​Mideast
​Turmoil
​​
​
​
​
The sun rose over the ancient city of Al-Miraj, not with the gentle promise of dawn, but with the heavy, copper-tinged light of dust and exhaustion. For ten years, the Republic of Qamar had been a jewel tarnished by the grip of the Al-Hakim dynasty. President-General Zayn Al-Hakim’s face, a mask of stern benevolence in the official portraits that hung in every school and office, was a lie known to all. His regime was a labyrinth of nepotism, secret police, and stolen wealth, where the nation’s vast oil revenues vanished into offshore accounts and marble palaces, while the people queued for bread and watched their children’s futures evaporate.
The spark that started the conflict came from a place the regime had considered broken: the university. When the beloved, outspoken Professor Nadia Hassan was “disappeared” after a lecture on civic responsibility, her students did not mourn quietly. Led by her protégé, a quiet but fiercely intelligent engineering student named Kareem, they took to the central square. They carried not weapons, but books, tablets, and a single, powerful banner: **“Our Minds Are Not for Sale.”**
The regime’s response was swift and brutal. Armored vehicles rolled in, and the world expected another tragedy to be buried in the desert sands. But this time, something shifted. A young captain in the Republican Guard, Amir, who had joined the military to serve his country, not a family’s fortune, saw his own sister among the students. He gave the order to stand down. His unit, their loyalty frayed by years of enforcing petty tyrannies, lowered their shields.
​
This single act of defiance was the crack in the dam. It was not a foreign invasion or a warlord’s ambition that fueled the fire, but a homegrown, profound yearning for dignity. The movement, calling itself **“Al-Nahda”** (The Awakening), spread like a whisper on the wind. It was a mosaic of the Arab state itself: Bedouin elders in flowing *thobes* who spoke of ancestral honor, tech-savvy youth broadcasting from rooftops via encrypted signals, women in headscarves and lab coats organizing field hospitals, poets composing verses of resistance that were memorized and recited in marketplaces.
​
The regime fought back with its old tools. They shut down the internet, only to see messages travel by handwritten notes and coded prayer calls from minarets. They arrested prominent figures, but found that Al-Nahda had no single head; it was a hydra of conscience. They spread propaganda on state TV, but the people had long since stopped believing the screen.
​
The true battle was for the soul of the nation’s institutions. Kareem, the engineering student, and his network of hackers, alongside insiders like Captain Amir, began a meticulous campaign. They didn’t launch missiles; they leaked documents. They exposed the regime’s corruption in staggering detail: the secret real estate holdings in Europe, the inflated contracts given to the President-General’s cousins, the siphoning of funds meant for hospitals and schools. Each leak was a surgical strike, eroding the regime’s last vestiges of legitimacy, both at home and abroad.
​
The final stand took place not at the presidential palace, but at the national broadcasting center. The regime planned a midnight address, a final, desperate show of strength. Al-Nahda, learning of the plan, acted. As President-General Al-Hakim stood before the camera, his face a grimace of fading power, the broadcast was hijacked. The screen flickered, and then showed a montage: the students in the square, the doctors treating the wounded, the oil field workers shutting down pipelines in peaceful protest, the ancient verses of Arab poets speaking of freedom. Over it, a calm, collective voice stated: “The people of Qamar are speaking. The regime of corruption is over. We are reclaiming our country.”
​
In that moment, the illusion broke. Military units across the country declared their neutrality. International recognition shifted. The palace gates, once impenetrable, were opened not by force, but by the silent, overwhelming presence of the people.
​
There was no triumphant vengeance. The dawn that broke over Al-Miraj the next morning was quiet, littered with the debris of struggle but washed clean by a collective breath of relief. The work was just beginning—the arduous task of rebuilding institutions, trying the corrupt, and healing deep wounds. But as Kareem stood in the square, now filled with people cleaning and praying instead of protesting, he felt the weight and the lightness of their victory. They had not just toppled a tyrant; they had rediscovered their own voice. They had fought the most insidious enemy—the corruption of hope itself—and for the first time in a generation, in the heart of the ancient Arab land, freedom was not a dream from a book, but a fragile, precious thing they now held in their own hands, ready to build.
​​
​​​​
The farmer
​
​
​
The earth beneath Old Man Kael’s boots was not the rich, dark loam of memory. It was a cracked, pale expanse, a scab on the land where his wheat should have been shoulder-high and whispering secrets to the wind. Instead, a late frost had bitten the tender shoots in spring, and a summer drought, relentless as a creditor, had baked the life from what remained. The harvest was not a failure; it was an absence. A silence where there should have been the thunder of the thresher and the shouts of hired hands.
In the quiet farmhouse, the silence was louder. It was in the hollow eyes of his wife, Elara, as she stretched the last of the preserves over thin porridge. It was in the way his son, Finn, now twelve, had stopped asking about the county fair and had taken to mending fences with a grim, adult focus. The bank’s letter, crisp and official, lay on the mantel like a tombstone yet to be engraved. *Payment due.*
Kael walked his dead fields at dusk, the setting sun bleeding red over the barren expanse. He knelt, crumbling the dust between his fingers. This land had fed his father, and his father’s father. It had sung to him. Now, it was mute. Survival for another season was not about profit; it was about preventing the final, irrevocable loss. It was about not becoming a ghost in his own home.
​
He knew what he had to do. It was a knowledge that settled in his gut like a cold stone.
​
The next morning, he hitched his two remaining draft horses, Brone and Ash, to the old flatbed wagon. He did not load seed or tools. From the barn’s deepest shadow, he hauled out his grandfather’s anvil, a block of iron so heavy it took him and Finn to lift it. He loaded the cast-iron stove his mother had cooked on, its enamel chipped and stained with decades of love. He took the walnut headboard from his marriage bed, carved with intertwining vines. Then, he went to the pasture.
​
Whisper, his daughter’s old mare, gentle and sway-backed, nuzzled his hand. Daisy, the young heifer with eyes like melted chocolate, lowed softly. Kael’s breath hitched. He scratched Whisper’s favorite spot behind her ear, his throat tight. “I’m sorry, girl,” he whispered, the words raw. “The living have to eat.” He led them up the ramp into the wagon. Their trusting obedience was a sharper pain than any hunger.
​
The auction yard in the county seat was a cacophony of despair and commerce. Animals bleated and lowed, men in clean shirts shouted numbers, and the air smelled of dust, manure, and desperation. Kael stood apart, a statue of worn flannel and resolve, as his history was sold piece by piece. The anvil went to a blacksmith from the next town over. A stranger with a thick wallet claimed the stove. A young couple, newlyweds setting up their first home, bought the headboard, exclaiming over the craftsmanship. Kael saw his past life being carried away in other people’s trucks.
​
Then came the animals. Whisper, confused by the strange smells, was led into the ring. The auctioneer’s chant was a rapid-fire river of sound. Kael looked away, focusing on a crack in the wooden fence. He heard the final “Sold!” and a number that felt like an insult. Daisy was next, her fate likely the slaughterhouse. The money, when the clerk pressed the envelope into his hand, was a pathetic, crumpled weight. It was enough, perhaps, for the bank’s next payment and seed for a desperate, late-season crop of hardy turnips and kale—food for survival, not for market.
​
He drove the empty wagon home in the twilight, Brone and Ash’s clopping hooves the only sound. The farmhouse felt cavernous, stripped of its soul. Elara met him at the door. She didn’t ask about the money. She saw the emptiness in his eyes, the new set of his shoulders, which seemed to carry not just fatigue, but the weight of everything that was gone. She simply took his calloused hand in hers and led him inside.
​
That night, after a silent supper, Finn spoke. “Pa? What happens now?”
​
Kael looked at his son, at the man he was being forced to become too soon. He walked to the mantel, took down the bank’s letter, and held it over the flame of the kerosene lamp. It curled and blackened, a brief, bright flare before crumbling to ash.
​
“Now,” Kael said, his voice rough but clear for the first time in months, “we survive.” He pointed out the window, to the moonlit field. “Tomorrow, we plow the south acre. Not for wheat. For potatoes, beans, squash. Things that are hard to kill. We’ll fix the roof on the spring house. We’ll live like our great-grandparents did. Not on what the land can sell, but on what it can give us if we ask it right.”
​
He had sold his past. He had sold his comfort and his pride. He had sold the trust in a gentle mare’s eyes. But in doing so, he had bought the one thing left of any value: a fighting chance. The fields had failed, but the farmer had not. He had done what he had to do. And as he looked at the determined set of Finn’s jaw and the quiet strength in Elara’s eyes, he knew the season ahead would be one of brutal toil and scant reward. But it would be *their* season. They would meet it together, rooted not in the dream of plenty, but in the hard, unyielding soil of resilience.
Purgatory
​
​
​
The man stood on a featureless plain beneath a sky the color of old parchment. There was no sun, no moon, only a constant, gentle twilight. He remembered the screech of tires, the blinding headlights, and then… this. This was not the pearly gates, nor the fiery pits. This was the in-between. Purgatory.
At first, there was only the silence, vast and deep. Then, he noticed the others. They were not ghosts, but people, solid and real, moving with a quiet purpose. They tended to small, impossible gardens where flowers bloomed in shades of memory, or they sat by still ponds, gazing at reflections of faces they once knew. No one spoke, yet a profound understanding hummed in the air. They were all waiting.
A woman with kind eyes and silver-streaked hair approached him. She held no clipboard, wore no uniform. “You’ll need a task,” she said, her voice like rustling leaves. “It helps the time pass. It helps you… prepare.”
He was given a simple wooden bucket and a soft cloth. His duty, he learned, was to tend to the stones. Scattered throughout the plain were smooth, river-worn stones, each warm to the touch. When he wiped the cloth over one, images would flicker across its surface—not of his life, but of moments where his life had brushed against another’s. A smile he’d given a stranger on a bleak day. A harsh word spoken in frustration to a loved one, the regret that followed like a shadow. A small, forgotten act of patience. He saw the ripple effects, the tiny weights added to or lifted from the scales of other souls. He saw himself not as the hero of his own story, but as a thread in a vast, interconnected tapestry.
Days, or what felt like days, blended. He cleaned the stones, and in doing so, he cleaned the lens through which he viewed himself. The prideful narratives he’d clung to—the grudges held as badges of honor, the successes worn as armor—began to feel heavy and unnecessary. The stone showing his greatest professional triumph also showed the colleague whose dream he’d inadvertently overshadowed. The stone of a childhood betrayal showed the fear and confusion that had motivated the friend who hurt him.
One evening, as the eternal twilight deepened into a soft lavender, the woman with the kind eyes found him. He was holding a stone that showed his daughter’s fifth birthday party. He saw not just the cake and the laughter, but the exhaustion in his wife’s eyes as she organized it all, an exhaustion he had been too busy to notice then.
“You see more clearly now,” the woman stated.
“It hurts,” he admitted, the first words he’d spoken in what felt like an age. “Seeing all the times I was blind. All the love I took for granted.”
“That is not the pain of punishment,” she said gently. “It is the ache of healing. You cannot enter a place of pure love while still carrying the dust of indifference, or the burrs of resentment. You must brush it all away.”
As she spoke, he realized the constant, low-grade anxiety that had lived in his chest for decades was gone. The need to prove himself, the simmering anger at old injustices, the clinging fear of lack—it had all been slowly wiped away, like dust from the stones. What remained was a quiet, vulnerable core. A profound sadness for the pain he’d caused, and a humbling, soaring gratitude for the love he’d been given.
He looked up at the woman. “Is it time?”
She smiled, and for the first time, he saw a faint, golden light beginning to glow from within her, and from within the other waiting souls around him. It was not a light that shone *on* them, but one that shone *out* from them, as if an inner sun was finally rising.
“It is always time,” she said. “The waiting is not a sentence. It is a gift. It is the final, gentle mercy—the chance to shed what you no longer need, so you can arrive home light enough to float.”
He looked down at his hands. They were glowing, too. A warmth, gentle and all-encompassing, began to fill him from the inside out. The plain, the stones, the twilight, began to soften and brighten, not into a blinding glare, but into a dawn of impossible beauty.
He wasn’t going to a place called heaven. He was realizing, with a joy so acute it brought tears of release, that he was finally becoming something that could *inhabit* it. The last of the dust fell away, and with a heart both broken open and mended, he stepped forward, not across a threshold, but into a state of being he was finally, fully, ready to receive
