Amekufa

THE INTERROGATION

The man didn’t wait.
He moved closer. Sat right across from me.

His right hand held what became more apparent—and more daunting—than just a machine that electrocuted people. It was a metal melter. A welding machine.

My throat dried.

His left hand settled on my thigh and, as if taking his sweet time to conjure words in his brain, began massaging the inner part of my thigh, gauging its weight.

“Good meat,” the man said.

“Wait… wait…” I implored.

“You should have started speaking by now…”

The electric buzz of the welding machine cut through the damp air. My heart sank. A flash of thoughts crisscrossed my mind so rapidly I wanted to say so many words.

“She is… ayyy, wait!” I screamed as the welding machine inched closer to my thigh. I broke down.

The man didn’t speak.

The heat of the welding machine burned my inner thigh.

“Ten miles from here. A house. I have the key… wait… wait… I’ll take you there.”

In a flash, the weld caught my right inner thigh. I screamed. Then, for a moment, the world became silent.

---

AFTER THE BURN

I woke to the sudden, violent slaps of the man’s left hand. When I regained a semblance of consciousness, excruciating pain cut through my flesh. I trembled. I couldn’t speak. My teeth chattered, saliva running down the corners of my mouth.

“Speak…” the man said.

“Please… I have told you where she is… I can take you to her,” I murmured. I couldn’t hear my own voice. The pain became unbearable.

The man hesitated for a while. Then he stood.

“Unchain him,” he ordered.

I was dragged by two heavy men. I couldn’t see because of the blindfold. I was kicked into the back of a car, then the car drove off suddenly.

“Location?” the man asked.

“Kiambu Road.”

We drove. I spoke in pulses. Pain ate not only my flesh, but my soul as well.

---

THE HOUSE

We arrived.

The house looked lifeless from the outside. None would notice that a human being lived there. The grass was tall and unkempt. The front door was stuck. The vicinity was silent.

For a moment, I thought Idhil had gone for a walk, or to buy groceries. Either way, I was prepared for more sessions of torture if she’d be away. I would have lied, right?

The men kicked the door open. It led straight into the living room. The TV was on, albeit mute. Images of mute people kept playing.

We went into the kitchen. She wasn’t there.

Then I moved to the bedroom.

When I opened the door, I fell to my knees.

I’d had a strange feeling before. Even on my way to snitching her out, something heavy had clung to me since the torture began. Realizing the danger I now shared, the pain eating me in pulses, and the sudden realization of what lay ahead made me break into a hollow wail.

Then I fell flat on my stomach.

Idhil’s neck hung from her scarf, tied to the fan. Her broken neck faced the left side of her body, her mouth foaming, her hair ruffled.

She had hanged herself.

She was gone.

Gone.

---

THE VOID

I didn’t know where I was.

The place was vast. Endless stretches of land. Plain and featureless. Then there was a sea of people—almost the same age. Each in varying degrees of stupor. Some silent. Others groaning and moaning.

I stood, trying to understand where I was. Then I thought the world I had known before was gone. No sky. No air. No clouds.

For a moment, I thought my soul was held captive in a violent dream—kidnapped in a vessel and sprinted through the cosmos. I could feel nothing in my body. In spirit, I was as alive as I had ever been.

And then, as if commanded to speak—like Lewis Carroll’s “Begin from the beginning, and go on till you come to the end. Then stop.”

Except my thoughts wandered.

To the exact spot that changed everything.

To the end.

Perplexed. Transfixed. Millions of jolts rushed through my body, like the Nile River’s currents crushing stones in their journey.

I fell. My body lost its strength. My knees gave in. I stumbled, head low.

I tried to speak, but my mouth stayed fixed. In my mind, I screamed.

“No… then I said… no.”

Idhil. Please. Wake up.

Wake… up…

Then, in a sudden jolt of energy, my mouth released a ghoulish cry.

“Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!”

“Why, Idhil? Why?”

V. ACCUSATION

We had won. Almost. We were going to be fine—like a new flower in spring. Even when faced with death, I was too weak to sustain pain.

I had betrayed.

But you were betrayed more.

Let down by the people who promised love. Yet you moved on, in a world that didn’t give a shit about you. Still, you soldiered on—one against many, one against the chaos of the world.

You were so close. God… so close.

Yet your last hope, your very last push, the final round in a fiery boxing match—

Why, Idhil?

“He brought her here… and then killed her!” the man said, grabbing me by the collar and pulling me to my feet.

“No, I didn’t,” I said weakly.

“I wonder what else he did to her…” another voice echoed.

Someone paced the room, making frantic calls.

“We have located her,” he said. “Amekufa.”

---

VI. TWO BODIES

There was a frenzy all over the internet when the news broke. Many people had opinions. Most knew nothing.

I played a part.

My name is Murilo. I am a detective with the National Intelligence Service.

My colleague, Kevin, was approached by a man named Farah for an off-the-chart job—what he called a certain operation. Farah worked in a separate wing of intelligence dealing with counterterrorism. A family friend had requested him to help locate his missing wife.

The woman was Idhil.

Kevin asked why the work wasn’t official. Farah shrugged it off as nothing big. A domestic issue. The pay was good.

We worked the case for weeks. We tracked Idhil through her phone. We uncovered violence unprecedented. One neighbor said her husband beat her “like a burukenge.” To this day, I don’t know what it means, but I know it meant badly.

After her hospital discharge, we lost her trail. She was accompanied by a young man. Medics said he was a good Samaritan from her neighborhood. But Kevin and I dismissed those claims. In our minds, the woman was having an affair. Easy explanation. Like adding two and two together. So our goal was to find both. Punish the man, and then quietly return the woman to her husband. Our motivation was to finish the job. Get paid and move on to other things.

But things didn’t go so well.

We found the young man. Tortured him. We used all tactics to get us to where Idhil was hiding until eventually he broke. When he took us there, we found a woman hanging in the middle of her room. In Kevin’s mind, the man had hanged her. I was quite skeptical at first, given the way he reacted. A guilty man never falls on his knees, crying. From his actions, the man, in my eyes, was not the killer. But. We had to close the case.

I called Farah. In a span of an hour, he was at the site. Kevin began his violent assault on the man. Grabbed him by the collar of his shirt and pinned him to the wall. He pointed a pistol at the man’s temple and screamed.

“You killed her, right?”

“No,”The man said. “No, I swear to God… No… I swear to God.”

Kevin was way bigger than the young man. He was feeble. Kevin hit him on his head with the gun. The man bled profusely. He’d cut the man’s artery on the forehead. The man fell. He kicked him on his stomach, again and again, until the man became limp.

“You’ll kill him,”I said.

Kevin stopped. The man groaned on the floor. Crying endlessly.

Then Farah arrived.

When he saw Idhil, he remained silent for a while as he looked at her hanging body, then quickly went to Kevin’s hand, grabbed the pistol from him.

He walked toward the man and fired two quick shots at his head.

The man’s brains splattered on the floor.

Later, the headlines read: A man who’d kidnapped a woman and raped her has found justice.

The brave detectives liquidated the situation fast enough. Ensuring the culprit never did the same to other vulnerable women.

My heart bleeds. Maybe one day my testimony will be used somewhere. But I know. I played a role. So God, forgive me.