Projections and War I.

Thin cotton shoes do little to cushion the long strides among sharp pebbles and winding roads. Steps are with sidelong glances attached, a jutting sack of perishables, coarse breathing. Somewhere an elephant trumpets and crashes through the undergrowth of crunchy autumn forest. They let the animals free from the zoo before the town burns. Everyone listens, even dispersed from each other as they may be, and waits for a careful gunshot, a report across long drained skies that the first had fallen.

Men huddled in twos and threes, clutching garden tools, sheltered away in a distant shack or cellar. Families took to the wet gravel roads with bundles and hope. The old lives begin to splinted and smolder. The houses burn from the inside in a precession of crackling timbers and seared dust.

I couldn't stand to let it burn, but who am I but an old limping horse. I could do nothing but whimper into the coarse seats of our jeep while Breseler caught the scene in a big whir of clicks and celluloid. Admittedly, a weak point.

I knew still that it was bigger than he and I.