Wade Read Free

around her was destroyed. She’d turned on Ahmad, screaming. He’d knocked her to the ground, then stood over her as he told her exactly what had taken place and how things would be from that day forward.
    The Taliban militia, in which he was now a senior officer, had captured Kashi and ousted President Zagros. They’d established strict adherence to ancient Islamic law as put forth in the Qur’an, or “El Noor,” the light, along with all the inflexible cultural edits of their Afghan brethren. Men were required to grow beards. The windows of houses must be painted black to prevent women from being glimpsed in passing. Females caught on the street without the covering of a burqa and a male relative to guard and monitor their conduct could be beaten by the police or any male citizen who took exception to their indecent exposure. Women could be punished for talking too loudly, laughing in public, showing the skin of wrist or ankle, wearing cosmetics—the list went on and on. Male heads of household were permitted, even encouraged, to use corporal punishment to keep the females in their charge in order. Conviction for premarital sex or adultery was now punishable by public execution of one or both parties. All schools for girls were ordered closed. Thousands of women had been sent home from their jobs as teachers, lawyers, doctors, nurses and every other occupation, with males appointed in their places.
    Chloe had thought nothing could be worse, butshe’d been wrong. Her stepfather had been conscripted into the Taliban army and marched away to guard the northern border. Ahmad had taken over as head of the household, the man solely responsible for guiding and correcting the conduct of Chloe and her mother.
    Conditions in the country deteriorated. Food became scarce, imported goods almost nonexistent. Women without male relatives to support them or a way to earn a living began to appear in the streets as beggars. Prostitution was forbidden, but became rampant nonetheless. The government infrastructure began to break down. Crime increased. Rabid dogs roamed the streets. As electric lines were cut and generating facilities damaged, power became available only for government buildings and a few hotels. Traffic lights and street lamps ceased to operate. Life returned to something like the Dark Ages.
    And then, less than a year later, her mother had caught sight from her kitchen window of wild dogs attacking a toddler. She’d run screaming from the house to beat off the starving pack with a broom. The policeman who appeared on the scene cared nothing for the injured child, a small girl. Instead he attacked Chloe’s mother for leaving her burqa in the house. As he began to beat her with his stick, one or two men of the Taliban appeared, shouting about the foreign witch with her sky-colored eyes who dared defy their laws. Chloe snatched up her own burqa and ran out to help her mother but was caught and held back. A stone was thrown, and then another and another. When it was over, the frenzied group faded away,leaving Chloe alone with her mother’s body where it lay crumpled against the house wall.
    Chloe felt as if the jaws of a great bear trap had closed upon her. She developed migraine headaches so sickeningly painful that it seemed only cutting off her head could relieve their agony. She spent hours lying in her dim room. Sometimes she slept or gazed dully at the ceiling, but mostly she stared out a small hole scratched in the painted window at the barren landscape of ochre buildings, sun-scorched brown earth, vegetation gray-green with dryness and the encircling mountains blue-hazed with distance and dust. She didn’t go out because there was no place to go, seldom joined the others in the common room of the sprawling stone house because she had nothing to say to them. She lost weight, allowed her long hair that could not be cut for fear of reprisal to grow lank and tangled. Sometimes,