Khfiyazi

The story of "Enough, my dear."

Khfiyazi awoke from the same nightmare he'd first had as a childhood fever dream. There were dogs attacking him, but he never developed the intellectual capabilities to communicate such things as the contents of dreams. He never learned to say much more than "yes," "no," and "enough, my dear." He often screamed those last two as he awoke from the frequent nightmare.

His diaper needed changing. He was twenty-four years old with Down's syndrome in Gaza. His seventy-year-old grandma, who loved him dearly, would be the one to change it.

He was a very sweet boy. He said, "Enough, my dear," so often that it had become his nickname and used more often than his given Muhammed. [When said repeatedly and quickly (as he did when his grandma heard him dreaming) the phrase, "يكفي يا عزيزي (yakfi ya eazizi) [ee-AK fee-AH (ah)-zee-zee]", phonetically condenses to "Khfiyazi."]

He enjoyed going outside. His grandma used to take him for walks every day. That hadn't happened since the last lockdown months ago. He would not go outside today either.

He was hungry. The diarrheatic stool in his diaper was a testament to his recent diet of mostly bug and grass soup. Once, he found what he thought was a tin of food, but it was a bomb, and his little sister lost most of her right hand when opening it.

Today, he wouldn't leave his room. Soldiers forcibly entered his grandma's house that morning, where she watched him be mauled by attack dogs. Grandma heard the words he often repeated in dreams screamed before she was forced at gunpoint to abandon him. She was told by the soldiers that a doctor would tend to him, but he died alone, bleeding out on the floor. He kept saying, "يكفي يا عزيزي (yakfi ya eazizi) [ee-AK fee-AH (ah)-zee-zee]", more and more quietly until he no longer could.

Grandma was allowed to collect his body a week later. That's when his diaper got changed.