Darkness

This is an excerpt from my novel, The First Boy who was Broken

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00AGFAWDE/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creat...

Amber awoke suddenly, having to remind herself again that she was safe. For a second she could still smell burning embers in dying fire pits. U.N. rations being cooked with heavy iron pans. She could still hear excited whispers from children telling ghost stories in the night- tiny syllables coming from tiny, murmuring breaths. She looked out in the distance, and she could see the baby sausage fingers poking through a metal grated fence, accompanied by the wide eyes of a frightened little boy, gaping at her from the darkness.

Amber had to remind herself that she was home again, with running water and reliable electricity- with hospitals and police officers and ambulances only a quick phone call away.

A heavy rain began to pelt her window- a dreary gray storm that lobbed plump, droplets at her house. It had rained many times since she’d returned to the United States, but there was something very specific about this rain that reminded her of Uganda. It was a unique ‘ping-ting’ sound the rain made, probably from hitting a slab of discarded aluminum along the alleyway behind her house. The past gnawed at her like ants over a free meal, and as she closed her eyes she found that she was there again, as if she had never left. Rain fell upon her mud hut with the thatched roof that could never repel all the water. It trickled down the walls and onto the wooden furniture. There were only a few huts in the village that had roofs of corrugated metal, and Amber could hear the ‘ping-ting’ sounds seeping through her mud walls.

People told her that Uganda was dangerous. People told her that there would be HIV, and child soldiers, and deadly bandit raids. People warned her of malaria, and staff infections, and scorpions and venomous snakes, and everything else they could think of to dissuade her from going. But instead of the atrocities, there were soccer games on Sunday after church, with children huddled by each goal post just waiting for the chance to fetch a stray ball. There were men who ran out in the rain to offer Amber an extra coat. There was the woman’s circle Amber had organized, which taught entrepreneurial skills, and sex-ed, and was a safe place for them to complain about their lazy husbands, who only worked 9 hours a day, as opposed to the woman’s typical 15.

When Amber walked to the market in the morning a band of little boys and girls walked beside her, promising to protect her from the lions and the elephants they all swore were lurking nearby.

And when she spoke with her folks back home via her laptop with the portable Wi-Fi connection, there would be dozens of peeping eyes and curious little fingers. Touching the screen and the faces in it, intent on seeing the images it held, but terrified of being caught on the laptop’s camera.

Amber loved her children, more than she ever thought she could. She loved the way their eyes grew when they told exaggerated stories, and she loved their complete fascination with her cheap digital camera, and the apps on her smart phone, and her noise canceling headphones. She no longer missed television, or skyscrapers, or night clubs, and there were few times in her life where she could remember feeling that complete. The diseases and the conflicts, the killing and the dying- it was all a million miles away from her perfect little village. It could not have been farther away. Until it wasn’t.

The trouble began, as many conflicts do, with rumors. Stories began pouring in of wounded appearing at refugee camps and the larger towns. Children with bullet wounds. Women with lips cut from their face. Men with hacked away limbs.

Amber could see a change when she went to the market place. People were more anxious than usual, more quick to make a sale instead of talking casually. Shop-keepers were much quicker to punish thieving children- even when the stolen goods were useless anyway. People she’d met and friends she’d made began moving away, as shop after shop closed down.

And in Amber’s mind, the entire conflict became real with the appearance of a single little boy, staring at her from the dark. He was a short, malnourished child- maybe 4 or 5 years old. He leaned his weary body against a metal grated fence on the outskirts of the village, his eyes pleading for the help that his throat couldn’t ask for.

And immediately Amber knew what was happening, she knew what this meant. He was a night commuter. A child from one of the smaller villages who migrated into town at night, for fear of being kidnapped and recruited by the Lord’s Resistance Army.

Amber had never seen one before. Her little village was so out of the way that there were few big towns to go to nearby. The boy’s feet were bare, with scabs and callouses across his toes. His pants were dirty and in tatters- an empty plastic water bottle hung loosely from a shoelace that was attached to a belt loop.
Amber never understood the evil that children like him were born into. She never understood hatred, or warfare- even the concept of bullying on a school level confounded her.

She studied the little boy, pathetically clinging to his fence. And more than any emotion- more than empathy, or concern, or curiosity, Amber realized that all she felt for him was loathing. She hated his emaciated young face, and the oversized shirt that fit more like a toga. She hated his sun-scorched skin and those eyes that had seen worse atrocities than most American soldiers ever would. She hated every molecule of his body, every inch of every mile that he had traveled.

She hated him because she knew exactly what his presence signified. This one boy was every danger that her friends and family had warned her of. He was disease and civil war and night raids. He was Joseph Kony, kidnapping little girls to work as sex slaves, little boys to do his killing and dying. Amber stared at his baby sausage fingers, dangling through the metal fence. She stared deep into those pain filled eyes, and she finally understood what it meant to hate another human being with all her heart and soul.

More and more of the night commuters passed through the village over the next few weeks- each hoping for a chance at five minute’s rest or some water before continuing on their journey to the larger towns. With them, more rumors of murder and torture and displacement followed. Soon after Amber heard her first AK-47 going off. It made a Klak-Klak-Klak sound that swept through the midnight air. This was immediately followed by other bangs and pops that one of the visiting children identified as a shotgun and a 9mm handgun. The gunfire lasted less than a minute.

The next day Amber got the email from her volunteer group. They had been trying to reach her for weeks. The LRA was on the move, sweeping up children and attacking smaller villages- all the volunteers had already been evacuated from her area, she was the last one. One of the organizers would pick her up within a few days.

Amber gathered all of the kids in the classroom to say good bye. She took one last look at her children- not the traumatized orphans and the passing night commuters who had traversed through hell itself, but HER children, her innocent babies who still believed the most dangerous thing in Uganda was the wildlife. She looked at their untainted eyes that had never seen warfare up close, that had never seen loved ones dying all around them.

And as she looked at them with their mixture of tears and smiles, she realized there was nothing she could do to save them. Sure she could write letters to politicians, rally supporters for the cause, post online videos of the children and their struggle. But that would take time, and by then her babies would already have become night commuters, or child soldiers, or sex slaves, or corpses rotting in the Ugandan sun. She imagined the tiny hands before her, picking up weapons or fending off lions in the night- and it took all her strength not to break down in tears.

The man sent to fetch Amber came early the next morning. He had a sour expression on his face and he swore a lot, both in Swahili and in English. He referred to the children as “soon to be DPI’s,” and didn’t even bother introducing himself to the people of the village. On his belt he wore a holstered revolver, and he had an AK-47 strapped across his back. In his truck was a long hunting rifle with a scope attached to it. The village children had never seen a man so heavily armed, and they were terrified that he would try to hurt Amber. She knew that men with guns would soon become a very common sight for her children, and the thought killed a little bit of her inside.

Amber stared into her expensive kitchen cabinets as the rain continued to pelt her window. Water didn’t seep through the ceiling. Kind old women didn’t wander in from the rain to discuss their lazy husbands. Smiling children didn’t cling to her waist as they promised to protect her from all the terrors of the darkness.

She looked at her life, at all that she had returned to. She had a decent job back home- working at an upscale daycare near the state capitol. She dated a boy she met at the local library. She went out with her friends on Saturdays. She was the same person she had always been. The same person she always would be.

But she realized that for better or worse, those desperate eyes would always be inside her, peering at her from the dark, guiding her decisions, swaying her judgment of others, reminding her that no matter how bad things in her life became, at least she wasn’t a small African child doomed to die in conflict.




Note: This was not the opening chapter to my book, just one of my favorite chapters. To read the full book, you can go to:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00AGFAWDE/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creat...