THE PURPLE FLOWER

WHAT IT FEELS LIKE WHEN SOMEONE TRIES TO KILL YOU

In my early thirties, I worked as a journalist in an African country that was lurching into civil war. One afternoon I was drinking beer on the third-floor balcony of my hotel when I heard gunshots coming from the railroad station. I slipped a notepad into my shoulder bag, left the hotel, and walked toward the gunfire.

“What’s going on?” I asked the ticket clerk.

“Soldiers and policemen are trying to kill each other.”

“And why is that?”

The clerk didn’t look scared—just embarrassed.

“I don’t know. Maybe a big reason. Maybe a small reason. You only find out later.”

A gun battle between the police and the army was a definite news story, so I walked out onto the concrete platform where passengers boarded trains. The trainyard had eight sets of tracks and a line of boxcars on a siding. I stood on the tracks for a minute or so. Then I heard the pop-pop of distant gunfire and saw a group of soldiers in tan uniforms at the bottom of the hill, firing their rifles.

The clerk was right—soldiers were involved—but I didn’t see any policemen. I walked back to the platform and waited until three teenage schoolboys with plastic book satchels left the station and began to cross the tracks.

“Where are the police?” I asked them.

A schoolboy with a necktie pointed toward a cluster of white buildings in the distance.

“Up there. Or maybe they ran away.”

I followed the boys across the tracks and then we stopped when a market woman approached us. She wore a shimmery green dress and carried a live chicken upside down in her left hand. A second hen had escaped and the woman was determined to get it back. While the first chicken squawked, the woman hopped back and forth across the rails, trying to catch the fugitive.

One of the schoolboys tucked his thumbs under his arms and flapped them like wings. Then he made clucking sounds and his friends laughed.

Suddenly a bullet hit the necktie schoolboy.

Blood sprayed out the back of his head and he fell forward.

Everyone hit the ground and I found myself lying on wooden crossties. In an instant, the world had become small, bright, and concentrated. My only thought was: The men shooting the rifles don’t know me. I wasn’t a bad person. I hadn’t done anything wrong.

There was no logic behind what had just happened. Explanations felt useless.

Bullets pinged off the rails. I turned my head slightly and stared at a purple flower. It was just a weed that had pushed its way through red gravel, but I saw it with great clarity. At that moment, it felt like the most beautiful object in the world.

When the gunshots died down, I stood up with the two surviving schoolboys, and we looked down at their friend. One of the boys grabbed the body’s ankles, so I grabbed the hands.

The dead person who had possessed desires, fears, and ambitions felt like a sack of meat as we carried him into the train station and laid him on the floor

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