[b]The Trouble with Ignorance[/b]

[indent]Samy wakes with pressure in his belly. He wants to sleep so he tries to readjust. A jolt runs down his stomach to his penis. He has to pee. He scrambles over his brothers’ legs and clambers down from their bed as piss dribbles down his legs. He can’t find the pot. Not in this darkness. He drags his hands against the walls feeling the rough and smooth ridges of the door. He reaches around for the metal latch, his legs shaking with the effort to control himself from making a mess. He makes it three steps out into the hallways before he lifts up his robe to pee. Some of the hot liquid splashes on his bare toes. He wriggles them, uncomfortable. 

A bang and a flash and Samy stops, dress hiked up so his bum is showing in the withering light. The noises continue. He doesn’t look back at the door he left ajar. He creeps forward down into darkness, right hand against the wall the whole time. His feet are still wet from the pee, but they are cold now. Everything is cold. He struggles up the steps, leaning forward to grab the slabs of wood because reaching for the railing is too difficult and everything is steep at five years old.

Someone blacks his view, though. He crouches to look between the older boy’s legs. Samy licks his lips, trying to bring back the sweetness of one of the new fruits he tried. The smooth deck juts up in odd places and the purple bruise of the night sky presses down on the yellow glow encompassing the imposing monster. More piss dribbles down Samy’s legs. He pushes his thumb into his mouth. And he screams. The Captain-but-not-Captain-Sharkas has something sticking out of him. Samy knows it hurts because that is how his father died and that is what his father kept saying as he died. “It hurts. It hurts. Make it stop.” 
His mother could make it stop. She knows how to make the pain stop. So he rushes away, screaming. Because it hurt to have something like that in your chest and you screamed when you hurt.

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Esra moves. Her legs stumbles and she hits her knees on the bed frame. Deena cries and Shahid whines about what is going on. Ahmed laughs. She’s out the door and then scrambles back inside grabbing the fabric she used for her head covering to make a cradle for Deena against her chest. She couldn’t leave the baby there with her brothers. Her daughter falls asleep again as Esra toes forward into the dark hallway. She still hears Samy’s screaming. It sounds so far away, but then he stands before her, swollen eyes from crying. He looks up at her sniffs and runs off in the other direction. 

“Samy! Stop. Boy.” She tries to catch him before he gets too far ahead. It doesn’t work. She follows him instead, beguiling him with promises to get him to stop moving. She needs to make sure that he is okay. It is hard to go up the steps with Deena strapped to her chest. It is like Esra is pregnant again and with the waves, she has a harder time correcting for her lack of balance and the constant movement of the ship and sea. 

Her boy races across the deck. She looks ahead and sees the weapon before she sees the man at the other end of it. Samy points and wails. Esra’s robe catches on the debris of the deck and Deena woke up again and presses her fists into her mother’s sides. It is the man, the captain who spoke to her and made promises of safe passage. If he dies, will she lose all of that? That security and hope? 

Esra is not willing to find out. She wedges her way into his gathering comrades. The spear pierced through. She unwraps Deena from her breast, shoves her daughter at the nearest man and uses the fabric that was once her head covering to staunch the blood leaking from the exit wound. She tears away the Captains shirt and presses her fingers along the entry wound and listening for the wheezing of a collapsed lung. She pauses. The red and swollen skin around the spear pulses and she feels the creeping movement as skin closes in around the shaft. '
“We must remove it,” she says in Berber. Grasping the shaft, she grunts, bracing her muscles. It must be fast. It must be quick. She doesn’t guess as to why the wound is healing. If he lost too much blood or if what she was doing sullied her soul by touching a man in such a way. Her hands a slippery and her hair keeps blowing in her face because she was not able to tie it back in her haste to get to Samy. Deena cries as much as her brother now. He grips the back of his mother’s [i]jellaba[/i] as she crouches on her knees over the man who is suppose to bring her back to Morocco. To Rabat and its corrupted streets and pirates and crumbling buildings. She wants to go home and this man will not die and ruin her chances of such a thing happening. 

She grunts and rips the lance away. It drops from her grip and she tears at the Captain’s shirt pushing the fabric into the hollow of the wound. “Fire,” she says in Spanish (or maybe it’s Portuguese). “Fire,” she tries again, shaking the man with the strange, shaved head. 
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