At the last note of the crickets’ faithful serenade to the moon and before the swallow’s dutiful morning call to the sun, a pair of eyes opened to reveal two large white orbs glowing on the black dusty roads against a soot darkened face. Only now did she allow herself to take full breaths of air and relax her body against the ground she had so desperately clung to the night before, in hopes that if she had pressed her body down with enough strength, clenched her eyes shut with enough might and prayed to the heavens with enough devotion, the bullets could never penetrate her.

She lifted herself from the ground slower than a sloth, arms trembling and heart throbbing; against the will of a mind now so deranged and filled with fear that it no longer had a say in her actions. Why she was now standing, she could not explain. Her lone, sickly silhouette blended with the battered, burnt trees in the background as her ribcage rose and fell against the navy-blue sky. At her feet lay at least thirty more blackened bodies of children resembling what her monthly copy of National Geographic used to call “refugees”, except now there existed no photographers to capture their woes and no nonprofit activist groups to care. Although she did not have the faintest who these children were, and could not confirm whether they were the ones she ran with the day before, she knew they were most likely one and the same. She could tell by their tensed muscles and flickering eyelids that they were still dreaming of an end to their nightmarish reality. They would soon see that the charred grounds of their city, ransacked and burned twice over, was never going to be the sanctuary that would return to them lives that their parents spoke of; lives of small pastel colored houses on roads with flower gardens and a small white fence, and your very own set of friendly neighbors to wave to in the mornings.

Raising her head to the sky, her eyes fell upon the twinkle of the falling stars that had started as a mere “meteor shower” six years ago. She would have never wished to see a meteor shower when she was four, had she known that it would have lasted this long, or rather, of the devastation and disorder it would cause. Her eyes searched the moving stars for remnants of The Big Dipper, the only constellation her father had taught her before the showers and bombing had started. She was sure tears would have swelled up in her eyes, had her tear ducts not dried two years ago when she realized crying did nothing except give away her position.

She faintly remembered trying to count the number of falling meteors while sitting on her father’s lap that night — one hundred and fifty seven. One hundred and fifty seven “stars” before she fell asleep, one hundred and fifty seven stars worth of bliss before her world became drenched with blood and warfare. To this day, she still could feel her father’s strong grasp on her forearm as he had shoved her into the basement. The ring of her mother’s sobs were still ringing in her ears and her heart still beat with the same scattered rhythm of fear and loss.

Darkness. That was all there was in their basement that was no more than a portion that the constructors had forgotten to fill with cement. She could hear her father’s voice through the dirt and wood above her head. She could also hear the gunshots, shattering of glass and smelled the alcohol long before the fires began. And to this day, she still could not remember whose blood had sank through the soil, crept through the wooden planks and dripped down her cheeks as she sat huddled just three feet below.

Mania. That was the world she found herself in when she finally had the courage to escape her dark prison. The smooth paved roads of Polk Ave, each identically brown and white house, every car-washing, plant-watering, dog-walking neighbor, and her parents had disappeared, blasted into pieces so small she doubted whether the pebbles around her feet her were rocks or bones.

For what reasons her family, their neighborhood or their town had been destroyed she did not know. Even as she stood staring down the objects falling through an already battered and worn atmosphere six years later, she could not explain or give a hypothesis to their destruction. But then again, no one still living ever could. No one could explain who they were running from, why they were fighting or for what reasons they were being persecuted — if any at all. No, not in this world where citizens were targeted by nameless military groups and rebels fought against a government that no longer existed.

Her nose caught faint traces of the pure smell of morning dew before it was washed away by the overpowering stench of gas and smoke. The twinkle of the falling meteors began to fade as the sky lightened and her eyes became captivated as the sun began to creep over the unnaturally smooth horizon. A beam of light fought through the air, thickened by dust and pollutants, and shone onto the charred remnants of what used to be a doorknob. She remembered those. She bent down to wrap her bony fingers around the half-melted, half-charred knob and realized that she had not touched one since the day she had opened the door for her father the night the meteor shower began. Although she knew the knob was no longer attached to a door, she could not help but think that her father would come charging in to pick her up. Her grip tightened as she pulled it out of the ground…

KABOOM.

Her frail body was thrown aside by a gust of wind so strong that it had blown the doorknob out of her hands. Her face was splattered with mud and blood, both old and new, as dozens of dark bodies trampled around and past her. She heard the monotonic ‘chtck chtck chtck chtck ‘ of machine guns echoing across the barren lands and took one more ragged, sickly breath before pushing herself to her feet.

She stomped the doorknob deep into the dirt beneath her, and ran.