![]() Days, weeks, months…I did not know, but I was dreaming during the absence of my consciousness, a scary nightmare. We began to fall and the witch screamed to me, “We have run out of charge, last night I forgot to charge the battery.” I hit the ground, it was a hard hit and I completely lost consciousness. The last time we flew out and while we were in mid-air the vacuum cleaner stopped working. This witch was flying her vacuum cleaner amazingly. It’s not like I intend to throw explosive barrels down!” She replied, “You’re extremely bad-mannered.” Oops! We almost collided with a cloud. What do you think, should we fly a little above it?” She turned to me while she was flying her vacuum cleaner and screamed angrily, “Oh you are very inappropriate.” I replied, “I only meant to fly above the women’s swimming pool in an innocent way with no bad intentions. A soldier lifted his head and shouted with joy, “Yes! It’s because of the prayers for rain, which our great leader prayed for yesterday, otherwise there wouldn’t have been this rain.” Once, while we were in the middle of the sky, I whispered to the witch, “In the North of the city there is a private swimming pool exclusively just for women. Once in flight and without her notice, I urinated on the soldiers below. When we passed over the checkpoint areas we were spitting on the soldiers and laughing. Every day the witch was taking me to the market and then bringing me back to the house for free. She turned on her vacuum cleaner and I rode behind her to take me back to the house. ![]() ![]() Two hours later I came back to the witch at the entrance of the market. I hugged the vegetable carts and kissed Haj Kassem vendor of the cakes. Once we arrived at the market I ran between the people with joy. We flew higher passing over the military checkpoints. A bird flying beside us caught it and continued smoking it. Her broom was not made from straw like brooms you hear of from those old folk tales, but it was a vacuum cleaner! I asked her, wondering why, “Is it for the need of the modernization of the tales and also the technological development of tales that you imposed this on me?” She looked over at me and said, “Your smoking is bothering me.” So I threw out my cigarette. Come on, ride behind me.” And I rode behind her on her broom. Suddenly, a witch with a broom landed beside me and said to me, “I’ll take you to the market. ![]() One year had passed, and I could not go there because of the despicable military checkpoint in the entrance of our alley. Seven months ago, I was standing at the door of our house. They say they know me! Oh my God, they are crazy. Raaza Jamshed for Guernica Global Spotlights Written in a single paragraph, the story forges a unique geography of thought and advocates for fiction’s imaginative capacity to leap into the impossible and emerge defiant. And this ride, far from being ordinary, is saturated with a wish-fulfillment quality before it spirals into a macabre nightmare. As the story goes, a boy hitches a ride with a witch on a broom, but this is no ordinary broom: this is a vacuum cleaner with a no-smoking-on-board policy. Collected by The Odd Magazine in its anthology A Song For Syria, the narrative steps away from conventional war tropes and embraces fantastical elements to subvert a reality with no possibility of redemption. In his story “Seven Months with the Witch Who Had the Broom,” the Syrian writer-in-exile, Mustafa Taj Aldeen Almosa, fictionalizes the experience of one of countless protesters persecuted by the Syrian security forces. Their treatment sparked more protests and more killings - and the Syrian civil war had begun. The boys were consequently detained, and one was brutally tortured and killed. In March 2011, inspired by the Arab Spring blazing through the Middle East, fifteen boys in Daraa, Syria, graffitied their defiance of their country’s corrupt government.
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