not a word from my mother, she wasn't directing anyone, no growls or complaints, not even the double-wrinkle her forehead got when tired. My sister was too busy, trying to touch her nose with her bottom lip, my father was away. Mother was being good for me. When the neighbors set her down on the couch, she just looked at me. The droplets of blood had congealed on her cheeks, and they looked like cunningly placed makeup. She wanted me to fawn, to feel shock and relief and tears, to wipe that blood from her face, overcome with concern and love. I looked away from her, ran to my room. I was ashamed of her injury, her weakness, how this woman who yelled and screamed and prodded had been reduced to plain want. The neighbors stayed over, my father came home and spent the entire night at the couch, padding her fevered head with a cloth, and I watched it all from a sliver between opened door and frame. If I could, I
 | | would have stayed in that room for the rest of my life, because now I was regretting what I did, but it couldn't be undone, and my mother would always remember, every time I wouldn't look at her.
The commander wanted to set an example, or perhaps the heat and humidity and long days had finally driven him mad. He probably fancied himself some sort of savior, leading the lazy and the doubtful to clarity of purpose. So he called for the cauldrons to be placed high in the hills, at the memorial shrine. Soldiers carried buckets of water drawn from the river up the stone steps on a constant basis, streaming lines of them one after the other, like a giant hand reaching up the side of the hill. At day, all was quiet, but when the sun set, the cauldrons boiled, smoke rising like the mist of ancestors, and the soldiers would carry the babies, squealing and shitting, up the
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