Dating : I Was 16 When the World Ended

WWIII was long, too long. After the draft, the world seemed emptier. My youngest aunt was gone. My second cousin. They were both in the Army, and they never came back. The Iranian soldiers were…not kind to women prisoners.

They said we won, but victory was no better than war. The UN intervened and ordered peaceful coexistence of Muslims and Americans. Sharia law was instituted to help us become more culturally aware, they told us.

My grandparents immigrated from Dubai. We’ve always been Muslim, nominally, that is. But even my grandparents had forgotten what it was like.

The soldiers barracked in D.C. used the Lincoln Memorial for target practice. All the other statues around D.C. were already torn down. Our neighbor, who was black, tried to stop them. They killed him in front of it. My dad and older brother sneaked out at night to bury him. The Lincoln Memorial was no surprise after what happened to the Louvre, though. They burned it to the ground, not trying to quell the flames even after a curator rushed in to try to save some art. I can never see the Mona Lisa now. I miss his stories. His songs.

We adopted my younger brother. He was in foster care for the second time after his dads were arrested for molesting him and selling the videos. He’s a good kid, quiet. He likes painting. I play LEGOs with him before dinner. His dads were stoned, as is the custom under sharia law, not for molesting him, but for their intercourse with each other. But their absence does not erase his pain.

My best friend’s family is from Venezuela. We used to go to school together until sixth grade. Then she was raped when walking home from school. Everyone knows who the rapists were, but there’s no way to bring charges. It’s the mayor’s son and his friends. And I know they would just say she was not wearing her hijab as we’re all supposed to now. They had the right to rape her. She stays home now. She will never be able to have children now, and her face is scarred from the beating she received. I take her homework to her and we help each other just like old times.

A female lawyer my dad knows tried to stop them from making more laws. She was a brilliant orator, they said, and had found a loophole in the UN laws. I guess she was too brilliant of an orator, though. They decided to make an example of her. We were ordered to go watch, but we didn’t. They televised it, though. My dad tried to switch channels, but it was on every one. After two tries, he turned it off, and sat there. I felt like her screams were still reverberating through the room.

If I could turn back time, there is one thing I could wish we had done differently. We would hide the Christians. They did not seem afraid to go, and we told the police they were a good family, a safe family, that they had helped us when my father lost his job and my mother got sick. But the police officer only laughed and spat in my father’s face. I think about them every day. I still have a book they gave me.

There are no more picture books. I am not allowed to draw self-portraits, pictures of my family, or pictures of my favorite princesses. Movies are banned, but we still have books. Some of them, at least. My favorites are the ones from long ago. The world seemed happier, easier. There are stories of women who could choose whom they wanted to marry, stories of people who could travel. I wish I could, too.

My parents wanted to leave the country when they heard the terms of victory, but they deny all visa applications. We are trapped.