Charles Henderson - Terminal Impact

“You’re a fool,” the men had cackled at him. “Go back to the lovely goats that you use like a man does a wife.”

The old Arab from Baiji, who had also known Giti’s father and never liked the man because he had wealth, and Yasir had nothing, left the men, disgusted. He would hunt the mystical great white oryx. He would kill it and bring it back to the house, where he would butcher it for them and feed it to these fools. Then they would surely respect him.

Yasir had lived his entire life herding goats with his brothers on the open lands along the Tigris valley before the war. He joined Abu Omar’s Jamaat Ansar al-Sunnah more out of emotion than common sense. His talents lay more with goats than fighting Americans.

In Baiji, he had witnessed Omar beheading Giti’s father and brothers, and him shooting the mother and her baby girl in their heads. He was glad that the old graybeard had spared the pretty young girl, Giti, even as a slave. He felt bad for the Sadiq family, but they got what they deserved.

Rather than respected as a warrior, Yasir found himself relegated to last car. A personal servant. When anything needed doing, Omar took the men and left Yasir to mind the girls and the herd of goats and the chickens.

“I will show all of them, even Abu Omar,” Yasir said to himself that morning. He struck out to hunt the white oryx buck that he called Boosolah, just after the men had departed. Yasir told the girls not to tell anyone. Why should they? If they did, Abu Omar would punish them as well as Yasir. So the old Arab trusted them.

He didn’t worry about leaving them alone here, either. Where could they go? If they tried to escape, they would surely die in the desert. And they knew that quite well. The remote headquarters on the Iraqi desert needed no walls to keep the girls from running away.

The man, now late in his forties and never married, treated the girls well. He had no meanness in him, but he did like watching the pretty females. He felt strange comfort hearing Giti sing her songs of Jesus. Abu Omar ordered him to punish any of the girls if they ever mentioned their Savior, Jesus Christ. But he didn’t do it.

Yasir never said anything. He let their Christian faith remain their business. As long as they kept up Muslim appearances, wearing their hijabs and shawls, covering their heads and necks in the presence of the men, all was well.

“If we just lived and let live, we would have no war,” Yasir had thought. “What does it hurt to sing a song? It is only a song.”

Giti stripped bare and threw her clothes in the steaming cauldron full of soapy water. Then she jumped in the giant galvanized tub, near the wash pot, that they had filled with hot water for their baths. Miriam and Amira still played chase, not caring that Giti got in the tub first, and Sabeen stood clutching her shawl, legs pressed tight together, shivering.

“Too bad!” Giti sang out, giggling. “I get the clean water today.”

Here in this bitter land, bathing was a luxury for the girls, rare and splendid in their lives of slavery. It refreshed their spirits as well as their bodies.

Miriam and Amira grabbed small pots and began dipping water, pouring it over Giti’s naked body as she stood in the galvanized steel receptacle that would double to rinse the clothes after all four girls had bathed.

“Is that a baby bump?” Amira asked, surprised, pointing at Giti’s growing belly.

Giti looked back at her, and the fear on her face said enough to Amira to let it drop. Miriam had already known, and she dreaded the day that Abu Omar discovered that his sex toy carried his child. It was a death sentence.

Doing her best not to think of her growing baby, trusting God to carry out His will, Giti smiled at Sabeen. The shy Syrian girl stood shivering nearby, wrapped tight, watching the girls and dreading her turn to stand openly naked while the others poured water over her.

“Come, get in with me!” Giti called to Sabeen, and extended her hand.

“I am modest,” the Syrian girl replied, ready to cry.

“You are our sister, Sabeen,” Giti told her. “We are the same. You just have more beauty than I do. Please, come. Get in the water, and we will wash away all your heartaches.”

Miriam ran to the plump girl and gave her a hug. “Jesus loves you, Sabeen. Don’t you know? We love you, too!”

“Jesus cannot love me, I am Muslim,” Sabeen said.

“You are wrong,” Giti said. “Let Jesus fill your heart! All your sadness will fly away. Here, we will pray for you.”

Giti, Miriam, and Amira joined hands around Sabeen, closing her in a circle, and began to pray:

“Oh Father in Heaven, You are the great, loving God of all creation,” Giti said, and Sabeen lowered her head, too.

“Lord Jesus, take the heart of Sabeen who does not yet know You but wants Your love,” Miriam added.

Amira closed their prayers, “Take Sabeen into Your eternal embrace, Lord Jesus. Let her know that You are her Savior, too.”

Then all three said, “In the Name of Christ Jesus our Lord, our Savior, and Your only begotten Son we pray to You, oh Father in Heaven, amen.”

“My Savior, too?” Sabeen asked. “What must I do for Jesus to save me?”

“Believe!” Giti laughed and embraced her.

All four girls hugged, and Sabeen dropped her shawl, and stepped into the washtub, her chubbiness exposed to the world. Giti stood in the water with her.

“God made you this way, just as He made us,” Giti said, taking a bowl and pouring water over Sabeen’s head, then over her own.

Amira took the soap and a cloth and began washing the Syrian girl’s back, while Miriam washed Giti’s.

While the four naked girls celebrated their momentary freedom, Yasir al-Bayati walked heavy-footed to the animal sheds and dropped a dead wild goat he had shot. No white oryx today, but a mostly white buck goat with a brown stripe down his back and a black mask over his face and tail. He had black horns barely a foot long.

“Wild goat tastes best,” he said, hanging the carcass with bailing wire in the rafters, letting its blood drain in the shade.

When he first saw the animal, chewing on dry weeds, he thought it was the white oryx. Maybe his mind made it appear much bigger and with the long, curved black horns. So he shot. Then when he got to the dead animal, he cursed the goat’s life as well as his own miserable existence.

“They will mock me now,” Yasir said as he walked to the water trough and washed his face. Then he heard the girls laughing. He looked toward the back of the house and saw the clotheslines draped with blankets, and smiled.

Quietly, the old Arab crept to the blankets and pulled a gap between them. All four of the naked girls in open display immediately excited him to rigid hardness.

He wanted to relieve himself as the girls washed each other, soap on their bodies, water sparkling on their skin. The fat one, Sabeen, caused him the greatest lust.

Yasir breathed hard and rubbed himself as he looked at the girl, the nest of wet black hair hiding that place of greatest ecstasy for a man. A thing he had not known in more than ten years.

Suddenly, a flash came over the man, and he stopped masturbating.

“What filth!” he fumed, disgusted with himself, and rubbed his hand on his shirt.

The vision that had come into his fantasy-filled mind was not having sex with the fat girl but of the men in their beds at night. Downstairs in the tunnels, hidden from light. They did things with each other that left Yasir filled with self-loathing.

One night, he had allowed one of the young boys to get in his bed, and he took Yasir in his mouth. It had felt so good, and he ejaculated stronger than ever in his life.

A few days later, one of the other men cut the young boy’s throat. They tossed his body in the garbage with the dead girl. As a homosexual, doomed to hell, he deserved no respect, not from the self-righteous Muslim men, nor would he receive any mercy from Allah.