Fatima knew it was going to be hard, but not that hard.

She had been crouching down in the thick shrubbery for what seemed like an eternity, the thorns dug deep into her skin.

She was told to wait for a signal to let her know the border patrol agents had gone away. She found it endearing that the signal everyone had agreed upon was the sound of an owl hooting like the one in the countless old western films her father liked to watch after the kids had gone to bed.

A twig broke not too far from where she was and she almost screamed out, gripping both hands over her mouth at the last minute. She did her best to peek through the thick branches and saw a pair of combat boots and the nozzle of an automatic rifle- she knew that rifle well because it was the same one that had killed the men in her family- her father and 3 brothers. How absurd, she thought, after running from that rifle for thousands of miles, here she was again, staring at it as a wave of fear swept over her tired and famished body.

She must have let out a sound because the boots turned to move toward her. Her heart started racing and tears rolled down her cheeks- but the warm liquid was soothing to her dry and chapped lips.

In what seemed like the longest moment of her life, the boots appeared to just stand there, right in front of her- she thought she had been found and will soon be at the receiving end of that rifle- and just as effortlessly, the boots walked away as she heard a voice yell out in a language she did not understand, followed by a scurry of boots and vehicle engines starting and driving off.

Fatima let out a sigh of relief and dried her sweat and tears with her hijab.

‘I think it’s safe for us to get out now’, a familiar voice said in the distance, and just as she was about to free herself from the pesky thorns a shot rang out so close to her she actually thought she herself had been shot and unconsciously checked the back of her head for blood- because that was where they shot you; the back of the head, always the back.

She closed her eyes and prepared to meet all the souls she has lost.

But there was no blood at the back of her head, no pearly white gates.

‘It’s not me, it’s not me’, she thought to herself with some guilt.

‘I’m okay’, she thought and bit down on her hijab as hard as she could.

Then her eyes widened with the horror of the realization that she did not know who had been shot. Was it her mother, was it one of her sisters? They had already lost her youngest sister at the last border crossing- ‘I told her not to chase after that stupid rabbit, I told her they didn’t shoot rabbits here, they only shoot little children who cannot keep quiet’, she remembered her sister who was too worried about the little rabbit she had adopted somewhere along their long journey. But Souad wouldn’t listen, she had always been a wild little soul that one. The image of her sisters’ little face made her smile but then as she felt the wave of that familiar devastating sadness starting to make its way over her, she shut her eyes quickly and pinched her arm really hard, ‘Not now, please please, not now’, she pleaded with her fragmented mind.

A reel of images played in her mind; the faces of all the dead and the manner in which they had died, like some deranged and twisted archival footage about victims of a serial killer that had never been caught, only this was real.

She pinched herself again, harder this time, until the pain erased all things from her mind. She yanked her neck back as far as she could and caught a glimpse of someone’s lifeless feet being dragged across the forest floor.

Olive-green boots.

‘I know these boots’, she thought to herself, trying so hard to figure out whose body that was. ‘Mama- black boots, Sara- burgundy, Olfat- Olive green, Ahmad- Black-’, she struggled to breathe.

‘No, no, it can’t be’, she tried to convince herself. Like some ritual, she went over the images of everyones’ shoes in her mind again, ‘Mama- black boots, Sara- burgundy, Olfat- Olive green’, a flash flood of tears gushed down her face. ‘ Olfat- olive green, Olfat- olive green, OLFAT- OLIVE GREEN’, her mind shrieked back at her mockingly.

As shocked as she was at that moment, Fatima was engulfed by the familiarity of it all. Her haunting proficiency in death and the effortlessness of it.

She grew up watching films and reading novels where killing someone had been the last resort a character had, and if they did kill someone she recalled pages upon pages of recounting how it was going to haunt them forever and ever. Here, on this earth- ‘my earth’ she thought, things were much different. Memories of Olfat began to creep up into her mind but she pinched herself again- ‘It does not matter, none of it matters’, she told herself. ‘It does not matter if you were a good person or a bad person, if you were old or just a child. When you’re dead, none of it matters’, she repeated to herself like a mantra.

She went on to think about all the bodies she did not get to bury properly, all the shallow and hasty graves she would not get a chance to visit. She thought of how many countries and borders those bodies lay scattered over, never marked.

Another shot went off in the background, and then another. She jerked around and saw more feet being dragged out of frame and she felt like she did not care. She could not care anymore. She turned around, buried her face in her dress, and moved deeper into the prickly prison she was in, blood oozing out of her skin, and closed her eyes as more shots rang out in the background.

The sun crept away from the skies, leaving Fatima cold and alone.

She called upon her trusted feel-good memory of when she was around nine or ten, when her mother would brush her long hair in the morning and sing folk songs as she weaved two indestructible braids. ‘One hundred strokes of a brush’, her mother would say. ‘One hundred strokes for one hundred years of good fortune’, Fatima heard her mothers voice repeat over and over in front of the large sun-filled window in her childhood home.

She heard the hooting of an owl in the distance, but her eyelids were too heavy and her body too broken to get up.

‘That’s the signal Fatima, get up’, Souad tugged at her. ‘ Just five more minutes’, Fatima murmured under her breath.

‘You do not have five minutes, get up NOW! Now Fatima!’ Olfat kicked her with the same olive-green boots and she sprung up from the bushes, wide awake now.

Ahmad was standing right in front of her and without a second thought, they flung their arms around each other and cried like they had never done before, like they were the last two souls on this wretched earth.

‘It’s just us now’, Ahmad said, ‘ They took everyone else’.

‘I know’, Fatima sobbed.