I’d watch my two brothers head out the front door and towards the school building, my jealousy uncontained. My mother would gently turn my shoulder back to the room and away from the peephole in the door, saying, “We are going to school today too, just we don’t have to walk down eight flights of stairs and five streets.” I would smile sadly. We laughed and joked during the breaks between lessons. We laughed in the way the men with their attention-drawing guns would not allow if they were present. 

        Ammi, my mother, made a private school out of our home when I was first banned from going to the public school in 1996. Other girls who lived nearby came as well due to my mother’s insistence. My mother had been a teacher at the public school before our education was pushed away from our grasp. The armed men did not like it when they discovered one of the private schools was in our confined house, not at all. Most of the other girls stopped coming after that, for their own mothers feared us being caught again, especially once private schools became banned. My mother continued to teach, though, even when it was just the two of us. She acted as though a whole classroom was in front of her, desperate and yearning for the information she could give. Her specialty was math, and I could always tell when calculations were buzzing through her head by the way her dancing eyes lit up and her narrow head with a pointed chin tilted to the side. 

Today, the men come banging on our door, unannounced. Quickly and in a practiced way, we scoop up the books strewn across the floor and the cluttered eating table, shoving them in the nooks and crannies where we have learned that the men do not look. Most of our books are shoved in the small crevice my mother had carved from our wall. Always, we hang laundry on the hooks that are directly above the crevice so that the men would never think anything could be behind the laundry but a wall. Today, we are in more of a rush than usual. My dry and cracked hands shake as we toss old shirts onto the hooks, but my mother’s thin and overused hands stay steady and quick.

        Two scrappy men finally burst through our door in a way as destructive as bulldozers for “inspection.” My mother and I silently greet them, knowing better than to speak without being specifically told to. 

        “We got notice that one of the other girls had been coming and leaving here around the same time each day a few weeks ago,” one of them insinuates, as though just saying those few words to us is a waste of his time and voice. The man is tall and has wide shoulders. He towers over Ammi, who has always had a short stature. He had come to our house the last time we needed an “inspection.”  “Not still going about with those books and papers, are you?” he grills. Although it is technically a question, he gives the ever-present impression that he does not want my mother to respond anyway, that it will not keep them from searching the room.

        Usually, they don’t even look at our laundry hung casually on those hooks. Today, they seem more angry than usual; they probably had just earlier found someone who had forgotten to stop for prayer. Our unstable ceiling decides it is a great time to give its hourly leak of water and oil into the bucket placed promptly on the floor. The plastic and warped bucket is just next to where the laundry and our secret crevice are on the wall. 

        The mens’ discriminatory eyes flick to the bucket and then escalate up to the worn clothes. With a sharp intake of breath, I notice that one of my old shirts has gotten snagged on the corner of a book. It is a large text book about the history of different religions in Northern Asia. I perceive this at the same moment both of the men do. Suddenly, my world becomes a blur of scolding and shouting, of my mother trying to fix our mistake with persistent words we know will not work. 

        Shrieking and frantic, I try to get to my mother as the two men close in on her; I know that they will not be lenient with us today. They shove me down and bark words at me, saying how ashamed of myself I should be. I scramble to my feet in another attempt to get to Ammi, but to them I am just a miniscule fly to be effortlessly swatted away. Helpless, I ache from every part of me as the two pairs of discriminatory eyes that belong to the Taliban take my mother away.

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        Four and a half hours later, my brothers come home. Abdul and Mohammed both have dark hair and dark eyes like myself, though Abdul’s eyes are a bit lighter. Abdul is at least two heads taller than Mohammed, being more than six feet tall while Mohammed hasn’t even reached five feet. Although Mohammed is eight years old, his two front teeth conjure a mighty gap that makes him look two years younger. 

        School bags flinging, stomachs growling, the two boys approach me. Sensing my glum quietness, Mohammed asks in his innocent voice, “Where’s Ammi?” I feel as though the lump in my throat won’t let me respond as I absently shake my head.

        “She’s gone. They took her away,” I mumble. Abdul stares straight into my eyes, and I will never forget the piercing look on his face, his hair messy and disheveled. 

        It is even harder when Baba, my father, comes home from his station in the bazaars. His shoulders slouch, and his eyebrows crease together. He knew Ammi and I had been secretly studying and had warned us several times, saying it wasn’t going to end well if we got caught. He was right of course, but we all knew it wasn’t going to stop Ammi from pursuing my education. Mohammed starts wailing, desperate for better understanding of why Ammi is not here. Abdul understands, though. He is sixteen years old, two years older than me, and has seen enough what the Taliban do to understand what Ammi and I did wrong. 

        Baba gives me a short hug, holding me tight. His ten centimeter long beard brushes my head. “I’m sorry, Baba,” I whisper, guilt clenching my insides. I know I couldn’t have done anything to stop the men from taking Ammi away, but I still feel responsible. What if I’m the one who didn’t fully cover up that book?

        Baba pulls back and grabs both of my shoulders with his scarred hands, making me face him. He has a very serious expression on, and I can’t stop thinking about what kind of pain he must be in. “Zulema, you are not at fault. Never, ever forget that. You have always had such a powerful voice, and I will never see how the Taliban could ever try to conceal it,” he retorted in the last part. “Now, I will try to get Ammi back tomorrow, but you must promise to be careful from now on and not get into something like this again,” he sternly says, tilting his face down, his dark eyes staring into my soul.

        I gulp and mumble, “Yes, Baba, I promise.” My eyes quickly drop his gaze. Baba’s circular glasses start to slightly fog up on his wrinkly and long face. He takes them off and then goes out the door that leads to our small balcony. I can only think about how much the Taliban have changed my life, causing anger and desperation. How all the women have suffered to their merciless group. How my mother didn’t stop fighting, and how I won’t either. I think about how I just lied to my father.

        Baba was right- I do have a powerful voice. Ammi often told me how my writing skills impressed her. She said I could move mountains and persuade whole towns of something with my opinionated words. As determination dawns on me, I know that’s what I shall do. 

        When my brothers and Baba appear to have fallen asleep, I quietly arise from my mat on the dusty apartment floor. I creep over to one of the kitchen drawers where we keep large sheets of paper. I take out a pen from the jar on the dusty countertop and place it and the paper on the table. I think of all the exasperated thoughts in my head, directed towards the Taliban, and I write them down. 

        I write about how the Taliban are silly, how the fact that they cannot allow women to educate ourselves is a form of intimidation of our intelligence. I state that keeping us inside cannot silence us and our anger. Not allowing women to ride in motor vehicles is treating us like we are not humans. I write all of this and more. Then, in big, demanding letters I write the headline:

WE CAN BARELY SEE WITH OUR BURKAS, 

TALIBAN LEAVES US UNSEEN

        When I am finally satisfied with my words, I copy them onto hundreds of sheets of paper until my hands are numb and aching more than I can bear. I then stack them in an as neat as possible pile so that I can fit them all in a basket.

I climb the forty thousand year-old rickety stairs that always shift to different sides when the weather gets angry up to the roof of my apartment building, thankful that no one is there. Then, before my arms will back down, I heft the basket up and above my head and throw the collection of papers over the city, just as a brisk wind hurls by. In slow motion, I watch the papers float in every direction. They shoot into the air like birds that have been locked in a cage for too long and then are all at once let out. 

        What a surprise for all the inhabitants of this battered city it will be to discover all the papers in the promising morning. My words have been thought by every woman in Kabul, and they will no longer go unspoken.

-Cassie W.