Semisynthetic illumination faded over the land.
The dunes sighed;
women and children (wide-eyed)
emerged from humble homes,
hands in the air, guns in their backs.

Still on hands and knees, as if in prayer,
Ahmed’s body slumped forward,
his beard and robes leaving tracks in the sand.

Hand-rolled cigarettes glowed over Mona Lisa soldier-sniggers;
village men,
lined up like sheep near the fence
were being stripped of their clothes—
they shivered in the face of death.

Fadwa’s back door creaked open;
two soldiers, high on poppies’ finest,
tiptoed through desert darkness, fingers on triggers.

Billy the Kid wasn’t named ‘Billy the Kid’ for no reason,
“kicks like a mule”,
so Uncle Mohammad had said;

The first soldier was winded,
the second not quite so lucky.

Fadwa picked up the man’s rifle,
popped the winded soldier in the face.

Billy and Fadwa took the brunt of the bullets; the rest fled.

All it took was for Ahmed
who had been sleeping in his hut
(built at least twenty meters away from the rest of the village),
to stop snoring
to realize that something was out of the ordinary.

Silence crawled over the land,
bringing with it the sensation
of a severed hand in desperate need to attach itself
(any arm would do),
scraping over the sand, against the walls of mud dwellings.

Fadwa touched her wrist, looked up
through a hole in the roof covering;
synthetic satellite blinks took over a clear pre-dawn sky—
the stars cowered,
some even fell away at the sight of their man-made twitters.

Tweets and twitters in the sky
“… news had said they’d blocked the Net,
that a kind-hearted group in the Netherlands had opened their servers
for those folk
either in need to contact loved ones or to tell the ****** truth that stains this sand.”

Or something like that; Fadwa yawned—
she wasn’t sure what the Net was
but it sounded like “serious business”— that’s what he had said,
Uncle Mohammed,
who came for dinner the night before; there’d been terror in his voice.

A stifled yelp broke the stillness.
Within seconds the dunes were lit,
strewn with military-style boots,  the rubber soles of which reeked
of corruption
carried in from army bases located not far from where the city ***** souls.

Ahmed was on his hands and knees
Fadwa was peeking through the key hole,
or what was left of the door; Billy the Kid, Fadwa’s goat
had been at it.

Two troops held handguns to his head but Ahmed had already departed.