Song for Night

A Question Is a Palm Turning Out from an Ear

If we are the great innocents in this war, then where did we learn all the evil we practice? I have seen rebel scouts cut off their enemies’ ears or fingers or toes and keep them in tin cans as souvenirs. Some collect teeth, which they thread painstakingly into necklaces. Who taught us this?

Who taught me to enjoy killing, a singular joy that is perhaps rivaled only by an orgasm? It doesn’t matter how the death is dealt — a bullet tearing through a body, the juicy suck of flesh around a bayonet, the grainy globular disintegration brought on by clubs — the joy is the same and requires only the complete focus on the moment, on the act.

Before the hate, before the war, I was in love with a little girl on my street, Aminatu, who gave me toffees from the jar on the counter in her mother’s shop. I loved those toffees, always half-melted from the heat of her clenched palm and smelling faintly of her sweat.

I have never been a boy. That was stolen from me and I will never be a man — not this way. I am some kind of chimera who knows only the dreadful intimacy of killing. If it would help, I would cry, but tears are useless here. Anyway, I can’t afford to lose any more fluids until I find clean drinking water. God, all this time and no water.

There are many ways to die in a war. Dehydration is one.

For the want of water.