Brian Burmeister
Two Dollars
Dark shades propped to her forehead, Sauda pulls a folder from the cabinet behind her desk. She is a tall woman with arms like a man’s. The only woman officer in the city of Kolwezi. The only officer assigned to rape. She crosses her small, yellowed office, sits, slides a picture of a group of soldiers to the white man, uniformed in white, before her at the other side of her cluttered desk. Sauda taps above a specific man, a smiling man, head cocked back, gun in both hands before him instead of over slung shoulder like the rest. She tells the man in white she had this man arrested. “But for two dollars they set him free.” The white officer stares, stares, through the paper, shakes his head. He asks if the man is back at it. Sauda reaches across the table, takes the picture back, says, “We try to do justice. But this is a dream for us. Impossible.”
