There was such confusion. A young man she didn’t know came and said to call him Uncle and she was made to go by land. Already there was a trail, a train of people, animals, their special things, their worn clothes and wagons and cages and bottles, but they were walking again toward another loss. Lin had only her goldfish now. The goldfish her father had brought from the river market. She carried it in a tall glass now, one she’d found.

On the way, Lin lost the young uncle who had warned them about what was coming toward them. She lost him in a bomb attack by the new boy soldiers. She looked back. Everyone scattered. There were bombs with nails, with pieces of metal, with fins. All around the girl, people screamed and bled in a flurry of movement and sounds. There was confusion and running. She was certain her heart had been hit because it hurt so bad and she cried.

The path had been changed from mud to dust and it rose up in clouds as they ran. It would become mud again from the blood. A young man picked Lin up to help her. He grabbed her under his arm, but in the commotion and running about he fell and she ran with terror after trying to pull him up and she couldn’t and finally she saw it didn’t matter and left him on the ground, another of her sins. Sins she couldn’t have helped, like leaving Old Grandmother. Another young boy came. She looked him in the face and waited for him to die, too, but he wore a uniform. He looked at her with wide-open eyes for a long time, then let her go.

She has told this to no one except now, later, to her husband, older than she is by six years, and he becomes very silent.

Then she was alone. They did run. One of the new enemies, as she then knew them, grabbed her, but she fell and escaped and ran without knowing where.

Out of good fortune she believed given her by the shoes of her mother, she was thrown into a truck by someone. She, a child with no emotion on her face by then, no more tears, just unblinking eyes.

She stayed in the truck, curled up behind the others, and then began to cry as she realized her feet hurt. She wore the shoes but her feet hurt. Someone stopped the truck along the way and she smelled fear. Words were exchanged, but she didn’t understand them from underneath all the human flesh. Someone was made to leave the truck. And somehow she was saved and traveled on, hearing gunshots, she, the girl with little legs and hands, the girl who wore her favorite red flowers sewn onto the tops of her shoes.

Later, even after the bottoms were worn out, she kept the shoes. They would touch the heart of a woman. Now, an adult, she still has them, in a cloth bag.