In the morning, they found a song entangled in the barbed wire fence. As she wriggled and jiggled there, a thousand cold tungsten needles pierced her. A red fluid oozed out of her flawless brown skin, as people stood there, watching her struggle with their innocent curiosity.

This place, gluzral the golden town, lies at the center of civilisation. It has always existed at this very spot for many million years even before the early zing people settled here. It stands on a mud mound now, but before the zing people, it stood there suspended between the earth and heavens.

Bright sunlight that funneled through harari mountains flowed into its base. As the sunlight thickened by the day, gluzral would slowly levitate upwards. It would stay there in a sweet lull till the sun retreated and it would start its slow descent towards the dusk. As the city lands on its feet, a cold wind would gush out of her bum. It chilled the bones of everyone who lived outside gluzral and would scare them to death. So they feared the fierce people of gluzral - the ones who descended from the true zings of antiquity.

These people who lived in the margins - those people on whom it snowed for 11 months a year. Those people who ate hailstones, who had babies delivered with head stuck in their pelvises. Those people who drank fermented dung tea and ate pork fingers marinated in rotten fish sauce. Those people whose limbs stank and armpits bred vampire flies. Whose minds were dungeons filled with ghosts of terrorists. Oh, their ghastly religion and freakish prayers! Their men all namby-pamby and women voluptuous sirens. Boys who chased the spoors of whores before boyhood kissed them goodbye; Girls who had their fathers slurping their punanis at the beginning of puberty.

That hopeless lot!

But the good zing people of gluzral is magnanimous enough to send their leftover food to keep these vermins alive. Good zing boys sent there to rebuild their cities that reeked of horse shit and rotten corpses; military aid and food packets rained on them from clouds of gluzral made helicopters. But still, these people wanted to climb the hills and leave muddy pockmarks on the white shroud that distinguished the good zing people of gluzral!

So there was no option, but to build a wall.

Only problem? Songs could pass through the walls, for these songs knew no boundaries that humans drew between themselves. Like those mellifluous berry trees that dotted the valleys around gluzral in thousands, these sweet little nothings would occasionally escape the caverns designed to keep them locked up forever. Transported through a network of fallen musicians, they slowly reached the perimeters of gluzral drifting through the lands lit by a thousand moons but 999 of them stolen by the miners from gluzral. They swam through rivers whose water was drank up by the good zing people of gluzral in shiny PET bottles. They ate fishes whose entrails carried plastic brushes thrown to sea by the good kids of gluzral. Being songs, they grew up in those marshy lands - flowers bloom the most when they arise from the deadliest depths of nasty swamps. These little songs, flowers to my ears and melodies to my nose - they flew from around the world, slowly swimming through carbon dense airs to crash land at the feet of gluzral, enmeshed in agony, to get entangled in those cruel barbed wires that wasn’t manufactured in any factory on earth. The wires issued themselves from the parched hearts of a people who forgot to love. A people whose heart’s chambers were morbid with dastardly worms. Their hearts had rivulets of pus flowing out of chamber-walls festering with fresh hatred. Such people needed no factory to build a barbed wire fence - a stream of warped wire flowed out through their noses and wound itself on crooked iron poles to create this fence, this wall!

As the people surveyed our tiny song, a group of officials appeared and locked her up in a silver cage. This cage was lying in their office since that canary died a few hours ago. These good officials representing the good people of zing, put the song into a silver cage left behind by a dead canary, now half a feet under the silted roots of our motherland Gluzral.

Such was the passion, that our officers tended to the song with all sweetness, an hallmark of the good etiquette that none other than the good people of zing could summon at will. Under their care, the song was expected to thrive, but withered in despair. The good people of zing was shocked to the hilt for a sum of two days, before they went back to complaining about the lack of enough guns around them to protect their dangling genitals, precariously perched to their sumptuous loins waiting to be ravaged by the ever marauding infidels of their dreams - their enemies.

But the death of this song was monumental. As it slowly desiccated, starting from the seams that bordered her tiny body, vigilant officials sprang up in action. They dug up a maestro surgeon who could heal broken hearts with his robotic touch. He descended on her tiny body with all the might of modern science, honed to perfection with all the props available to the predators who sat at the top of the food chain. Making cannons that can shoot down spaceships is no vain pursuit, for it churns out MRI machines in the sidelines of life. Such was the perfection, that our solemn military hospital were this tiny song lay hooked to these machines started glowing green under those dark dark skies.

But slowly, she vanished into thin air. First she started to turn pale and they fed her melanin tablets. When her hair started to glow, they waxed her. When her fingers went numb, they electrocuted her nails. Her skin turned so pale that they could see her heart beating and purple liver quivering under fear and pain of separation. The rhododendrons of her heart blossomed to a tune that bellowed across the balconies of gluzral where free songs shrieked at her memory. Outside, the good zing people made merry as the christmas bells tolled, oblivious to a song that evanesced in the annals of this sacred power structure that governed their nation.

The probes of the electrocardiogram hooked to her forehead was weeping in shame. Other probes stuck into her sweet body danced death for a moment before they themselves fell dead in the light blue hospital bed from where the song vanished as the bells tolled. God heaved a sigh, but the good zing people of gluzral made merry - scoffing at what life is and what it means to lose it.

It was nearing dusk when the song vanished. As the sun’s rays thinned, gluzral slowly started its descent towards the mound. A stream of cold air gushed out of her bum as usual. The brittle bones of her neighbours creaked once again out of habit. This should go on forever.

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Inspired by the regrettable death of a 7-year old girl. My heart weeps for the thousand different lines that divide humanity, most often accompanied with egregious violence.