"Kawsar's bones ache for sunlight, she has taken to sitting out for an hour most days just after the worst of the midday sun and basking in her orchard like a lizard."
"... and a shimmering portrait of Oodweyne faces Kawsar. A few rebels refuse to hold up their placards, making tiny little holes in his face, but the message is clear: the President is giant, a god who watches over them, who can dissolve into pieces and hear and see all that they do."
"More makeshift balls would have to be made from rags tied up with shoestring when the others crumbled under the stampede of toddlers and teenagers, girls and boys - the girls often just picking up a ball in their hands and running to the goal because they couldn't understand why they shouldn't."
"'She is a child of her time.' 'No, it is the other way around: Those with sick hearts have made the time what it is.'"
"It isn't the cleanliness she is used to - patches of her skin have not touched any water at all - but it is enough to make her feel human again; soap, warm water, and the touch of another's hand has that power now."
"She doesn't want food that prolongs her life; she only wants to sustain her soul while it remains in her body."
"Only such a violent country could deserve such a violent rain."
"Children are sometimes swept along with the torrent, their bodies found miles away alongside drowned cows and mangled bicycles. From desperate drought to desperate flood, it seems as if Somalis can only expect disaster."
"It was the first time the young country had needed to beg the former colonial rulers, and since then the government hasn't stopped asking; from floods to famines to tractors and X-ray machines, prayer mats turned to the west and knees bent in supplication."
"Farah had bought it for Kawsar and she imagines his eyes consuming her body."
"'That can all happen if you're as poor as mud. I'd rather have worries like that with cash in my pocket than have ten sons and nothing to give them but black tea.'"
"Filsan feels like an orphaned child rather than just a motherless one."
"... a gun makes a soldier even out of a woman."
"They are talking about a woman one of them has had sex with in a way that makes the woman sound like some kind of animal he has caught and killed."
"It seems as if this wild terrain had determined the character of the people or had attracted like-minded spirits to dwell upon it."
"It was only her who listened to the rules, who feared breaking them - no one told her it was fine to steal or fuck or kill as long as it was kept quiet."
"'An end to it all. The whole population has to be resettled to stop the terrorists taking over.'"
"It is easier to leave her mother to the past, that wound is mostly healed and there is nothing to gain by picking at it."
"How would she even know if she had died? There is no one to wail or weep beside her."
"... it strikes Filsan as ironic that they had delayed fleeing so they could take as many of their possessions as possible, but now those very possessions prevent their flight."
"There must be a hunch-backed, toothless sorceress somewhere who weaves all these disparate people together, thinks Kawsar, who carelessly throws this child together with me, while families are ripped apart."
"... the songbirds that haven't fled begin to trill, calling out disoriented, despondent songs to one another for comfort. They will have to be the poets recording what happened here, indignation puffing their chests and opening their throats wide, the sorrowful notes catching in the trees and falling, if life returns, like dust over heads that would rather forget."
"Filsan pushes deeper into the wheelbarrow to keep it moving... Bolts of pain shoot up and down her spine and she endures it silently, seeing them as part of the restitution she has to make, a physical purification if not a spiritual one."
"She is back in her familiar world; the war and all that time in Hargeisa just a complicated trial to achieve what she always wanted: a family, however makeshift."
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