Sands of Life

My earliest memories start at when I was about ten years old. That was awhile ago and I was far different than the person I have become. My name is Shadira and this is my story.

***
I remember it was September eleventh, 2001 and we watched like all Americans did in horror at the events that happened at the world trade center in New York. I remember my mother crying her eyes out as we all watched it unfold we were on the west coast so this all happened before I had to go to school.

I remember that I didn’t go to school that day. This was too terrible a thing. I really never understood why they did it then, even now I don’t but to understand evil you really have to be evil.

I remember it was two days later and we were getting groceries at the store and people were muttering around us. Staring at us with looks of hate in their eyes. They called me and my mother names. Paki, towel-head, sand-nigger, rag-head, Apu, A-rab and other lovely things. We left without our groceries after the clerk at the cash for the store had cut up my mother’s credit card. I know it wasn’t declined she was just being evil.

We barely got out of there without being beaten just for us not being natural born Americans. We weren’t Arabic, or Palestinian or Hindu or Pakistani we were Jordanian or in my case half; but that didn’t matter to the people home. We walked ran fast to our car where we met my father a white American guy by the name of Steven Walker.

I remember my father had met us coming down the street and that’s when more and more people stared to yell at us. We were the only “Brown” people in town. Our car stopped at a stop light and a black kid who I knew but to this day that I can’t remember…He ran out in front our station wagon and through a brick through the driver’s side window and that’s what made my father crash into headlong crash with the town’s big green garbage truck. I’ll never forget watching in slow motion my father’s head flying forward and going through the windshield, the blood as the glass had cut the artery in his neck. I think my mother tried to save him and blood spurting everywhere in the car and then it sort of grey’s out on me to the sound of my mother letting out a death wail of mourning at my father’s death.

It’s all mixed up with me bouncing ahead into the back of my father’s seat or the seat was pressed back into me as we impacted with the garbage truck. That’s when everything in the world went past the grey and into the blackness…

Allah help me…

***
I was in darkness, but it was a quiet darkness, not scary but not serene it just was. And then there was this light. A soft golden light like the way that sunlight gets hazy with there’s dust or pollen hanging in the air. Bright and warm and there was a scent, not like I’ve ever smelled before, dry, earthen but in an almost salt and metal way, like the beach gets but totally different at the same time.

Then they were there.

A man but not a man with six golden wings fanning out from his back and he shone that light and both he and I were in this sort of cloud of his feathers, golden glowing feathers that when they fell on me they melted or sank into my skin like a melting snowflake. His eyes were the color of molten gold and his hair was a deep rich brown color and shiny like the sheen on horses. He wore this tunic and pants of simple undyed cloth even tattered at the edges of the hems and a sash of golden silk as his belt a scarf wound around his neck again of simple cloth but on it like a scroll was the words of the Qur’an and a shining shamshir (sword) was in his right hand.

“Allah…You…you are one of the Malak (Messenger/Angel)…”

~Yes Shadira I am his messenger, and I have come bearing his will unto you. ~

“Shadira?”

~Yes this is the name, the word of you that was spoken by Allah in your creation, you were wished to be and thus it is. ~

“Are you here to collect me, to take me to heaven?”

~No child it will not be I who will have that honor to bring you home and before the merciful one. My mission is to set you onto your path, to bring to your world a new prophet and to set you upon your own Sunnah (Trodden Path). You are to be one of his prophet’s child, your people will need you more in the time that will come that you can fathom. The yawm ad-din (Day of Judgment.) is coming Shadira and you are called. ~

The Malak looked down on me and closed his eyes and I could hear my father’s voice singing out the Morning Prayer. I settled on my knees and prayed before the Malak as he shone like the sun and I hoped that this would be right.

After lifting my head at the end of my prayers his glow became too great to bright for me to see and my awareness was filled with it.

***
I woke from that dream that golden glow and panicked there was this pain in my throat and it hurt to swallow there was nothing around me I recognized as I thrashed and things beeped wildly and things went off making all these sounds and several nurses came running. I was in the hospital, I hadn’t been expected to make it and had been in a coma and getting worse until they put me on the breathing machine. They had left me there for days and then turned off the machine. I was dead for eleven minutes or so before somehow my breathing had started back up and I had returned to life. They hadn’t had time to take the tubes out of me and stuff so I woke intubated? I think that’s right, in any case I don’t recommend it. I remember what I told you about my accident, I remember that coma dream. But nothing of my life before that. The doctors say I have brain damage. There is a very nasty set of scars where they had to operate under my hair. I know to hear that I was operated on in my brain was really strange, scary too. They said my skull was really badly smashed and cracked and they had to fix it. That my brain swelled and there was a really bad cut on part of it. I was scared and looked at the doctors and the nurses.

“Where’s my Mother?”

“We’re sorry but your mother…when she was visiting you two months before you woke up she was mugged and she was shot. She never made it Stephen, she died.”

One of the nurses was nice and she held me as I cried. I cried hard, I cried and cried because I was alone, in the world and I had only that last fuzzy horrible day to remember my parents by.

***
I was in the hospital for four weeks, my muscles were weak and I was not a strong boy to begin with and they had to help me learn to walk and even do some simple things. It was hard and not helped by the rising feelings of stupidity as letters and numbers jumbled on me from time to time.

Men came in suits and asked me questions about my family that I had no answers too. FBI and Homeland security they called themselves. They didn’t believe me or the fact that I had memory loss despite everything my doctors had told them about me.

My father they wanted to know about my father and why he did what he did? Why did he leave the army, why did he marry my mother, why did he ram the garbage truck?

I looked at the angry man from Homeland security. “My father didn’t ram the truck; we had an accident because someone had attacked us.”

“That is not what several witnesses had said.”

“But they’re lying!”

“We have several witnesses all whom state that you and your family were acting suspiciously at the Penny-save and that when confronted your family left…fled and then drove headlong into the sanitation vehicle. Why were you running! where were you trying to get to!”

“Why are you doing this?”

“I’m trying to save innocent American lives and you’re the only link that we have to your father’s terrorist activities!”

“My Daddy wasn’t a terrorist!”

“He was!, He left the United States Army after the gulf war and remained in the middle east where he met your mother and then converted to Islam! Why would he do that if he wasn’t involved in a terrorist plot?”

“He wasn’t my daddy was a good man, he was peaceful!”

The nurses came in after I started to cry bawling my eyes out and chased the FBI men and the Man from Homeland Security that was yelling at me away. They came back though several times and just as mean and as nasty and as soon as I was better I was taken from the hospital and placed into a foster home by child protective services.

***
I lived in the Rose Street Foster home for six months just outside of Portland and my life there was hell.

The kids there all hated me because I was part Arabic but to tell them that I was half Jordanian did no good. I still got A-rab, or Half-Paki or worse. It did no good to tell any of the teachers because they hated me too and I got the same and nearly daily beatings or abuse of some kind from the other children at my school.

I slit my wrists twice.

I stole and took an overdose of sleeping pills.

One day one of my tormentors a bully by the name of Jerome Metcalf had broken my nose when he shoved my face into the locker doors and something in me snapped and I threw myself at him and knocked him down in the playground and started hitting him with my fists as small as they were. (I was always a slight boy.) I was so enraged it was like something else had taken over that part of me that just wanted my life back, my parents back and I fought like an animal that had enough of being tormented. I barely remember reaching for that rock on the ground but to this day I can remember that first sickening thump as I hit him in the head with it and again, and again and again over and over screaming at him and making no sense at all just screaming out the torment in my heart.

His friends soon jumped me coming to his aid and they pulled me off of him and started to punch me, and to kick me and then one of them I don’t know who stomped with all the hate in his soul onto my testes. I felt my balls break, pop, rupture like squished grapes.

The pain was unlike anything I had ever felt and I screamed, I screamed and screamed until I passed out after curling into a ball so tight it was nearly physically impossible.
I barely remember the sound of the ambulance. I was put back in the hospital under observation by several police men. I remember them talking.

“Little bastard nearly killed the Metcalf kid.”

“Yeah but I heard the kid deserved it.”

“How so?”

“The kid here’s been getting nothing but shit since the twin towers and the airplane thing.”

“Why? He’s just a kid?”

“Feds are saying this kid’s the son of a terrorist, that his old man did a hari-kari into a garbage truck and nearly took all of them with him. They’re coming in to question the kid again.”

“Waffor? He ain’t even got an A-rab name; he’s too young to cause shit.”

“I heard his old man was a white guy, left the US Army after Kuwait and went native.”

“Muslim.”

“Shit.”

“Yeah, Shit.”

I lay there awake for the longest time crying quietly to myself. It felt like there was nothing left in my life, nothing really worth living for and right then I was sure that God/Allah had forsaken me.

It’s a terrible feeling just to be lying there and sinking deeper and deeper into misery, I was on painkillers for what had happened to my body but they didn’t even come close to the pain that I had inside, that dark pit that I found myself drowning in.

There are times when you can be hurt so bad inside, in so much internal pain that it is actually hard to breathe.

***
It was the middle of the night when the curtain to my bed was torn aside and there was a large man there with a knife. He had an insane and wild look in his eyes as he screamed at me.

“It’s because of you my boy’s gunna be nothing but some retard! He won’t even be able ta wipe his own ass you little bastard!”
I seen the police officer rushing in trying to stop the man but he wasn’t fast enough as the mans hand snapped down and the knife went through the bones in my right forearm. He kept screaming and ranting about how I caused Jerome so much brain damage that he might as well be dead.

I had been curled up and hiding defensively and yet I couldn’t scream, I couldn’t cry all I could do was to stare at the shiny metal of the knife blade and be almost entranced by it. I don’t remember pulling out of my arm or how I could all drugged up and not really strong enough to do it. I remember the blood shooting from the wound as I pulled out the knife. I remember not feeling anything really as I pulled the blade over my arms and my legs opening the skin and the red flesh underneath and the blood I remember the blood.

Someone took the knife from me as I tried to open up my throat. Then darkness. It seemed that was one thing that was constant in my life, my friend the darkness.

***
The rest of that year and the next was a blur for me as I had been locked away in the Gravenhurst Psychiatric hospital. They filled me full of drugs and put me away in a room held down by restraints. It took me a long time to recover there, with the drugs the other half of the year just passed me by. Not really knowing much of anything because I was so heavily medicated. I missed my birthday, the second year in a row actually and missed everything else as well.

One thing that has stayed with me and it’s something everyone should know. Just because you’re drugged up to the point where you can’t think doesn’t mean that it took the pain away.

The next year 2004 had me in there and on meds that helped me with being so messed up in my head and effectively castrated, my testes too bashed beyond repair to be saved so they had been surgically removed. It was also the year that between the medications and some of the staff there I had been…”Saved” I had been born again and baptized as a Christian, Jesus would save me and wash away my pain and my sins and I would receive forgiveness for being a heathen Muslim.

It was hard first letting go of who I thought I was but being “Saved” took away my pain. I was praised for it and I wasn’t called names no more and people stopped hating me and told me that I was special and that god and Jesus loved me. The staff there that had taken my soul in to be saved had me placed in a caring and loving family.

By the time I was thirteen I was adopted into the Robinson family. They had kids of their own and lived out in the country on a farm. Mr. Robinson wasn’t Dad or Daddy it was father or sir. But that only applied to me, or to his two daughters. Not to him three boys two of which were older than me and one younger. No they got to call him Dad and Pop but not me or his daughters. Even they got to be called by him those terms of endearment…Honey, sweet-pea…Me I was Stephen and I wasn’t a girl and because of my injuries I wasn’t a boy.
I was the family mule. That was a lesson that I learned hard because I was so determined to be a good boy, to be a good Christian I was more that willing to do those things asked of me. For me was the hardest chores, the dirtiest stuff on the farm from cleaning and washing out the stalls for the cows and slopping and cleaning after the pigs and cleaning out the chicken house to pushing the mower and carrying load after load of firewood. There were family chores to be sure, like putting in the gardens at planting was a full family thing, just like harvesting and haying season was. It wasn’t all hard or bad it was just I wasn’t really their child; I wasn’t really a boy or a girl so Father’s idea was discipline and hard work and prayer, lots and lots of prayer.

All of us were taught locally at the church that also was school for us kids who where getting a good clean Christian education. We prayed as much as any Muslim would only for different times and different things. At home before our baths, we heated the water on the woodstove in the back room for us boys, only the girls got to use the good tub and the hot water heater we’d pray before getting in to wash the chores and sins away. Then saying grace at the table before breakfast. Then the mornings prayer at school, then there were several as we studied school work and the bible and then another grace at lunch and then another to bless us again in our learning and then again at grace at supper then more if we had bible studies in our homework and then our evening prayers. Everyday this was my life and I was good at it I kept my nose clean for the most part except for the odd scrap at school or more often whenever I protested my brothers foisting their chores off on me. Punishment was more chores, or a caning because father felt that spare the rod and spoil the child was a literal reference. I wasn’t the only one spared his justice but I was the most often corrected or when he drank and got angry he’d be much more willing to punish you for something, and when he was drinking he found fault in many things that I did. I swear there were times he was so…angry and drunk that me breathing would have earned me getting corrected.

Then he liked to baptize us all over again. Getting dunked for something you needed correcting in then him reciting scripture to you so you had whatever he thought you did drilled into your head.

Or he’d make you recite the verses as he’d soak you down with the garden hose in the wee hours of the morning…or in the winter time.

It got less and less as the years passed by and you get used to it and you know what not to do, not where to be when this was going to happen and even what you say and how you can say it right down to your tone of voice becomes part of you. It became part of me and still I thought this was the way that life was supposed to be. This is the way that God and Jesus wanted life to be like for everyone. I became like them, like the others in my church and my school and my community that were angry and scared that the rest of the world wouldn’t see the truth and that they were so determined to go to hell.

I had not use for my boy parts and god couldn’t, wouldn’t make me or have made me into a girl so I thought that vows of celibacy would be easy for me. I thought that I’d become a priest or some other servant of God and Christ. I became very good at speaking from the good book and even became a helper in the church with father Emmet. My adopted father was more than pleased by this news and my decision to make good use of Gods choice of what had happened to me when I was younger.

Then just after my fifteenth birthday in 2006 something wonderful and horrible happened at the same time and was the same thing.

I met Justin Munroe. He had come to our church as a missionary and was staying in our little community for a few years. He was in his twenties and he was this big strapping guy full of burly power and strength with massive arms and legs and he was stronger than anyone I had ever met. Justin had these soulful brown eyes and this well trimmed black beard that looked very good with the hippy pony tail (according to father) he kept his hair in. I though he looked like Samson brought to life right from the pages of the bible stories. He was soft spoken and he had a well and true love of god and was gentle with women and children and animals.

I became very aware of him and more so myself as I worked so closely with him doing things for the church and the congregation. It was more than anything I had ever known. I wasn’t really a man, I was watching puberty pass me by and I wasn’t a woman I had no real sex drive until Justin.

Yes, I had fallen head over heels in love with this man that I could never have, never really touch or never really be with. That year that I had been fifteen was the best and worst year in my life. It was torture to be around him and yet I found reasons to be around him and to help him out with anything that he was working on. Around him it felt like I could fly, like I was flying.

And I thought I was gay, and being gay was a sin. And I prayed to god to heal me and make me not gay, to cleanse me of my sins. It never worked and I still found reasons to keep close to him.

Things changed that Christmas, or it was around then. We had gone into the city to go and do our once a year big rush of Christmas shopping and I was wandering around downtown and my feet just seemed to carry me down the streets and a few blocks this way and a few blocks that way until I found myself in front of the local mosque. I took on look inside and instead of rallying my good Christian sensibilities at the offending heathen temple I went inside and found my place and knelt and then bowed my head in prayer in time with the others, my heart and my soul falling into that true and gentle rhythm of something that was long lost but dear to me.

I prayed with the others falling into unison with them and the chanted half sung prayers, my mind, my heart filling with remembered light and the sweet scents of the oils and the incense even the drifting hint of spices used in the tiny temple kitchen a balm to me.

~Hello Shadira, it is long since you have come before Allah. It is time and past time for you to set foot upon your own path. ~
It was the voice of the Malak, the angel that had been sent to me. I closed my eyes and bathed in its light, the light of God of Allah. There was this feeling if fleeting but it left a change in me, something deep.

“Yes, I am ready.”

There was nothing else said. The other men looked at me for talking to myself or perhaps they thought I was talking to God/Allah. Or they might have been looking at the cross on the neck chain I was wearing.

It didn’t matter and I left without talking to anybody and walked back to where I’d find my family. I knew I had to do this. I just couldn’t not be the person that I was meant to be. And my love of Justin had shown me that I wasn’t going to be cut out to be a priest or anything else like that but I just couldn’t live like this any more, not in this vacuum that my life had become.

I wasn’t Stephen Robinson. I wasn’t meant to live that life. I was Shadira Remington and I was a Muslim woman.

Some people agonize over something like this. Was this right or was this wrong but for me it was like visiting that mosque had flipped a switch in my head and turned on a light that had been left off for too long.

I got myself a coffee at a small shop as I walked it was a middle-eastern place so I bought a bar or a square of baklava laden with pistachios and flavored with hints of rosewater and cardamom dusted honey. My first bite took me back to my mother and our old kitchen and made me cry. It was good tears, tears of remembrance because this was something she would have made in our kitchen back home. This was something I seen her eat and smile at eating as she sipped her coffee. I just knew, deep down knew that it was that exact same smile that was on my face right now.

Only God/Allah can give you back something like that.

I lost all of that because of the brain damage that I had suffered. I hadn’t been able to remember anything before the accident, our assault for so many years and now this came back to me just so clearly, so beautifully.

I know I was quiet when I rejoined my family. I wasn’t yet sixteen and I didn’t really have a choice but to keep living as I was until I turned sixteen. At sixteen I could move out. But I knew that I had to be honest with them sooner or later. But this was Christmas, and I honestly didn’t know what would happen once I let them know everything. So I sort of played it like this was Stephen’s last Christmas and I burned through a good chunk of my savings, as well as all of my Christmas money and bought them nice presents.

It was during Christmas break that I would take walks over to the next closest village in my spare time it was about twelve miles from the small one that I had been living in and it wasn’t a “Christian” township and looked up men becoming women on the computer at the library there. It was here I discovered another world of things, more than just the transgendered stuff or the transsexual stuff but the entire world was suddenly laid open to my fingertips. Father only had a small television with just an antennae at the house. No cable, no internet….certainly “no damned internet.”

I needed money, so I could go away. I was going to join the peace-corps and go to Thailand or Brazil on a mission and have enough money to get the operations that I needed to get done, done so that I could actually be the me that I really and truly felt I was inside.

I got a job shortly after that, got my license too. Justin was super kind on both parts and took me out and taught me how to drive and he took me along on several of his odd job runs… (Sigh).

We were in Portland picking up a truckload of building supplies at the mega-sized hardware place they have there when we stopped to take a break for lunch at one of the internet cafes there. I was looking up things on the peace-corps and going to Thailand and SRS in Thailand. I felt a shadow loom over me and Justin was looking at the things that I had been looking up. I froze, he’s a huge guy and where I live…

“Peace-corps huh? It’s a good organization.”

I just stared at him. He gave me one of those gentle giant smiles. “Relax, kiddo I’m not going to freak out and pound you.”

“You’re not?”

“No. look…you have a femme name yet?”

“Shadira, but it’s my real name, not my femme name.”

“Yeah okay; Look Shadira, I know all about you. I mean I know about what had happened to Stephan and while a lot of other people might not get it I do. You’re a young kid and you need to have a life ahead of you that’s your choice. Now there’s things that were taken away from you that you can’t get back so I can understand you looking at this from the angle you’re looking at it now.”

“You’re not mad?”

“No I’m not mad, I’m not even disappointed. You’re a human being just like me and God knows who you are even if you glued wings to your self and dyed yourself purple. God just wants us to live and be happy and to know peace through the things he has to teach us, he just wants from us what every father wants. Us to be happy.”

“But I’m not Christian, not really?”
“What are you then?”

“I’m Muslima.”

“That’s fine with me, most Muslims I know are great people, and they love God too.”

“But it’s not your way, and you don’t hate me for not being a Christian?”

“Hardly, I wouldn’t be a good Christian if all I did was think and do hateful things, besides Jesus wasn’t a Christian.”

“He wasn’t?”

“No I’m pretty sure that Jesus was actually a Jewish Rabi, but he was also baptized by John so honestly I’m not sure where you’d place him. Islam says that he was a prophet, I kind of think that fits.”

I stare at him really confused. He wasn’t freaking out at my heathen ways and he was even talking about things that in our own church would get him screamed about, especially his view on Jesus. He takes another look at the sites about SRS in Thailand while my brain is still trying to do the whole refresh page thing.

“You got to be careful with some of these places Shadira, some of them aren’t safe.”

“You know about this stuff?”

“I’ve been all over Shadira and I’ve known and gotten along with all kinds of people not just from other countries and other faiths but those that are differently gendered or gay or lesbian and all sorts of stuff in between. People are people, I’ll always believe in them.”

“Why? You could be just like the others and you’re not. I mean if you really think this way then why are you even here living with a church that’s so closed off as ours?”

“Well the easiest way to understand people is to live with them, to walk a mile in their shoes. Then that’s when you can open things up and talk about something’s, maybe offer a different view of things or even just to lead by example. Or there’s another reason that I chose this church out of the ones that I had on my list of ones to go to.”

“What’s that reason?”

“Maybe God sent me to here to help you.”

“Huh, you think so?”

“Maybe, I’m not going to discount it or the fact that he intended both things and any and all of the other things that I’m going to do while I’m here.”
“I wish that I had that kind of faith.”

“That’s the funny thing about faith, it relies on having faith. I believe that God has a plan for all of us, and for all that we know this plan was written right into who we are when we’re born. That our free will is there for us to learn more about who we are because we all have always learned more from the mistakes that we make more than how successful we become. He wants us to smile up at him and go Ohhh now I get it.”

“But why? Why do we have to have free will at all, what’s the point of it?”

“Shadira honey, if you figure that one out you come and find me. People are still trying to answer that one; they’ve been trying to figure that one out for all known time. It’s the biggest question we can ask.”

“What is?”

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“That’s just it, in the absolute broadest strokes we all just want to know just Why?”

I look at him and honestly he just kind of turned even more handsome to me, it wasn’t it isn’t a sexual thing or I didn’t think so even looking back on it now. It was the kind of man he was. The strength in his body was matched by the strength of his character but now I got this deeper glance of the soul of this man and the deep well of wisdom that he had there and I kind of fell more in love with him, but it was I’m sure in a sort of spiritual way.

***

The next few months Justin became my rock as it were. He helped me get my things in order to join the peace-corps and getting my transcripts ready for me to continue my education abroad and built up my savings as much as we could. It was 2007 and in June I had turned 16.

Things turned once again three days after my birthday. I was packing my suitcase not taking much beyond a few personal items and a few clothes. My Mother came in and watched me packing up. I hadn’t noticed her there and she put her hand on my shoulder.

“Stephen, I wish you wouldn’t leave home, you’re still so young and we need you here at the farm.”

“I have to go Mother, I have to.” I was tense, I’ve always wanted to be close to her, but it wasn’t to be just like it wasn’t to be with father.

“Why do you have to? What’s wrong with staying here?”

“And do what Mother, get married? Raise a family? I can’t, It’s not who I really am.”

“You’re sixteen, you don’t know who you really are.”

“Yes, I do. Allah has told me.”

“Who…?”

“Allah, God…Mother.”

“That’s not God Stephen, that’s a devil word, that’s why you were sent to us, it’s why you were saved. Your parents godless ways had you punished until you came to be saved.”

“That’s why I’m leaving Mother, you’re all good people but I’m being called to follow my true path.”

“God and Jesus are you’re true path! Not that mumbo jumbo the terrorists swill, is that you’re path! Are you being called out by Al-Lah to be a bomber! A murderer!”

“No!, I’m not! I’m not like that!, I’ll never be like that!, My dad wasn’t like that! 911 happened and we were just as scared and terrified as you all were only we were the ones getting terrorized! I’m not leaving to do anything like that!”

“Then why are you leaving!?!”

“I’m leaving so I can be who I’m supposed to be!”

“And what the hell are you supposed to be?!”

We were both screaming at each other and as we were my brothers and sisters had decided to be nosey and stuck close upstairs and were likely hoping that I was going to get in trouble. They were like that a lot, especially my sisters and my two older brothers. But Father had came upstairs to find out what the screaming was about just as I screamed at her.
“I’m leaving so I can become a woman!”

………………

Then his voice. “You little bastard.”……..”You little bastard after what I’ve done for you. After what this family has done for you!, given up for you!”

He came in and shoved mother aside and he hit me. He hit me and hit me and hit me and I couldn’t just stand to be treated this unjustly, not anymore. I fought back, I didn’t fight well and I just managed to fight him off and grab my backpack that had my papers in it and I scrambled out the window, falling hard onto the tin porch outside and then off of it two the ground.

As badly beaten as I was I ran, I ran until my hurts became too great and I limped into town. I got stares for a good hour or so as I could feel the dislike of those around me building up, just like they were saying in their heads….see I told you he was evil.

I headed to the church where I’d find Justin but the yard was full of the town police, and two state troopers and my father’s truck by the time I limped my way there. There was an ambulance, and Father Emmet was pointing at me and yelling. “That’s him!, that’s the little terrorist bastard that started all this!” He got up to try to do something but was restrained by a state trooper. I saw my Father in the back of a patrol car and he was screaming at me, swearing most likely and foaming at the mouth. I never heard what he was saying behind the glass.

All I saw was an officer taking charge of his hunting rifle. And them zipping Justin, my Justin into a body bag. Yes…He’ll always be my first love. A good, better than good Christian man killed be the folk he loved and served. Yes I get the parallel now that I’m older. But right then it was a heartbreaking, soul shattering loss.

I remember, screaming.

I remember my oldest brother was there and he called me a faggot and jumped me. It took two cops to pull him off of me.

Corporal Patrick Taylor of the State troopers office got me out of there and actually three towns over. I was placed in protective custody at a decent motel for the night after getting taken to the local hospital. I was questioned as I was being seen too by the state police then the FBI an Agent Hope Sinclair. I instantly took a liking to Hope and soon over a few coffee’s in the ER I was pouring out my life to her. Hope became the first woman I have had the pleasure of calling my friend.

She took my statements and made sure I had a safe place to stay. My Father had beaten me to town taking a different road and had burst into the church and blamed Justin for me being a faggot and a pervert, he accused him of having turned me gay and of us being lovers and sexual partners. I wish now that part had been true. But it wasn’t that kind of love. He was mad with his zealotry, Justin’s just too moderate beliefs came under fire and when Justin wouldn’t give me up no matter that I hadn’t arrived there yet he shot him in a fit of rage and fundamentalist righteousness.

I was a crying mess as I related what had happened at the farm and in the course of five weeks she took me as I was coming to be. Shadira, a Muslima girl who just needed to be what she had no idea how to be. She even helped me in a way I had never asked for and frankly didn’t even knew was possible.

Wearing female clothes has become less and less alien to me and honestly there is many things about them that I just feel is right. I’m not talking about the panties which are softer and nicer than what I’m used to but it’s the variety, it’s the ability to dress as I feel like. My adopted sisters and my Mother had very few choices in the things that Father had allowed.

I wasn’t even sure what would be acceptable to be worn as a Muslim woman. I had played it safe with skirts and dresses and things that I could layer and live in, I kept my footwear simple and everything else.

No make up, not yet either. Even now, I don’t feel right wearing it.

Shopping was fun if not scary a little bit. But it’s not really an issue or a item in my life that I’d go over in much detail.

She got my family estate returned to me. It turns out the black kid that caused our accident had bragged about it while he was in jail for something else. And in the years since and after 911 some sanity had returned to people in my hometown. One of the local PD had reported it and the investigation had cleared my father’s name and my mothers name but they were still gone, from my life and from my memory. Any thing that we actually owned was in evidence and the property had been sold out from under me because of my status. The agent who had interrogated me as a child had buried the new investigation under paperwork and accusations that the case had been solid.

Hope got me a good human rights lawyer and quickly she had gotten me a cash settlement from the government in exchange for me not pursuing the matter further or getting involved into a class action lawsuit and there were several offers from sleazy ambulance chaser types. I could have gotten I suppose a lot more money, but I wanted to move on far more than I wanted to get rich, or even get revenge.

I saw a psychologist about my transitioning and my injuries and over a few weeks he decided I wasn’t crazy and that my decision to no longer live in the limbo I was living in was a good one and he signed off on my RLT. Armed with a prescription a letter for court and a referral to an endocrinologist I started my first doses of hormones.

I saw a judge who saw to reason given my injuries and what I had been through with the help of my lawyer changed my name and my legal gender.

The last time I had spent in my home state was a mixture of testifying in court against my Father and my Brother and against agent Adam Harcourt of the Office of Homeland Security. Apparently he had done more of what he had done to me in railroading a lot of innocent families who had ex-military americans that had converted to Islam. After I testified I did one last thing and paid for the burial and funeral of My Justin. I stayed away from the large crowd that had came to the funeral and burial keeping to myself in a black hijab and a simple black cotton dress and a raincoat. I was the last one to leave the graveyard, the last one to leave flowers for such a sweet, sweet man.

Hope had called me when I had. Gotten to the airport and was waiting on my flight for Rio. I was still going to get my surgery, I was still going to actually join the peace-corps and see a bit of the world and help people. My adopted Father had been convicted of 2nd degree murder and child abuse and reckless endangerment plus firearms charges in total he got thirty years with a chance of parole in twelve and my brother was charged with aggravated assault and was sentenced to house arrest. Agent Harcourt was under investigation still and it didn’t look good. I try not to wish anyone ill tidings really but he deserved everything he was going to receive. I let it go and let Allah be judge and jury for him and the evil he had done.

I thanked her and said that I’d never forget her or her kindness and if I ever made it near where she lived I’d look her up. I left soon after stopping for a layover in Dallas. There I was accosted by the lovely people on security that decided to racially profile me and held me up for several hours. I missed my flight and was held until I gave them Hope’s number and after a terse sounding phone call with a very ticked off FBI agent I was let go and had to wait until the next available flight. Even waiting I received a few looks, I have Arabic skin tones even with my Dad’s Danish ancestry, I have this very flat, but kind of pretty look. My hair is black but still too close to my old buzz cut and I’ve a perky nose with a bit of that Arabic point to it and grey eyes. I don’t look like a girl with my clothes off but I don’t look like a boy or a man should look either. But in my hijab and my hooded sweatshirt, and shirts I look like a young Muslima girl. And in Texas post 911 it’s an uncomfortable place to be. I can remember the sigh of relief I had when I had lifted off out of that place. I wanted out of the USA, I love my country and everything, my father was a soldier and we lived in the USA. Nevertheless my country was less than kind to me.

Getting into Rio wasn’t a problem. I went and registered with the City hospital and entered my papers from both the judge and my lawyer and psychologist for SRS surgery and had a consult after a four hour wait in the office which I spent online with my laptop and looked for an apartment to live at.

I got on the waiting list for my surgery and learned that it’d be a few months before my surgical date. I arranged through their offices the filling of my meds and got a family doctor that’d manage my case while I waited.
I got a room at a decent hotel and once settled I called and left messages for the director of the local chapter of the peace-corps and a wake up call at the front desk for nine AM.

I settled into the hot bath with a sigh. Tomorrow, tomorrow. It’s going to be a new start for me.

(end of part 1)

Sands of Life-2

Chapter 2

Present day….

My head snaps back as the gloved fist lashes out catching me on the right cheekbone. My head snaps back into the stripped box spring mounted on the wall like a torture rack.

“Fucking A-Rab witch! You’re going to burn in hell for your consorting with the devil!”

I look my current torturer in the eyes and take a deep calming breath. “I am no witch; it is you that are the spawn of Shai-tan. You claim some holy mission but you are no soldier of god, no warrior of Allah. You have little shame, no honor and you smell like a whore’s douche-water…”

“Fucking slut!”

He uses me as a punching bag a few more times before his companion pulls him off of me and touches me with the wet sponge held by the jumper cable. Allah is with me, my Angel is in my mind and…I…DO …NOT…Scream.

They’re torture goes on for awhile. I go on for longer, longer than they can bear. It ends with them dragging me from the room beaten and soaked and one of their lords and masters in the guise of a priest is there. I look at him. He looks at me. I see it inside of him. The demon, I see it sliding under his skin, under the priest’s collar and I see the red in his eyes glowing, burning like hell it self and I meet his stare of hate.

Then me and the Malak, the angel within me stare at him together. He flinches and moves away from us, moves out of our light. “Get the heathen witch out of here. We’ll cleanse her soon enough.”

They drag me down the cold halls of this place. These “Templars” and toss me back in the cell marked with strange sigils and symbols that glow with a dark light. I curl around myself quietly and breath through the pain until it passes and I kneel and pray giving thanks. Every time I dip low to pray the sigils flicker, their dark majik dislikes my faith, dislikes my prayers.

I finish and scoop some of the sand off of the dirty floor and let myself go and what I know as reality becomes Allah’s truth and the sand in my hand becomes cool clear water.

“Are you alright Shadira?” The voice is smooth and light yet cultured and pleasant. It comes from the cell across the hall from my own. I look over to where he sits this dark haired man but no man. He looks like a model, but he’s never been but once I think. A nice smile, intelligent eyes despite everything we’ve been through, fine features like a cat if a cat was a man…all things most girls would dream of. But save for the upswept pointed ears. He is an elf, a real and true one of the fae. Hence the legend, and the long life. “I’ve been better Dorian Grey.”

“I am glad that you are still alive my Shadira. I was worried that you’d never come back. There’s far too many that never return from them.”

“Allah was with me today Dorian, as long as I can keep my faith they are the weaker for it.”

“I wish I had your faith Shadira, I’m afraid I’ve been here in this world for so long that all the colors of the world have washed away for me like my beliefs.”

My heart goes out to him. There is this weary beyond weary sound in him like he just can’t keep the pain of the ages out of his voice. Looking over his back is pressed to the wall and his head tilted back looking at the ceiling, even in the dim light I can see the tracks of wetness from tears running down his face.

“Dorian…if you wish that you had faith then you are still holding unto hope after all of the things you’ve survived. Faith, all faith is hope Dorian. I am in awe of the faith that you really have Dorian, I can see it shining in you even if you cannot.”

“How is it you know so much about Faith and Hope Shadira?”

“I learned my strongest lessons about it from the first man I ever loved. He still teaches me even know.”

“Justin right?”

“Yes, my sweet Justin. But there were others.”

“Tell me more about you life Shadira.”

I look out the window. The night of blood and ice will soon be here, the moon is not yet quite right for it. My angel shakes in anticipation inside of me…this is a crux, a turning point in the world, it can feel things moving around us in the greater sense of it all that neither of us can explain.

I take one more look out the tiny dungeon window. I move closer to the demon sigiled bars but not close enough for them to burn me and sigh. “Alright, now where did I leave off?”

“You had just arrived in Rio.”

***

Nothing in my life had really prepared me for life outside of America. I had been in the city for a month now and was staying in this old Spanish mission that had been refurbished by the Peace Corps. It wasn’t big, there was an eight foot yellow painted wall with archway gates and the chapel itself and adjoining it were the rectory behind it with another courtyard where we grew vegetables and had a modest veranda with a sort of outdoor kitchen and a bit of seating for us to gather and eat and relax.

I was housed with the girls and the nuns in the nunnery that was like a real sparse dorm with thirty girls and only two bathrooms and three showers each it was chaotic. I loved it though. We had members from every age and country I could imagine at the time. I was up front about myself and they were more curious about me being Muslima than being transgendered. Two other local girls here were just like me, well not quite both Lola and Gisele were actually drop dead looking and I’d never look like that, not in a thousand years. Then again they went for the implants and the injected silicone.

The men and the boys lived on the other side of the courtyard in a cloister with the monks and even though we worked together we were housed separately. We fixed schools, taught in some of the barrio areas where you couldn’t get schools. Worked with other groups doing stuff like using old glasses donated free from other countries to those that need it, set up clothing hand outs and even ended up out in parts of the country side in villages helping with wells and planting crops and fixing things. We even helped build some better homes, school houses and clinics.

Things got to be pretty normal for me in the following year. By two thousand and eight I’d more or less mastered Spanish, had a good grasp on Portuguese and was semi able to speak a bit of Creole and German even. I was a pretty good Muslima, I prayed my five times a day and didn’t eat too much, never touched alcohol and even was a semi regular at one of the smaller mosques in the city and getting to be known in the Islamic neighborhood in the southern area of the city.

Once ever two weeks I’d go to Dr. Fernandez who I had gotten to keep track of my real life test and through him my blood work and hormone levels and ended up in February of two thousand an nine I went in and went through my SRS surgery.

I was finally a woman, and did it change much? No. There wasn’t any music in my soul, there was no great overwhelming feeling of being right. There was just this sort of milestone feeling like I could put so much of everything that I had gone through behind me.

I was comfortable in my real gender and I guess that did a lot in its own way.

Deeper down though it seemed to have started something else. The Malak would show, he was no longer a he though but came to me as a she and still clothed the same, in the white desert tunic and shirt but with a golden sash and a long white scarf with writings of the Quran on it in golden thread it obscured her face like a veil and she often bore a tall white candle instead of the sword, and on her head was a hijab of pure while.

She would come to me sometimes and guide me. Twice when there was a search for a lost child she would appear and point the way. Once her hand laid over mine when a man had drowned and I had performed CPR, he was gone under the water at a local community pool for too long and when her hand slid over and through mine his eyes had snapped open.

There was the man she told me was choking. The old woman with the heart attack in the market. And there were numerous times that I might have gone down the wrong street or alley and she showed to shake her head no.

Honestly I never questioned these things. I never questioned her. These were not all bunched up either. Just these strange visions and happenings that just happened every now and then throughout two thousand and nine.

But there were times that she didn’t show, didn’t come to my aid as it were. Three times’ I had been accosted by rude and pushy Muslim men who seemed to have taken a fancy to me and had tried to bully me almost into a relationship with them. Two were just that bullies, they though I’d be a meek little woman and just roll over for them. Those two got rough with me and I fought back, I slapped and bit and clawed them and used anything to hand to fend off their attempts at taking me and making a proper Muslima woman or bride out of me. They beat me pretty bad those two times and I made enough noise that I was rescued by the policia and I pressed charges much to the chagrin of several others in the community.

They got over it.

The third one was the sneakiest and he had gotten the Imam on his side to try to wed me to him for my own good and protection. I wasn’t being a good quiet and obedient Muslima and setting a bad example of being single when a man, a good man was more than willing to marry me and provide me with a home and comforts and a family.

I left that mosque and had gone to another where they had more than happily protected me from Hasim and his unwanted attention. He showed up one night having followed me three weeks later and he tried to get violent with me. It was a mistake. After my adventures with the other two very poor examples of manhood my friends at the mission had taken me along with them to study self defence in the form called Brazilian Jujutsu, that’s most often known as the main style of the people in that UFC thing and a fighting league in South America called Vale Tudo but for us girls who were learning the style it was a good style just for self defence like Judo or Aikido where we learned to use our attackers power against them.

I haven’t seen him since that night when he tried and tried to hurt me or rape me or likely kill me or all three. He was rabidly mad. He was tearing at my clothes as we fought and had torn my dress I had been wearing and he had a knife. I did everything I could to keep him from hurting me and the last time I saw him, he was limping away his knife in his own leg and calling me a filthy devil woman.

I’m not saying that Muslim men are bullies or all of them are bad, actually by and large most of them that I have met are wonderful people. Most people can be decent, and kind but there is a respect I get as a woman from the Muslim men I have met that is different then that from many others. It is a cultural respect though that calls you to respect your role in their culture as well. That being said I’m still modern and American enough of a woman I’m not going to be treated like garbage.

Things came and went until one night coming home to the mission I saw Ferouz the Imam that was aiding Hasim in his efforts to try to force marriage on me picking up a young thirty something Middle eastern man from the mission. I watched them as they left and then I saw my angel hovering over the courtyard her candle replaced by a shamshir (sword) I followed the call by her to the courtyard were there she hovered all six wings slowly moving over one of the trash cans. I looked inside and moved some wadded up papers and saw a bomb…

Somekind of series of taped together pipes five in total like those dynamite bundles you see in the old films. There was a cell phone taped to it and wires. Her hand hovered over mine and she stared into my soul.

~Choose.~

“Choose?”

~Chose, Shadira for once the choice is made there is no going back.~

“Chose what?” I ask even though I thought I knew.

~Chose.~

“Will Allah take me? Will there be heaven for me after the life I’ve lived, the things I’ve done?”

~It is not my place to judge.~

“I understand.”

~Do you? There will be no Martyrdom for you in either choice. The road will be harder than anything you have faced or you will not be recognized being this close to the blast.~

“I understand, I do, these people don’t deserve this.”

~Chose.~

“I have.”

As I reached into the trashcan she was there her hands on mine and the scroll scarf fell from her face, my face and I/We pulled out the bomb and the cell-phone rang. I curled my body around it trying to muffle the bomb blast and folded my wings around it and…

There was pain, my death, her birth, and the bomb went off.

Then there was a voice.

THE VOICE…

There was the warmest brightest light that I’ve ever seen, felt, been a part of and then I was back…standing in the courtyard holding the bomb. I sort of felt like myself but not…

I take the bomb and dump out the things I had gone shopping for and put it inside. I’m in a daze but I’m not. I know for a certainty that I have died once already and we have been born and that nothing is what It seems.

I feel things here in this city on the edge of my senses here lurking in the steamy Rio night. I walk all the way to Imam Ferouz’s small little temple and it’s late but there are people inside. I walk into what should be HIS house and feel the filth inside. Violence without cause has lived here, there is a stench lingering like a stain of burned flesh, human grease, and the lingering hint of sulphur here. He is not an Imam, not any longer he abuses his power, he uses it for his own gains and for “Their” causes.

There’s three men here with him as I walked in. Ferouz’s eyes widen seeing me. “You!, You should not be here it is not permitted for you to be here woman.”

“Be quiet Ferouz Ibn Kattief Ibn Terique.” His mouth opened in shock that I’d talk to him in such a way.

The three men stared at me and I saw something in the oldest one. A red shimmer under the eyes. Something slithering under the skin. One of the younger men glares at me then the other young man. “You fool, what did you do wrong.”

“He did nothing wrong. Fasil knows his craft well Davvid.” Both stare at me then Ferouz as I take out the bomb. “As you can see he was successful. You both learned you lessons well from your time in Hezbollah.”

The third man glares at me eyes simmering even hotter and I let my angel reach through me and the bomb becomes light then turns to desert sand between my fingers. The two and Ferouz gaped, Ferouz wet himself as we let him glimpse but of us, what we have become.

The third man that wasn’t a man began to pull a long knife over a foot long. There was a wave of power, tainted essence majik and all the doors and shutters slammed shut. I look at them she recognized the stink off the power.

~Sammael….~

*Shadira….*

I barely remember the fight, the Shamshir in my hand as I changed and I became her and she became we as me and the demon met blade to blade. The inside of the room burst into flames both holy and unholy as we fought. The men forgotten the moment I killed them, Sammael uttered a command in demon-tongue and they rushed me. The two Hezbollah terrorists I cut down and with a finger two his forehead I turned Ferouz who chose hate versus love, evil over light to a statue of sand.

It was the opening that Sammael wanted and drove his blade deep in my right arm. It’s left a blackened scar on my even now, it looks odd like a thin shiny bruise. I know had I been alive as I once was the tainted blade would have killed me outright.

The remainder of that fight blurs in my mind because I can’t remember some of the things done because I’m still far too human to understand them. By the time dawn came I staggered out from the burned mosque into the clean sunlight and Sammael gone, his willing host a pile of ashes. His essence fleeing away from us a tight cloud of blood colored smoke, hate and anger.

I don’t know how I wasn’t seen leaving there, I don’t know why nobody saw the small mosque burning down or why none of the buildings nearby didn’t light up and burn the area down.

I do know I cried for what was lost, what had been taken and twisted and tainted. I know I was in shock the entire walk home. I could feel these pockets of darkness as I passed pulling away from me and from the rising sun itself.
It took me two weeks to recover from it. From dying and living and the battle. There was so much to adjust too now. Being able to sense and see evil, for what it was…to following a handsome boy as he walked with a girl out somewhere private during one of our dances we used to put on for the teens in the area…driving my suddenly there Shamshir through his heart or what passed for it as he changed and grew long fangs and the Vampire was going to feed on her…

Everything had changed so much I thought I might go mad. But there was things I…she had never known that I knew and yet got to be blessed with reliving for the first time. Can you really remember fully getting to enjoy washing your hair, that first bite of fried chicken with crispy skin and that first taste of chocolate, your first ice cream headache…I gave Allah my life, and He gave me a new one in return.

Literally and more than I knew. I fainted in my room when I woke feeling ill and there was blood on the sheets between my legs. I knew what had happened, she, me my Angel, My Malak self did not.

When It hit us that I could be a mother, we could be a mother that we could bear life and love and care and nourish and nurture another life another soul…I cried for hours and prayed all the rest of that day giving thanks. I could be a mother, I could be a mom…that one thing more than any other thing is what I hold onto. Keeps me alive, keeps my faith.
The thought of my children.

I slowly was getting adjusted to who I was becoming and was finding new joys out of life each day.

Then the year passed from the old to the new. I defended those who I could as things would happen. Vampires, Rio was rife with them and other evils. Black Santeria priests that performed the darkest of rites. Necromancers and just plain murderers touched by the Monster below.

It all came to a head during Carnival this year.

I had been partying and dancing with friends from the Corps and having a good time when my friend Julie a nice girl from Australia had gotten separated from the rest of us and I saw her with two young men and the scent of mana and charm majik thick in the air like a too cloying cologne.

I followed the scent and them as they stole down an alleyway. They were tearing off her clothes and she was just dazed under the sway of majiks, like she’d been ruffied. I stepped in quickly and broke one’s nose with a palm strike to his face. The other pushed her aside and said words in black Latin that caused me great pain. Then I was tasered from behind. I tried to fight them, I tried to get up but there were more of then with boots and snap batons and they beat me. Mortal men, my powers were being hindered by the two sorcerers. I was bound by chains marked like these bars here in our cells and I heard a long slow hate filled chuckle.

“Good evening Steven, it’s so nice to see you again.”

I looked up to see. Agent Adam Harcourt of The Office of Homeland Security staring at me a sick smile on his face.

“You’re out of your jurisdiction Adam.” He purpled with anger at me using his first name but he smiled even more evilly and crouched pulling off my hijab and grabbing me by the hair.

“I’m a Justifier of the Holy Templars you freak witch and I’m here to make you pay.”

He slammed my head as hard as he could into the pavement.

***
“The next thing I knew I was here in this forsaken place.”

Dorian nods and looks over to where I’m sitting with my arms around my knees. “I’ve heard a lot of stories Shadira but nothing like yours.”

I nod but stare out my cells tiny window again. “Shadira? You’re smiling and crying…why?”

“Three days Dorian, three days.”

“Three days and what?”

“Three days and they’ll have reaped what they’ve sown. Three days and it’ll be the reckoning they’ve never thought would come. May Allah have mercy on their souls because she will not.”

“She?”

“She…the witch-wolf, and her pack. In three days they’ll be here.”

I look at him and our eyes lock. “Three days.” he says.

“Yes.”

(This Merges now into Bad Moon Rising-3.)