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The Birds That Fly Free

The wind howls, shaking the branches above our heads. Twigs break and land in the pots and pans that we are trying to clean, making our work even harder. Even when we move the pots away from the trees, something else dirties them again. It seems as if the forces of nature are working against us.

And if the pots and pans aren’t clean by the time we must cook, we will be beaten. Or worse.

My name is Nkiruka, meaning greater is what lies ahead. My mother used to say that every day, and being the eldest at thirteen, I received her favorite name. My father died when I was eight, leaving my mother and I to take care of my younger brothers and sister.

They’re dead now.

The Lord’s Resistance Army killed them, but I pretend not to know. I pretend to be drugged, pretend that I am clueless like the other children.

Not all of us are clueless, but we pretend we are. Everything is pretend and pretending, now. Pretending that I did not have a life.
Pretending that I did not have a family. Pretending that this is my life.

Pretending that this is what my life should be. Pretending that everything is okay.

Even though it’s not.

I have killed.

But I killed because I had no choice. We are living in a world where it is either kill or be killed, and I don’t want to die.

No one wants to die.

They took me. The men. They took me and they killed everyone else.

Everyone else is dead.

I wish I were dead too.

The men say that we are soldiers, that we are brave and strong and must fight. We must kill.

But we are children, children who wish to play and learn and talk.
Child soldiers. That’s who we are. Child soldiers.

No one calls me Nkiruka anymore, the other girls just say ‘you’ and the men call me ‘you’ or ‘it’. I guess I don’t matter anymore, then again, no one does. One of the girls, Chipo, as she calls herself, calls me Eshe, which means ‘life’, because she says it gives her hope.

“Every time I say your name it reminds me that I have to survive.”

Chipo is one of my best friends because she’s the only one I’ve got. We’ve fought on the front line together, killed together, cooked together, and we share a spot on the floor and a thin blanket. We’re lucky if we even have that.

We don’t talk about what we’ve done.

Chipo isn’t drugged either, and I think that the men don’t really care whether or not we know what is happening. They know that we will do what they tell us to because we know what they’ll do to us if we don’t.

I finish rinsing out the pot and Chipo and I gather the rest of the them in our arms. Mine are scratched and burned from cooking, but they, like Chipo’s, are covered in bruises.

Pain has become a part of my life, and it does not bother me anymore. It is just always there.

“Hurry up!” one of the men yells at us. Chipo and I bow our heads and run as fast as we can toward the cooking area.

“How much time do we have?” I ask her, settings down the pots and pans.

She shrugs, looking alarmed. “Let’s just get it done as fast as we can.” I nod and we start to cook with the other girls. It takes us a little more than an hour, which is lucky because the men come to check our progress just as we are preparing to bring the food to the dining area. Most of the boys are already there, and we walk between the tables toward the front. I am carrying one of the big pots along with some of the other girls, but Chipo is behind us with a smaller plate. After I put the pot down on the main table, I turn in time to see one of the boys stick out his leg and trip her. She stumbles, trying to regain her balance, but she falls, landing on the ground.

“Chipo!” I try to run to her, but one of the other girls holds me back. I struggle against her, but soon the rest of them are restraining me as well.

“It’ll be worse if we interfere,” one girl hisses in my ear. It’s true, yet I feel so helpless, watching Chipo lay there rubbing her wrist and looking up in terror at the man marching toward her. He grabs her by the front of her shirt and drags her to her feet.

“Why did you fall?” he demands, shaking her and then shoving her backward. The girls loosen their grip on me and I run forward to stand by her side.

“I- I tripped, sir.”

“Clumsy thing.” The man steps toward Chipo with his hand raised. I try to push in front of her, but she blocks me and takes the blow herself. She crumbles again and the man kicks her before dragging her into the corner. I can see the tears that she is blinking back as he chains her to the wall by her wrists. To the boys he says, “when you finish eating give her five blows each. Try not to kill her.” The boys cheer and I feel anger bubbling inside of me, but Chipo keeps a steady face and stares straight ahead.

The rest of us girls must continue to serve the boys, but there is a greater tension between us than there was before as we take the bowls and fill them with the soup.

I fill as many bowls as I can carry and pass them out to the boys. When I reach the boy who tripped Chipo I look up at her and find that she’s staring at me. I swear she shakes her head at me, but I ignore her and dump it over his head. He goes rigid and turns slowly, trying to blink the soup out of his eyes. Before I can stop myself, I punch him in the face. His nose starts bleeding and he raises a hand to his face in shock. The other boys go quiet and I see the girls tense. Then the boy’s shock fades and he stands, throwing a punch and ripping the bowl off of his head with the other hand. Everyone stops to watch as I duck and strike him in the jaw with my elbow as I come up. I can feel the eyes of the men on us. They won’t stop the fight because they encourage violence. I won’t kill the boy, and I don’t want to encourage the violence that they promote, but I want the boy to feel the same pain that Chipo will. He trips me and I fall. He kicks me hard.

I look up at him, my side burning with pain.

But pain doesn’t matter anymore. His eyes are blank.

He does not think.

He does not feel.

He does not care. He only lives to kill. He is not human.

He is a monster.

Because that is what they made him.

I roll to the side as he tries to stomp down on my face and grab his ankle. I pull him down and use the momentum to pull myself up, leaning over him and I pin his arms and legs down.
“If you ever touch one of us ever again, it will be last thing you ever do.” I growl through my teeth.

I wish I could say that he glared at me the same way I glared at him.

But he didn’t.

He just looked at me with the same lifeless eyes.

***

After the boys have left the dining area, the men point at Chipo. “Let her down after you have cleared tables.” They walk away after the boys, laughing. 

One of the girls watches them and once they disappear she turns to me. “Get her down, we’ll take care of the dishes. Bring her to your tent and we’ll help you.” 

“Thanks,” I say, then hurry over to Chipo.

She looks awful; not unconscious but barely able to move. Her wrists are bleeding from the chains that hold her so high that her toes are barely brushing the ground. Her arms and legs are covered in bruises and cuts. She’s covered in blood, fresh blood pouring out over the dried blood. Her face is also bruised and her hair is matted with blood.

“Chipo,” I whisper, reaching out to unclasp the chain binding her right wrist.

She moans, moving her head slightly to the right. Her screams are still echoing through my head. I try to be gentle as I support her and unclasp her left wrist. She gives a loud groan of pain, but keeps her eyes closed.

“Hey,” I shout to the other girls and they turn. “Can someone help me?”

One girl steps forward as the others turn their backs on us and continue with their work. She wraps one of Chipo’s arms around her shoulders as I do the same, and we carry her slowly toward the small tents at the edge of the camp lines.

They put us there to test us, because they have cameras watching the boundaries at all times. If we try to leave, they’ll know before it happens.

And they’ll kill us.

But worse, they’ll kill us all.

***

We enter our tent and I finally realize that the girl helping me carry Chipo is one of our roommates, or rather, floor-mates. The girl helps me lay Chipo down on the only bed, which we all take turns sleeping on, and runs to get water while I tear up our sheet and part of our blanket. She comes back quickly and helps rinse the cuts and wash away the blood covering Chipo’s arms.

I look up at the girl and when she realizes that my hands have stopped moving, she glances at me.

“Thanks for helping her,” I say.

The girl gives me a weak smile. “Of course.”

After a slight moment's silence, I ask, “what’s your name?” 

Her smiles fades. “I don’t have one.”

“Oh.”

“Well, do you?”

“Yeah, Chipo,” I gesture to her, “gave it to me. I’m Eshe.”

Life.”

“Yeah.”

“I like that name.”

I smile. “Me too.”

“What happened to your old name?”

I look away from her. “That’s not who I am anymore. I do not deserve that name.”

I glance back up at her. She dabs a cut on Chipo’s forehead. “I wish I could bear to say my old name. I liked it a lot.”

“I bet Chipo will give you a new name once she’s... better.”

“She’ll be okay, I think. They could have hurt her a lot more.”

“Yeah.” I look down at Chipo, cleaning away some of the blood on her leg.

The tent flap opens and the rest of the girls pour into the small room, taking wet cloths and cleaning the rest of the cuts and running cold water over the bruises covering her body. While none of us talk much, it is nice to know that we are all there for each other, that at least they haven’t yet been able to take the entire concept of family away from us. Watching all the girls help Chipo, I wished that I knew them. That I knew their names and their favorite songs and colors and artists and which boys they liked, but we can never be friends like that. This is the closest thing we will ever be to friends, because none of us are really anything anymore. We are nothing more than a ghost of our former selves, which is why none of us use our names.

They are who we were.

They are not who we are now.

As the sun sinks lower in the sky the group of girls begin to subside, and soon it is just Chipo, the girl, and I in the tent. The girls who typically share the floor with us have joined the others for tonight in order to give Chipo space and quiet, but mostly space, because no one really talks all that much anymore.

***

The sun comes up slowly and creeps through the tent walls. The girl fell asleep around midnight, but I couldn’t sleep. I watched Chipo’s chest rising and falling, praying that it wouldn’t stop.

At one point I thought it did.

As the sun falls across her face, Chipo’s eyes flutter open and she blinks, her face twisting in pain. “Aren’t we s’possed to be up a’ready.” Her words are blurred together from exhaustion.

“Right on time, actually.” The girl says, sitting up and rubbing her eyes.

“How do you feel, Chipo?” I ask.

“Okay.” She looks awful though. Her skin more green, blue and purple than brown. 

“Can you get up?” the girl asks, coming over to us.

Chipo nods, wincing as she stands. “It’s not like I can take the day off.”

“I wish you could, you need to.” I help her limp a couple of steps until she can get the feeling back in her legs. When she can stand on her own without shaking too badly, she turns to the girl.

“What’s your name?”

The girl shrugs, “I don’t have one.”

“Chipo,” I say, “do you think you could give her a new name?”

Chipo looks at the girl for a moment, studying her. “Ifunanya.”
The girl is silent for a moment before she speaks. “Love inspires love.”

Chipo nods. “Yes. We can call you Nanya for short if you like, or I could find-”

“No,” the girl, Ifunanya, says quickly. “No, Chipo, I love it.”

Chipo smiles and the girl hugs her. I can see tears in her eyes. I know how she feels. I felt that way too, when Chipo gave me my new name. I felt alive again, like I was actually something. I wasn’t who I was before, but I was someone.

They let go of each other and Nanya hugs me too.

She wipes away the tears in her eyes and says, quietly, “I feel as though life here may be all the better, because I know you two.”

***

We are all smiling when we leave the tent, despite the long night and the prospect of another long day, but we are not alone as we once were, and though Chipo and I had each other, having Nanya makes life here all the more endurable. Nothing happens today, it’s just a typical day, and I can hear the screams from the prisoners that echo through the camp as the boys enjoy their daily round of games.

***

When night falls, the other girls sleep in the other tent again after insisting that Chipo needed more space, so we let them cram themselves together and Nanya and I crawl around until we find a comfortable spot on the floor while Chipo keeps the bed.

The night is quiet, and I lie awake thinking for a while. I can hear Nanya’s quick breathing and I know that she’s awake too. We don’t talk, though. We just lie in silence together, listening to Chipo’s slow breathing until finally, I let my eyes close and fall asleep.

***

I am woken by a hand grabbing me and dragging me upwards. I hear Nanya and Chipo yelp as a hands grabs them and we are thrown onto the bed together. I look up at our attackers and see five of the men standing there, growling down at us like rabid animals. I can hear Chipo’s and Nanya’s hearts pounding along with my own.

“Wha- what do you want.” Nanya whispers, but the men ignore her and instead two go around the bed and pin our hands down above our heads as the other three reach for our clothing. I see Nanya’s eyes widen, but Chipo has shut hers. I am scared. This can’t be happening.

I want to fight back, to push them away, to get them to go away- But I can’t.

I cannot move.

Please, let me die instead-

The man at my feet yanks down my pants and rip off my shirt as the ones next to him do the same to Chipo and Nanya.

Then they take off their own clothes.

And they hurt us. They hurt us and they hurt us and they hurt us, covering our mouths with their dirty hands as they each take turns, sharing us like wolves and their prey.

They don’t care what happens to us. 

***

The next day, none of us speak. We can’t. I’m still too horrified to put words together. To make things even worse, we are fighting today.
We form our lines without question, us girls in the front, as usual.

We are raiding a village today, and as we march, carrying our guns on our shoulders, I cannot think. Days go by, and the same six words echo through my head over and over again like a clock tolling midnight.

I am going to kill again.

I am a robot, not thinking or feeling because I can’t. Instead I stare straight ahead, barely even blinking.

I am so done with this life.

We surround the village, aiming our guns at the helpless people milling about doing their every day chores, not knowing that death awaits them.

Then we fire.

They scatter, screaming and cowering because they know that they’re trapped.

I killed a girl. I watched as the bullet from my gun struck her in the chest and blood stained her brown skin red. She died immediately.

The slaughter is quick, and once there are no more living bodies left in sight we gather materials from the houses and arms of the dead and the commander gathers us in the center of the village. He lets the boys kneel, but he makes us stand.

I don’t listen to what he says, and because I don’t hear him, I hear the gunshot. The terrible, piercing scream of a gun that was not my own. The deadly, petrifying sound as the bullet flew through the air. I did not turn around in time to see its blur that seemed to shriek ‘one of you will soon be dead’.

I only heard it in what seemed to be slow motion as it came closer and closer and closer- There is a scream to my left and someone crumples, holding their stomach.

It’s Chipo.

My heart begins to pound, drumming in my ears like a million screams on a dark, eerie night lit only by the distant light of the moon, and I can’t look away. The drumming grows louder and louder and louder as I drop down beside her, weak with fear, and make her move her hands away from her abdomen. I see the boys scatter, searching for the one survivor, the murderer, but I don’t really see them.

I don’t see anything but the blood pouring out of Chipo’s body, staining her hands, her clothes, the ground beneath her, and her skin, just like the girl I killed. Painting the world around her in a dark red that tells of despair and anger and fear and hatred. There is so much hatred, in the world and in my heart. I hate the man who has done this, who has brought my closest friend to her knees. The world is so full of hate. Hatred for each other, hatred for ourselves, hatred for everything that can be good and everything that can be bad. The world is a terrible, terrible place, filled with hatred. And now because of it Chipo, Chipo...

She is dying. I know but I don’t want to admit it.

She can’t die.

I hear another gunshot and know that culprit has been killed.

But I don’t care. I don’t look anywhere but Chipo as her face contorts with pain. The rest of the world fades away, and it is just us.

“Chipo,” I say softly, laying her down on the blood-soaked Earth and holding her head as tears roll down my face in a waterfall of sorrow. “Oh, Chipo, stay with me, please. Don’t go. Don’t leave me.”

She ignores me and whispers, “Eshe, survive this place, for me, please. You and- and Nanya.” Her breathing is labored. “Eshe, Eshe my real- name was- was-” she takes a rattling breath. “Dikeledi.”

Then her breathing stopped and her eyes went blank as her face relaxed in the inevitable embrace of death.

And she was dead.

***

Nanya dragged me away from her body, away from the eyes staring upward but not seeing. I screamed and screamed, trying to break away from her until all of the fight drained out of me and I went limp, the grief washing over me in waves, in a tsunami of pain and despair. I sobbed as Chipo’s words rang through my head. I sobbed the entire walk back to camp, but all I knew was that my heart felt like it had been ripped apart and a part of me was missing.

She’s gone. I kept thinking. She’s gone. She’s never coming back.

I didn’t talk to anyone for weeks. I didn’t sleep, and I didn’t eat, and I didn’t care.

The only reason I’m still alive is because that’s what Chipo wanted.
Weeks and weeks after her death, I am sitting outside, watching the stars, when Nanya sits down beside me. “Hey,” she says.

“Hi.” My voice has no emotion. It hasn’t for weeks. 

“Do you want to get out of this place?”

“What?”

“Don’t you ever want to leave?”

“Of course.”

“They why don’t we?”

“Nanya,” I look around quickly. They will be watching us, listening to us, I’m sure of it. 

“There’s no camera’s here, or recorders.”

“How do you know?”

“I was in the camp headquarters cleaning and I saw the map. I wasn’t supposed to see it, though, so they gave me these.” She shows me the bruises on the inside of her arms. 

“Are you okay?”

“Yeah.”

I look down at the grass beneath my bare feet, not sure what to say.

“Let’s go this week.”

“What?”

“Let’s leave this week. We’re doing another raid, and we can escape. We can run.” 

I stare at her, wanting to say more, wanting to argue, to insist that we won’t make it. But I remember Chipo’s words, and I take a deep breath before answering. “Okay.”

“Really!”

“Yeah.”

She smiles, then looks upward. “You know, I always loved the stars.”

“Yeah?”

She nods. “They always gave me hope.”

***

Our uniform lines almost seem to break as we walk, but I know that it is just because of the prospect of no longer being a part of them anymore. Soon we will be far away, and we will not have to fear the men.

We will no longer have to fear our own lives.

My heart is racing as we near the village after a walk that lasted days, and as we surround it I am almost sure that someone will hear the drumming inside of my chest.

We fire upon the people, who fall screaming as usual. I feel the guilt washing over me as I shoot down another child and an elderly man, and a woman holding a small baby in her arms, and I remember Chipo falling, screaming, and dying because someone did the same thing to her as we are doing to these people. I remember the girl, whose skin turned red like Chipo’s when I sent the bullet flying through her heart.

But I can’t think about that now, not when we are so close to freedom.

Not when freedom comes at the expense of these deaths.

Besides, when we are free, we will not have to kill people anymore.

When most of them are dead, we are told to split up to search for any survivors, and Nanya and I search for the opportunity to flee. We stay together, worried that if we separate, we will never find each other again.

We enter a few houses, checking for survivors, but not really seeing if anyone is still there. If they are, we ignore them.

Maybe they will be able to escape as well.

When no one is looking, we duck behind a house on the pretense of looking for more survivors, and with my heart beating so hard that it feels like it will explode inside me, Nanya turns to me.

“Are you ready?” she says.

I nod and take her hand. My heart has far since passed the point of racing and is now flying. I do not know what I feel upon this prospect. Fear. Excitement. Happiness. Sadness. It's all a blur.

Nanya gives my hand a squeeze, and I return it. I can feel the courage in her firm grip and I know that we are ready.

This is our chance. This is a chance that we have been waiting months for. It seems more like years and decades.

I hear Chipo’s voice as we turn and run into the trees and underbrush.

Survive this place for me.”

We will.

I promise.

As we disappear into our new sanctuary, I cannot believe it. We have done it.

We are almost free.

***

We don’t stop running until we are far, far away, the memories of the camp seeming to have disappeared behind us. But there are still some that will never disappear. Memories too dark and too horrifying and too scarring to forget. They have shaped our lives up until this moment, and now we can break the mold and reshape them.

Nanya and I are both tired and hungry, but at least we are free.

We stop for the night and I sit on the spring grass, watching the stars beginning to appear in the sky, glittering like a million guardians, angels, protectors. A million reasons to be happy and to hope. Nanya joins me and we sit together in silence for a while.

“I can’t believe we did it,” she says finally.

“Yeah,” is all I can say. It seems so unreal, too impossible and too easy, but I know we are safe, and I know that it is real. “I think Chipo helped us out a bit.”

Nanya smiles, looking up at the sky too. “Yeah. She did.” “Do you know what her real name was?”

She shakes her head.

“Dikeledi.”

Tears.”

I nod.

“I wonder why.”

I shrug. “I don’t know, but I miss her, I miss her a lot.”

Nanya puts her arm around me. “I know. I do too.”

“I can’t believe she’s gone.” I say, voicing the words that have haunted me for weeks and I can feel tears blossoming in the back of my eyes again. I can see them shining in Nanya’s eyes too.

I am not alone.

“But she’s not. She’s not gone. She lives on in our hearts and as long as we keep her there she will always be there. She will never be gone.”

“You’re right.” I manage a small smile as a tear rolls down my cheek and I wipe it away.

I watch as a star falls through the dimming sky and the birds above our heads sing the song that I have forgotten. I forgot it a long time ago.

Hope.

A song of hope.

And I decide that, the world isn’t such a bad place, it’s just certain parts, certain people, certain things. It isn’t divided into good people and bad people, love and hate, right and wrong and black and white. Nothing is that simple. People wear different faces, and to separate those who are good from those who are bad is unjust, because that is never the only face that they have. It’s just the only face that we see.

It’s just that the only faces I’ve seen are those of evil and hatred. I have been shown the world at its worst, but now I have a chance to see it at its best.

Greater is what lies ahead.

It is. The past has been taken away by the future, and while it will always be there, scars that will never fade, it doesn’t define me anymore. It doesn’t define the world.

Ifunanya and I will face the world from a different angle, from a different life, and the hope that was once gone has now returned. The place in my heart that yearns for Chipo aches greatly, and though it aches I no longer blame the man who killed her, I do not feel the hatred that I once did. He only killed her, because we killed them. He didn’t pick which one of us he brought down, he didn’t aim directly for her, that’s just where the bullet flew when he let it fly. I wish that she could be here now, but she is, and I must not forget it. She is here with us, watching the sun set over the new horizon. Watching the birds flying through the air, soaring high with no burdens weighing them down. We, Ifunanya and I, we are like these birds. We are weightless and for the first time in so long, happy. Yes, there are parts of us that are not, places so dark with sorrow that they will never know happiness, but in the end, we have each other. In a way we have Chipo, and we are no longer the caged birds that we once were.

Never again will we be those caged birds. 

No.

Now we are the birds that fly free.

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