She begged people to keep digging, deeper into the stone-hard earth. The strong carried spades, picks and hoes, and at each stop along the road that was no road, they dug. The strong were not really strong, they were simply stronger than the weakest, but they knew their lives depended on it and they knew their lives were not pitiful or at least their lives had once not been pitiful but proud and happy. They had once dug the earth for yams and planted seeds and prayed for rain. Now they dug for life and planted the dead if there was time and prayed for the end.

And when the shelling started again, mothers left their children because they had others to carry. The old carried the young, the young carried the youngest and the oldest. Sometimes the oldest just sat; they had run enough; they had seen enough. Or they carried themselves because, despite all the life they’d had, they still wanted more. Sometimes mothers stayed with their children in lifeless rows if they had no one left to carry.

They heard the familiar drum of mortar fire, like the heartbeat of the earth itself, except the beat was erratic and its inconsistency which kept them guessing, jumping, ducking, running, became a consistency that they understood and learned to anticipate or so they told themselves as they guessed, jumped, ducked and ran, because it made their deaths seem less random, less fickle and their lives something they could control even though they secretly knew they could control none of it.

And the mothers wondered: is this how it ends? They clutched their wasted children around them and placed their wasted bodies over them. They took shelter under the carcasses of fallen trees and fallen people and fallen words of Conventions signed in faraway cities by people who were certain they would see sunset and sunrise and another sunset and sunrise and thousands more. And they were angry not because they’d lost their husbands and their homes and their homeland, but because now they would lose their children. They knew a maddening terror, a chaos in their minds, a surge of adrenaline and vomit and urine, because they knew their children would die.