A Little Woman in a Red Cardi

I was so angry last night. 

I couldn't sleep, and so I picked up my phone which was charging on the table beside my bed. I opened Facebook and then I came across a clip filmed from someone's phone. It showed a sordid scene. Beside a roadside was a little, round, inoffensive-seeming woman wearing a bright red cardigan. She was standing next to a low concrete wall, and seemed to be pleading with one of the several people standing over her. It was impossible to hear her words, the audio was all music and a man singing a prayer maybe in Arabic or some other Eastern language maybe, I don't know. There was dirty, scuffed snow, and pavement, and rather scruffy-looking men, all bigger and stronger and taller than her; they were standing around holding up their phones and filming her in her distress. 

She slumps down to a sitting position, her back still leaning against the wall. The men are waiting to film her death, they are recording it so they can upload it to social media. I thought, surely not, this is a joke this is not going to happen, but I couldn't stop watching, 

I wanted to see it not happen. I wanted to find out that she would be rescued, like in a novel or a movie, when a saviour might come, and while I am thinking these things, without any fanfare, without any warning at all, a man stepped forward from beside her on the footpath, and quite casually, he shot her in the side of her head, and she rolled sideways from the pavement onto the road, this ordinary little woman, entirely dead in her bright red cardigan.

I was so shocked. I was so angry at the banality of her death, at the way she was treated like a nothing, not even deserving of a bit of ceremony. I hated this world right then, and I hated those men, all men right then, and I hated everything in this world that allowed, nay, ensured, that this is our world, the world of patriarchy and murder, of viciousness and brutality, of violence.

Someone whose name I cannot read wrote a comment which said, "behind this roundabout there is a small building and an old landed (Arabic) house, my childhood is buried there, we were departed from there, the FSA departed our family along with a few hundreds more families (now most of them are besieged in Fua and Kefafaria), and hang their green flag on our building ... later FSA was kicked by Annusra who killed this lady (I don't know what is the actual reason) she just asked them to see her sons before she dies ... they didn't wait."

She just asked them to see her sons before she dies...

She was a mother of sons like me. Just an ordinary little woman in a red cardi.