by Tommy Cheis
Admission standards for suicide bomber school were low. An applicant needed only be pious, unmarried, psychologically healthy, and thirteen years old. And all criteria were waivable.
Graduation standards were lower. The technical demands are so minimal and evaluating the mastery of skills under mission conditions so impossible that no student ever failed the course. In fact, all forty students in Muhammad Jihad’s class, which convened for two weeks in a rat-infested warehouse in a riverfront warren in Raqqa, were trained for their martyrdom by instructors with no direct knowledge of the subject matter but with the express guarantee all would graduate.
During Week One, Muhammad Jihad, a thirteen-year-old from Gaza City, kidnapped by ISIS when an Israeli bomb orphaned him and pressed into their service, hibernated as ISIS celebration videos played. He zoned out during lectures by clerics who taught that martyrdom is not suicide, which Islam categorically prohibits, and their targets would not be humans but killers of prophets and monkeys’ and pigs’ descendants. While other imams whipped up fervor to convince students to detest the slavery of their earthly existences and lust after life with Allah and the garland of seventy-two virgins, he blanked his mind. While other students learned to arm and detonate bombs they would, when their times came, drive into a conglomeration of the enemy and detonate, causing mass casualties. The boy suffered in agony at the loss of his mother.
In Week Two, while others learned as death approaches to recite shahadatyn and allow their brains to become reptilian lest thoughts of this world or the faces of potential victims cancel their resolve, the boy prayed to his handler, Abu Zil, for a reprieve from a short rotten life by way of a promotion to a fighter with a place in the lines.
On graduation day, Muhammad’s prayer was answered. Abu Zil granted him his promotion but also, as a present, something more prurient.
Now, in the passenger seat of a white Nissan pickup, he swatted gnats while Abu Albusny, a twitchy Sarajevan rat and fellow ISIS member, handed coins to a clerk in the berubbled ghost city Dayr uz-Zur. Other fighters in the Busarayah Street internet café viewed pictures of naked women and children. Heavy fighting was over, but crackling gunfire made Albusny hustle back behind the wheel.
The emaciated, white-haired thirty-something opened his begrimed hand under the boy’s chin to reveal a cluster of blue pills. “Viagra,” he chortled, then mashed the accelerator.
The pickup bumped over the acned road through a forest of building-skeletons and the miasma of history’s ghosts.
“What is it?” asked the boy, who watched the blur of opportunistic riverbank bushes suck the Euphrates like vampires. Bloated corpses floated on oil slicks.
“You joke? Viagra.” As they passed a shattered memorial to Armenian victims of Ottoman genocide, Albusny broke into cigarette-roughened laughter. “Make you go all night!”
“Is it caffeine?”
The Sarajevan let loose a mirthful blast as they stopped at a checkpoint in a zone of schools with no students and good-less shops. “You never fuck?”
The boy went brick-red. “I swore I will never touch a woman before marriage.”
Incredulity contorted the weasel’s face. “Promised who? Allah?” He spat the word like coffee grounds. “Imam fix problem! Temporary marriage!” He cleared the checkpoint, turned onto the one-lane bridge, dug in a paper bag, and tossed a Hustler magazine on the boy’s lap. “Research.”
The boy threw it over his shoulder, considered punching the Bosnian on his weak chin, but realized that would earn him a watery grave in the Euphrates. And Abu Zil had missed his graduation ceremony, but penned a note promising, on his return in three days, to celebrate with him. Yet who knew if his future held ought but bitter disappointment and Zil was toying with him?
As the pickup crested the bridge, sulfur conquered river-rot, then the largest brightest thing Muhammad Jihad had ever seen materialized. A dazzle of metal, light, pipes, towers, and gangways crouched on the east bank belching fiery smoke and humming with purpose like a mechanical monster consuming humanity or an electrified mosque redeeming it. The enormous Conoco Oil Refinery, by its sheer size, converted trucks and people into toys and ants.
Albusny steered onto a service road, then past bleak concrete and sun-faded aluminum outbuildings, and then pulled up to a barracks-style structure. A hand-painted sign on the industrial door read, in Arabic, English, and Russian, Guest Worker Quarters. He killed the ignition, gulped blue pills, and opened his door. “Buy girl,” he explained. Graduation reward.”
Muhammad Jihad shook his head.
Puzzled, Albusny scratched a greying beard so patchy it would disappoint teenage boys. Then he brightened. “Want boy, OK.”
“No thanks.”
Albusny went to the next item on his mental list. “Doctor check, woman clean, give pill, no baby.” He wagged a finger, negating any belly-bump. “Unless you want. Slave girl give birth to her master. Is sign of end of world. In West, sun rises. Mahdi come. Is written in Qur’an. Surah 23, ayat 5 and 6. OK make sex with slave girl. Imam make fatwa. Is not rape.”
In the face of militant ignorance, the boy, who knew exactly what the Qur’an did and did not say and that its words could be shaped like wax to suit the handler, chose not to argue.
“Allah bless the State for bring shari’a,” Albusny lectured through rotten teeth. “One time, one day, one year, make wife if want. Fuck. Wash. Cook. Better than five against one,” he jeered, simulating masturbation before jerking his thumb at the dormitory, “Yazidi infidels.” He stepped onto gravel, walked around the hood to the boy’s open door, and tugged him out by his lapels.
They walked through a gnat-swarm, past guards, and down a corridor where fighters fresh from the front milled outside a room wherein women were confined.
The boy’s groin felt full. He tried to yank his thoughts away but there was nowhere good to put them.
Albusny refused the flesh-vendor’s offer of tea, threw a spindly arm around the boy—unleashing an armpit-riot—and name-dropped Abu Zil. Open sesame. The door swung inward.
Muhammad Jihad found himself in a barren pantry cum harem where females of all ages, shapes, and sizes were waist-chained together and huddled under fluorescent lights, radiating hatred and keening with fear. Pinned to each black robe was a piece of paper upon which a number from 1 to 47 was written. The pantry stank of rotten musty vegetables, vomit, and urine.
The vendor, clutching a folder with a sheet for each, ordered his slaves to rise. When they did not obey quickly enough, he dragged them by their chains.
Market prices were written on a dry-erase board. The base for a forty-year-old woman was $100. Blonde hair was a $200 surcharge, whether from nature or a tube. The same for eyes other than brown. Ceteris paribus, the younger the woman, the more expensive she was.
“Look all,” Albusny advised, steering Muhammad to a middle-aged woman at row’s end, “then pick.” He cupped his hand and screened a fistful of cash with his body to keep the vendor from seeing. “Abu Zil give many dinars for buy girl.”
Despite himself, the boy beheld the captives like a wolf-cub first seeing lambs. Halfway down the line he found 19, a tawny girl with a triangular face, delicate fingers, and a death grip on 20.
Vendor beat mother to pry daughter away, then threw a hemp noose around the girl’s neck, stripped her, and handed her garment and the rope to the boy as if presenting a horse and saddle blanket to a rider.
An erection sprouted in the boy’s trousers. He draped the robe over his shoulder, smelling scents new and old.
The gangly girl held an arm over a chest whose blooms awaited spring and a hand over a place where, until now, no man had seen. She held her chin up defiantly.
“Fun but expensive,” Albusny said, staring obscenely. “Another?”
“No,” said Muhammad. While Albusny and the vendor haggled price, he snuck glances at 19 between thudding heartbeats. He guessed her age to be his—thirteen—and blushed furiously.
The vendor grabbed a hank of wavy hair, bending 19’s neck. “Blond, blue, virgin.”
Albusny crossed his arms. “No meat, all bone.”
But the boy stood his ground. “How much?”
“Two thousand,” the vendor said. “If I sell her for less, I’d make you a thief. You’d lose a hand.”
Albusny pulled the boy back. “Only have fifteens hundred. Look another.”
“Want the old one too?” the vendor asked. “Try some mother-daughter action?”
The boy pulled out his entire wad of bills. “For both. But let the mother go.”
The vendor snatched the boy’s $500 plus Albusny’s roll. “Bow before your master!” he ordered 19, raising a hand to strike her.
Muhammad Jihad tugged 19 out of the vendor’s reach and asked, “Where can I take her?”
The Disgrace of Sarajevo extended his middle finger, circled his other hand, and performed a lewd gesture. “Big hurry to fuck!” He added a quick pelvic-thrust then laughed like a jackal.
Two other fighters entered the corral.
Two other girls were forcibly disrobed. Both were forced to spread their labia.
Down the line, the girl’s mother wailed and held her hands in supplication as she was ushered to relative freedom; meanwhile, the vendor trumpeted the wares of a raven-haired, violet-eyed nine-year-old to entice two pedophilic fighters over forty.
It’s sewn, one fighter grumbled, slandering her virginity to reduce her price.
Her brothers already fucked her, the other customer complained.
By Allah, I guarantee her purity, the vendor said.
Muhammad Jihad turned on Albusny. “Go,” he said.
The Sarajevan slunk away.
Then, slave at his right hand, the boy led 19 to a bored clerk, who checked him and his spoils-of-war into a room for three nights.
* * *
“Show me.”
“No.” The naked Yazidi slave-girl pressed against a headboard, arms around her knees.
In the mirror above the chest-of-drawers, a boy with a room key safety-pinned to his underwear sat on bed’s edge, playing a drawn game of tug-of-war with the tired linen sheet in which she had wrapped herself. “Open your legs, infidel.” The air conditioner worked, barely, but Muhammad Jihad worried he smelled rotten. “Show me!”
She sat up to gain leverage.
He got up and paced beside the bed, then retrieved a phrase. “By the rules of war and religion regarding capture, you’re my property.”
19 looked at him as if he were particularly stupid, then affected a reverential tone. “Oh, Shaykh Muhammad, what rule of war or religion lets you enslave us?”
“I will inspect my purchase! I paid $500 for you!”
“One fourth of my value. Inspect this.” She teased the sheet up and revealed, in slow succession—toes, arches, heels, shins.
Mesmerized, Muhammad Jihad took it in.
Then 19 kicked the sheet to make it settle over her and scooted against the headboard. “Master, you abandoned my mother. Is it because yours abandoned you?”
The boy’s world went red. “Shut up!” He tore away the sheet, found her ankles, and yanked.
The girl slid, bumping her head.
The boy threw a knee on the mattress and swung his other over her midsection.
The girl flailed at his face.
When he captured her wrists and pinned them, 19 fear-spasmed and froze.
Two cotton layers separated them. Trying to make himself do the duty Zil required of him, he bicycled off his underwear, prised her hips apart with his knees, and put himself against the crinkly hair dusting her pudendum.
Then he rocked in gentle increments along her furrow. Watched the buds on her chest stiffen. Insinuated his torso against hers. Hunched in the general direction of her musky heat, but too indiscriminately and limply to penetrate her.
He rolled her nipples in his mouth to enflame himself. Brushed his lips against hers to call him to arms. But everything was salt and sorrow.
He awoke still atop 19. He did not know where, who, or what he was. In the bathroom, when he saw himself in the mirror over the sink—naked, shriveled, in a seedy room with an abused Yazidi war prize—his legs gave way.
He stumbled to bed, tapped her shoulder, and beheld her. Blood engorged him, but searing shame made him cover her with the sheet. Then he sank to his knees and prayed. Then he rose, leaned over 19, and brushed her lips with his.
She was cold. He feared he had killed her until her eyes fluttered.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I was curious.” He realized how ridiculous it was to comfort her. Her muteness hurt more than blows. “Did I hurt you?”
She stiffened.
“She didn’t abandon me,” he said. “My mother’s dead.” He wondered whether their mothers might otherwise have been friends. When he realized he was naked, he put on his underwear.
“You don’t belong with those people,” 19 said. “Why did you join?”
“I didn’t.” His erection tented his underwear and tinkled the pinned-on room key like a bell. He turned away, humiliated. “Not at first,” said his mirrored reflection. “It’s a long story.”
“We have three days,” she noted. “Less if you sell me. Tell me between rape attempts.”
“I won’t touch you again.”
“If you try, I’ll break that mirror and cut your throat. Or mine. Or both.”
“Please don’t harm yourself. It’s a great sin and you’d go to Hell.”
“I’m already there.”
The boy wanted to say he had not violated her but quailed at the fear that anything he would say might push her to suicide.
Shrill screams from another room penetrated the walls, followed by thuds, rhythmic bumps, and cries.
“What’s your name?” 19 asked, blocking out the commotion.
He told her.
She rolled her eyes. “As if. Don’t tell me, then. I’m Zara.”
“That’s beautiful. Seriously, I, Muhammad Jihad, am pleased to meet you.” He extended his hand but caught himself, then laid it over his chest in the traditional way.
“What would your mother think if she saw you now?” Zara turned his chin so they were face-to-face. The sheet fell. “Would she be ashamed?”
“I don’t know,” he said, drunk on her incense. “I never met her.”
“Were you adopted?”
“Orphaned.”
“Me too.”
“No. Your mother’s cooking and cleaning in a big house. You’ll see her soon.”
“Maybe in another life.”
“This is all there is.”
“What about Paradise?”
The boy reflected on just how far from Paradise Zara was at this moment. “Yazidis don’t get Paradise,” he informed her. “You go to Hell because you have seven gods and worship the devil.”
“We believe in the one true God, even if She doesn’t get involved. We don’t question Her.”
“God is masculine!”
“Maybe. If God were female, She wouldn’t allow what your kind do to women.”
“Your peacock god is Satan in disguise.”
“Don’t believe all you hear, see, or read. Melek Taus is neither god nor devil, but a defiant angel sent to earth to reward and punish.”
“How can you believe this foolishness, Zara.?”
“The same way you believe yours.”
“Then convert.”
She looked at him as if he had suggested she douse herself in diesel and strike a match.
“Only Muslim women are safe,” the boy explained. “I’ll marry you if you renounce the peacock.”
The ensuing silence was prolonged. “If I do,” she said, “then what?”
Her question caught the boy flat-footed. He could only improvise. “Well, you’d support me in jihad,” he began. “You’d bear my children. We’d live well together. When the time came, we’d go be with God.” Even to himself he sounded presumptuous, but he meant every word.
The silence that followed was an eon.
Finally, he gave up his foolish dream and settled for the mundane proximity of her skin brushing his. “If I free you, where will you go?” he asked. “How would you survive?” He tucked a stray tendril of hair behind her perfectly-formed ear. “Fighters are everywhere. You’d be captured again by those worse than I.” He kissed her.
Zara kissed him back timidly, then with conviction.
Then she rolled and slid her hands up his chest and behind his head.
Then she kissed his length.
Then they gave and received equally.
“I would get a gun to fight,” she said later, “but I would freeze. You saw it. I want to be a teacher. Let’s go someplace safe. Sweden or USA.”
“I hate the USA,” he said, then told Zara everything.
She listened, mourned, and bore so gracefully the ponderous urn wherein he carried the ashes of his past that for the first time he could envision scattering its contents to the winds.
“Sweden then,” she said. “It’s civilized. We’ll get good educations and jobs, then have children.”
Terrible imaginings of what awaited her outside his circle of protection assailed him. If he left her here, she would be sold, used repeatedly, and die in agony. But if he took her along, he could guarantee only danger and uncertainty. His future was unknowable. Binding hers to his might doom her. He set out mentally in every direction, sailing through fog to speed her to safety, but kept circling back to the launch point. He was old enough. There was no other way.
“Marry me,” he said.
“No. I would lose my soul if I married outside our tribe.”
“Zara, if it’s all the same God, you’d just be changing teams. Not quitting the sport.”
She scrunched her forehead. “No Yazidi man would have me now that I’m defiled.”
“That’s nuts,” he said, hurt to be the suitor of last-resort whom she would forever blame for her lost virtue. “You’ll never see your people again. Who needs to know? I’ll tell the imam you want to convert. You’ll say the magic words. Once we’re man and wife, you can worship a peacock, a pig, or your purse. Nothing’s dirty about you that water won’t wash away.”
“I’d ask you to abandon your faith if we Yazidis accepted converts.”
“I’d do it to save a life. Only God knows what’s in your heart and mind. If you decide it isn’t for you, divorce me, then chase after what’s left of your devil-worshipping tribe.” Realizing thought might be the enemy of action, he kissed her as if this was what all gods intended when they were made.
She responded with vigor.
“Will you?”
She hesitated.
“I won’t ask again.” As he uttered those words he wanted to grab them back and remain forever in that moment where at least she had not denied him. But arrows had flown and would hit or miss their targets.
Zara touched his hand. “May I pray before I answer you? And I need to wash first.”
A terrible premonition reared up. “Don’t run away.” With his finger, Muhammad drew an imaginary line circumscribing her. “Per your faith, you can’t step outside a circle I trace around you.”
She took his face in her hands and kissed him. “Darling, get my robe.”
He frenetically hunted for the black garment he had tossed, then escorted her into the bathroom. Among the standard paraphernalia of linens, soap, and shampoo was no razor. The tiny window, although unbarred, was far too small.
Zara pulled the shower curtain closed.
He pulled the door shut.
From a loudspeaker, the evening prayer issued forth. While she washed, he kneeled on the green carpet and prayed to the one true God. Then he locked her in and explored the compound.
He hustled back and laid an atomizer of fragrance on the bed. When he pulled open the bathroom door, everything was hot and white. When steam clouds dissipated, Zara was wrapped in towels. He gave her an iridescent robe the colors of the Gazan Sea and olive groves.
“It’s perfect,” she said, then again shut the door.
The boy sat on the bed to await her judgment, ruminating himself into a fugue and wondering if his entire future would be a pathetic attempt to crawl back in time.
When she came out in the resplendent robe and a mysterious smile, she perfumed her wrists and ankles, then oriented herself toward the setting sun streaking the room with shadows. Then she prayed as sincerely as he had, albeit with queer words and movements.
He wondered if she asked for blessings for her marriage. Whether her wishes were transmitted to the same god as his. Or whether gods would choose between them.
When she finished, she sat and took his hand. “Yes,” she said. “I’ll marry you.”
The boy, heart pounding, jumped up and paced. Acknowledging the oneness of God and that Muhammad was prophetic would make her, formally, a Muslim, and allow consummation of marriage. But that was half of it. Other things needed to be learned to ensure an ISIS bride’s safety. He stopped mid-stride, shocked, and pointed at rivulets running down her thighs.
Zara covered her mouth. “I’m early.” She got up, bunched the robe, and trotted to the bathroom. The shower ran. “Muhammad, I need something, khateebee.”
Hearing her anoint him her fiancé made him glow deep in his interstices.
He went out and spent nineteen minutes in a happy daze trying to obtain the female products she needed. Despite his impending entry into matrimony, he was too shy to inquire of the merchant who ran the compound’s convenience store as to the whereabouts of the hygienic material Islamic State logisticians might prudently have provided female slaves, who, like all women, bled with regularity. But he finally found something suitable.
On his way to the mosque, he bought a plain silver band from a vendor of recently-pilfered jewelry. Then he informed the roly-poly imam with the curry-stained belly of his slave’s intent to convert, and that he would have himself wed to Zara as soon as her renunciation of Satan and acceptance of the one true God could be heard.
Back at the room, the boy keyed the lock to discover a bedsheet as bloody as if a rooster had been slaughtered upon it. And, worse, high on the bathroom wall an open window that when investigators arrived framed a rising crescent and pinch of stars.
Guards caught Zara hiding in an empty oil barrel in an offline section of the refinery and took turns raping her for an hour. Meanwhile, fruitless torture that would leave scars on and in the boy, bolstered by the gory bedsheet and the imam’s testimony, led investigators to decide he was neither spy, nor witch, nor complicit in Zara’s escape.
In the pre-dawn on the day she was to have married him, guards dragged Zara by her hair and tied her to the punishment-stake before lashing her bare back with a camel whip ninety-nine times—the customary one short of the number prescribed. They were dousing her with fuel, and the camp’s fighters and their rape-slaves were assembled to be entertained or cowed in accord with their respective stations, when the imam scurried out in pajamas chasing after Abu Zil, who materialized from nowhere and hastened to where the commandant had positioned himself and the boy to witness Zara’s execution.
Abu Zil raged that although the Qur’an prescribes punishment by fire for infidels, only God may administer flame. Therefore, he said, immolation by the hand of man is an abominable crime. He glared hatefully until both imam and commandant ran away, then handed the boy a rifle and stood right behind him, nineteen paces from where Zara stood chained.
The camp fell silent.
Zara, choking on fumes, refused a blindfold.
Through the glinting maze of refinery pipes, burnt-orange chariots dispatched by the rising sun saluted and sped Zara home to the one true God when, from a spot so near her fiancé could kiss her, Muhammad Jihad, because Abu Zil ordered it, squeezed the trigger.
It’s perfect, Zil whispered in the boy’s ear, his breath hot and rotten as his soul. I’m so proud of you.
Tommy Cheis is a Chiricahua Apache guide, medicine leader, and Cochise descendant. After traveling extensively through distant lands and meeting interesting people, he lives with his horses in the Cochise Stronghold of Arizona. His stories (will) appear in Another Chicago Magazine, Puerto del Sol, Nonbinary Review, Invisible City, ZiN Daily, After Dinner Conversation, BULL, and more than thirty other publications. A 2x Pushcart nominee and Darren L. Wright Memorial awardee, his work appears on the CLMP Reading List for Native American Month November 2024. His first novel, RARE EARTH, is on submission; his second, CHILD OF WATER, will follow shortly.