A Moment of Silence: Midnight III (The Midnight Series Book 3)

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A MOMENT OF SILENCE

Some thing is in the water,

Some thing is in the food.

Some thing is in the atmosphere,

Some thing changed the mood.

Some one stole the feeling,

Some one flipped the beat.

There’s meanness in the cold air,

And anger in the heat.

Now the souls are empty,

The strength gone from our stance.

Now most hearts are vacant,

And feet no longer dance.

Knees won’t bend for prayer,

I can’t breathe this air.

No one even cares,

Or remembers what was here.

Some thing is now nothing,

And ugly is extra bold.

Beauty has been stripped away

And only lies are told.

We need more than A Moment of Silence,

A year to just reflect

A time to become sincerely humble,

A truth worthy to live, believe and protect.

By Sister Souljah

1. MY SECOND WIFE

She is closer to me than my shadow. She’s as precious as the sky. In my almost empty Brooklyn apartment, my second wife, Chiasa, aimed and then fired sharpened knives into the corked wall. I had taken everything out of this place, but the cork seemed permanent to my project bedroom. It had served as my target practice for seven years and unlike me and my family, it did not want to leave.

“Go stand over there for me,” she said sweetly. As she locked her silver-gray eyes into mine, I looked at her and said nothing. My smile broke out naturally. “Don’t smile at me,” she said with a straight face. “Every time it’s time for us to fight you flash that smile.”

She must not have figured out that she brought that smile out of me, and so much more. It was because of my love for her that I held onto the keys to this place, where I wouldn’t even allow my mother, Umma; my first wife, Akemi; or my sister, Naja to ever again step foot.

I walked to the corked wall like she wanted. I leaned back, my hands in my Girbaud jean pockets. She narrowed her eyes and hurled a knife at me. It cut through the still stale air that was typical in the projects and sliced through my fitted. I didn’t flinch. She saw that, and inside of seven seconds she outlined my head and shoulders with eight knives rapidly fired by her quick and accurate combination of eyes and fingers.

“You going to kill me, with my own knives?” I asked her. She
walked towards me slowly until only noses separated her and me. She pulled each knife down from the cork.

“Now you do me,” she said, handing me the knives. Her breasts pressed against my chest, and her unusually long lashes brushed against mine. The last thing on my mind was taking aim at her with a weapon, and she knew it.

Chiasa, my second wife, is a badass, a flawless-skinned, pretty-faced, thick-haired, doe-eyed, ballerina-bodied, ninjutsu-trained warrior. Pretty and precise, she is disciplined to the extreme, same as me. Yet, she is the only one alive who could move me off point, cause me to temporarily lose my balance and have to check myself. The unusual combination of her deep fiery soul, her soft-spoken manner, her sharp mind, her vibrant energy and exquisite body, topped off by the intensity of her loyalty, moved me continuously and
I couldn’t keep off of her.

It had gotten to the point where she sometimes had me questioning things and matters I had never questioned myself about before. Boldly, she had become a Muslim woman at age sixteen. She accepted Islam on her own, without me asking her to do it or having to recite her any truths from the Holy Quran. She reads the Quran for herself, loves each
sura
she studies and each
ayat
she learns. She uses every word in the book to challenge herself to become more beautiful in her wisdom and her deeds. For her to love the faith like any Muslim born on Islamic land and raised with the Muslim example and lifestyle surrounding her made her irresistible to me.

When anyone in her family tried to reverse Chiasa’s mind, she would politely and calmly reveal her angles of thought and her contentment. Once, one of her aunts said in front of her whole family, “A Muslim man can only have more than one wife if he can treat them all equally. No man can treat two, three, four women equally, so that means he can really only have one wife. You’re supposed to be smart enough to figure it out. It’s like a riddle,” her aunt said.