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Chapter 1 - HER

When Soul Died is a tragic story following a family of an internally displaced refugee family in Syria. The characters in the story are fictional, while some events are described as narrated by survivors. Inspired by current events, the story relies heavily on contributions from Syrian refugees and their stories. The purpose of this novel is to encourage empathy towards victims of wars through story telling. This is a collaborative piece of writing and all contributions from war refugees are welcome.

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Chapter 1 - HER

I no understand. I think she my lost sister cuz she look like I. But she have own family look like she. And they all rotten. They no know to lick injury. But they rotten inside also. I have my legs cuffed, I bleed there. My front legs cuffed in my back! I hurt. They rotten and they bad to I. What I do? I happy to see sister, I play I run on back legs like I no know run before. Then sister family stop I and cuffed legs. Why they bad?

Where my momma? Where you, momma? I howl you but male hurt I when I howl you name. My sister help, help to I but she not strong. I afraid she died. My sister not moving now. 

Momma. I think you dead too. You strong and sniff and you not here? I love you, momma, save me.

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When Soul Died - Prologue

When Soul Died is a tragic story following a family of an internally displaced refugee family in Syria. The characters in the story are fictional, while some events are described as narrated by survivors. Inspired by current events, the story relies heavily on contributions from Syrian refugees and their stories.  The purpose of this novel is to encourage empathy towards victims of wars through story telling. This is a collaborative piece of writing and all contributions from war refugees are welcome. 

Prologue

“Fetch her some water, Aminah.”

“Abdallah…“

“Water, I said. Will you get it?“

“But there’s not enough for all -“

“Cut it out, Aminah! Do you think I forgot about our children?” He grabbed her by the shoulders and pulled her so close that the breeze between their bodies changed direction. Aminah showed no resistance. Everyone was too weak to resist. Her tears started falling down on the drenched soil. 

“Cut it out!” 

“Abdallah…,” she whispered in between the sobs. 

“Aminah. You are the backbone of our family, our bravery. You are the mother, the example. They need your strength, and mine, even more than they need water. Courage is all we have to feed them. You need to stop, right now. If you cry, they cry. If you walk with your head held high, they will, too. We need to keep walking, now, with this trophy, faster than ever before. The border is close.” 

He pointed his fingers toward the horizon near and far, with all sorts of sad signs of the approaching border crossing. Desolate houses, rags and sleeping bags halfway swallowed up by the desert. Empty water bottles, entire sea of bullets, grenade safety pins and other small pieces of metal lived in symbiosis with the sand. And sharp they were, as if their only goal was to live on forever in full dedication on doing the thing they were created for - to hurt more. In the distance, right where the sand met the horizon, tents were sporadically arranged to shelter all the families and lone survivors waiting for any sort of miracle - chickpeas, asylum, water, passport, a warmer blanket or peace, all seemed equally satisfying, all seemed equally distant.

“The water,” said Abdallah and released his wife from the grip of his unusually rusty hands. Back in the days when Syria was a real, sovereign country, recognized by the entire world, Abdallah worked as a surgeon. He also played piano and guided his children every Friday and Sunday to develop their musical skills. At work, or by the piano, his hands were soft but strong, steady, and concise. The explosion changed everything… The story of what happened to their home was written in his hands which were now rusty and always in motion as if they had their own will and wanted to run off, away from Abdallah's crushed soul. 

“And you drink too. Soon, we’ll be past this wasteland.”

Aminah pushed back and hit Abdallah's chest with her palms. 

“How do you know that? You said the same yesterday! You…” 

... and he was back at her again, this time squeezing Aminah’s jaw in between the hardened fingers of his right hand, lifting her face higher so she could be a witness to the flaming anger in his eyes. In this new endless darkness never disturbed by the lights of once unbroken civilization, only anger and fear could send a sparkle of light bright enough to interrupt it.  That flaming doom in Abdallah’s eyes had cut right through his wife’s willpower. 

“Aminah,” she heard. The way Abdallah said her name sent sparks through his reddened nostrils. She was hurting, her neck felt as if it was about to detach from her heavy skeleton. She fought the gravity with the tips of her feet but rather than a fight, it way a play of hide and seek between her slippers and the ever moving sand. Yet, in a way, this pain was a blessing. After a long time, she felt something, something physical, something other than fear, or guilt, or surrender and apathy. 

Surrender was the most overwhelming emotion that occupied Aminah’s mental strength for past few weeks. From initial terror to gratitude that her family was blessed enough to survive the raid in their village in full count, Aminah’s consciousness would move towards guilt more often than not.

She felt like a roach. She had been living the life of the only creature that could have possibly survived what had happened to her village. Yet even though the aftermath of her village's destruction had reduced her soul to a wrecked creature who preferred death just a minute ago, her legs fought for life and refused to comply with the degradation. They wanted her to live. So tiny, they were still bravely holding against Abdallah’s rough grip while her lungs sent out a violent stream of air trying to break through the locked larynx and helped her catch breath. 

“Do not try this again.” He said as slowly and quietly as he could and then let her collapse to the ground. This was the second time Abdallah raised his hand on his beloved wife. The first time this happened, Aminah accidentally admitted that she had taken a lift from a stranger on her brief trip to Aleppo. He turned out to be her aunt’s neighbor, which, presumably, they figured out as they conversed in a little restaurant outside the bus station. He had wished he could have just talked it out, he knew Aminah never intended to put his name to shame, but she was just too careless, and so young… He only wanted to teach her a lesson, to protect her from the expanding net of infiltrators everyone had whispered about. But yes, it was also that, he was jealous. She had been his wife for only two months and he disliked the fact that she had socialized so freely with another man. She is twenty-nine now, a mother of their two children. Even though only nine years passed since that incident, Aminah lived through a life-time worth of tragedies, each of which were imprinted on her face. 

“Look what I’m doing! Maybe I’m losing my mind, but I have not lost our way! Do not speak to me this way and do what I say. I believe you can do what is expected of you and let me do what is expected of me.”

Aminah went on to lay down by her children as they slept, and buried her sobs in Ali’s  sweat soaked sweater which was a part of his school uniform. Abdallah sat in front of the fire, looking towards the camp side on the north and wondering. Was that hope of the internally displaced that played with Abdallah's imagination, or was it real? The tents might have been a mere drawing of wishful thinking, colored in by hunger and fatigue. He pretended he hadn’t seen that Aminah hadn’t woken the children up to drink. He focused on the tents and wished he could see them better and watched them all night, but his sight was blurred with tears. Ali, too, fought the tears in his sleepless eyes as he held his little sister in his arms. Zaynab, the little one, she was the only one who stopped crying that night.