We ran fast through the grand hallway to the wide and carpeted staircase and I could feel our stampede beneath our leaping feet. The palace was barren and cold. A blank red enveloped my sight but I knew where I was leading the raging mob. We reached an imposing door. I felt like I had to knock before entering but we kicked it open. 

You won’t believe what we saw. No one does. The English journalists outside scoffed at us when we told them. With anger in our hands and hearts, we saw him: The Crown Prince of our Kingdom.

His eyes were as wide as they could go. His mouth clenched and I could almost still hear echoes of his probable anguish in his office. We stopped and circled the memory of him in stone. 

‘Let’s break this son of a bitch in a million pieces’ 

‘No, no one touch it. He belongs in a museum, we are free’ 

‘Ah fuck! He’s playing a joke on us, he’s on a jet to the Maldives by now’ I said. I ran and pushed the marble sheikh onto the cold stone ground of his office.

Like the statues that we crushed out on Celebration Square, Monument to Victory and the People’s Mosque – it crushed into pieces spread out on the ground like spilt water. 

I remember how wide my eyes were as the pieces, some large and some like dust, began to ooze a dark and somber red. The mob pushed past me as they lunged at his remains and forced bleeding stone into their pockets which grew patches of red. I could only stand and watch, in the cool distant air. 

About Maan Al-Yasiri

Maan Al-Yasiri is 22 and lives in London. He was born in Damascus to an Iraqi family. He read History and Politics at Oxford University.

• More Posts(2)