Chapter Nine
330 Words
It was not a dream.
That’s what the villagers told themselves when the flowers began to grow—out of season, out of reason—around her grave.
They had no name, those flowers.
Pale white, edges tinged with violet.
Like mourning dressed in light.
They grew in silence, watered not by rain, but by memory.
And still, no one dared speak her name aloud.
Except one.
A child.
⸻
She was barely seven.
Hair like burnt sugar, eyes that held more truth than her mother’s prayers.
She stood near the olive tree one morning, staring at the grave.
Then, gently, she sat beside it and whispered:
“Everyone says you’re gone…
But I think you’re just quiet now.”
The father watched from a distance.
He had not spoken in days.
Not to the villagers.
Not to the woman who stayed.
Not even to the grave.
But when he saw the girl, something inside him cracked—not like glass…
More like earth after a long drought.
⸻
That night, he returned to the village.
Not to live.
Not to beg.
But to confess.
He stood in the mosque, where once he’d preached anger dressed as righteousness.
The walls remembered him.
The floorboards creaked beneath his guilt.
He spoke softly, yet every syllable shook the silence.
“I killed her with my doubt.
I buried her with my pride.
And still… she visits your dreams with mercy I never gave.”
No one interrupted.
No one moved.
Because they all knew—
He wasn’t the only one confessing that night.
⸻
The next morning, the woman was gone.
No footprints. No shawl. No scent of incense.
Only a page torn from Huda’s old notebook…
fluttering by the olive tree.
On it, a single line:
“If pain can echo, maybe love can too.”
And so, the village began again—
Not new.
Not clean.
But honest.
And honesty, they learned, is the only soil where forgiveness can grow.
- Writer
