her mother’s eyes as they tore her away from her arms. She remembered the wailing… the rape… the pain.
Even though memories of her home at Chibok had begun to fade, she remembered his stale breath in her face telling her to learn to be a real woman and a humble wife if she wanted to live. But she couldn’t.
She couldn’t understand what it meant to be a woman. She was only thirteen!
