An armoured truck rolls through the city traffic on a sunny Wednesday afternoon.  A man is perched in a hole in its middle, looking through the scope of an M21 rifle. Everyone goes about their day around it like normal. No one acknowledges the elephant in the street, but we’ve got the message. It’s the cane lying in full view on the math teacher’s desk as he teaches your class quadratic equations; a threat and a promise.

My dreams frequently transport me to that day, on that November. I am running from soldiers, their faces invisible behind their face masks and ballistic goggles. The city is on lockdown, taxis are not working their routes. No matter which road I take, I can never seem to leave the central business district; Kintu Road somehow merges back to Kampala Road.

Bullets whizz past, a lady balancing a basket of tomatoes on her head falls to the ground in front of me. Her heavyset body lands on some of the tomatoes, squashing them and staining her white camisole a bright seedy red. From a hole in her chest, a more sinister red spreads around her, mixing with the tomato pulp. In the dream, I forget the chaos around me, fixated on the way the two shades of red are blending.

Across the street, soldiers yell out something in Kiswahili and kick a boy’s legs from underneath him. He falls, hands flailing, trying to catch himself before he can hit the ground.  They spot me and give chase.

Running turns to effortless gliding. I’ve always wanted to fly, but I can’t even enjoy it. No matter how clever my moves, the soldiers are always a couple of steps behind me. I’m getting tired, panic clogging the back of my throat.  If they catch me, they will find out I’m not a boy in the way they expect.

I can already hear their taunting laughter as they ask me what I am, which cell they should put me in. Everyone knows the soldiers don’t mind a little rape from time to time; men, women, children – dicks rated ‘E’ for everybody.

The day after the riots, the city was eerily quiet and subdued, like Form Three West after Mr Tumwine had ‘taught us a lesson.’ People tentatively emerged from their houses; no one talked about what had happened the day before, at least not outside their homes. You just never know who is sitting in the taxi beside you.

It’s a 40-year hostage situation, and everyone is afraid to hope. Black coffee tastes all the more bitter when you were expecting hot chocolate. So, we keep our heads down and focus on our families. You don’t want your loud mouth to be the reason we never hear from you again.

But what if? I don’t know, it’s probably silly, there’s that stupid hope I was talking about. What if we all shouted loud enough to drown out the sound of this ridiculous play we are being forced to participate in? What if we said no more? Surely, they can’t make us all disappear.