New Flash Fiction: Death's Witness

For our latest flash fiction, we have a story that is a much darker than our normal fare and has echoes of the tragedy unfolding in parts of Syria and Iraq. Our author is Day Al-Mohamed and her first book, released from Dark Quest in September 2014, is a young adult novel Baba Ali and the Clockwork Djinn. In addition to speculative fiction, she also writes comics and film scripts. 

Her most recent publications can be found in Daily Science Fiction, Crossed Genres anthology Oomph - A Little Super Goes a Long Way and GrayHaven Comics' anti-bullying issue You Are Not Alone. She is a member of the Cat Vacuuming Society Writers Group of Northern Virginia*, a member of Women in Film and Video, and a graduate of the VONA/Voices Writing Workshop. (*Based on the theory that writers would do just about anything but write, including clean the house. To the point that after vacuuming everything, the idea of vacuuming the cat to get the hair BEFORE it ends up on the carpet sounds appealing.) You can find her on the web at www.DayAlMohamed.com and on Twitter @DayAlMohamed



Death’s Witness
by Day Al-Mohamed


Qasim Al-Mafqoud stood on the edge of the grave. He was tired. It had taken many days of pain and heartbreak to bring his tribe to this place for burial – Mother, brother, father, uncles, cousins, wife…and children. His back ached from the work; his hands raw from scooping away harsh desert sand to make a place for them. “La Illa ha Ill-Allah, wa Muhammad al-rasul Allah.” There is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is His Messenger. 

As the sun set and the air cooled, Qasim wrapped his stained jalabiya more tightly around him. He blinked, but he had no tears left. He took a deep breath and let it out slowly, his gaze panning the desolate horizon, seeking someone. Some thing. 

Less than a score of years and already Qasim felt like one of the old men who sat in Abdul Rasoul’s shop, drinking sweet tea and smoking shisha while children played in the dust of the street. The old men laughed and reminisced about companions long gone, yet Death was at their left shoulder and in their dark eyes there was fear, for every man faces Death alone. As inevitable as the shamal winds that blew down from the North during the dry season. Yet, Qasim had prayed, for years, to no longer see the white-robed figure.

As a boy, he sat vigil with the men by the great sheik’s bed, and watched patient Death who waited with them, unseen, as the old man coughed and shivered with fever. And Qasim had cried. Seven hundred and forty tears for an old man who had led his people away from war, to the oasis in the El-Kharga desert. As a young man, Qasim had seen Death follow his little sister, Fatima, for days before finally embracing her. And he had shed helpless tears, three thousand, two hundred and eighty five tears, one for every day of her life. As a father, he had shouted to the Almighty when he had seen the same Death with its hand upon his baby daughter’s breast. One hundred and fifty-one thousand and two hundred tears, one for every breath she took in her short life. But his burden was too much the day he awoke and Death had left its shadowy handprint across his village.

Everywhere he looked it was there – on shoulders, on brows, on arms and chests; on women and men, on babies and even  animals. He ran and shouted, and screamed, and cried at them until they feared him mad. Thousands upon thousands of tears. Perhaps he had been a little mad, perhaps that was why he was locked in the tiny spring house on the edge of the village when the raiders had come. 

Qasim wiped the mud and dirt and blood from his face as he stood unsteady but dry-eyed at the mass grave. Now, there was just him. And Death. Death looked down upon the clutter of bodies and for the first time, Qasim could see Death’s face. Death too wept.