The Shadow King

by Maaza Mengiste

One name always drags with it another: nothing travels alone.

What is lost is gone, my child, what is lost makes room for something else.

Because one hundred thousand men, however ravenous they might be for this beautiful land, can never total the numbers of Ethiopians intent on keeping their country free, regardless of mathematics.

These aren’t the days to pretend you’re only a wife or a sister or a mother, she says. We’re more than this.

is telling him to beware, to listen carefully, to look up, to scrutinize, because even a woman carries danger, and where she walks, there too is death.

don’t understand what I’m seeing these days, Hailu says.

Back then, we knew immediately who to hate.

girls like her were born to fit into the world, the world was not built to mold around her. Because there are those born to own things, and those brought forth to keep those things in their rightful place.