The child began playing with his green army men on the floor, imagining an exuberant battle as he smashed the small, plastic soldiers together. The mother had left the room and went to the kitchen to prepare dinner. The father had just returned tired and hungry from his vexatious job. When dinner was served, the family took their places in the living room. The father sat in his chair and the mother and son sat closely together on the couch. The father turned on the news and began eating profusely like a house pet that had been starved for days. The family had become used to the chaotic, malicious stories that the news casters described with their barefaced tones. Often, a terrible disaster involving a terrorist group displayed worldwide on the news. The father would always just shake his head and say: “Just another terrible thing happening in another terrible place.” The mother would quickly cover her child’s eyes with her hand when they would show vulgar, disturbing footage of the destroyed cities and the mangled, unidentifiable remains of those who were unable to escape- and she often said to the father: “Those things will never happen here.” The child would look through the cracks of his mother’s fingers trying to get a glimpse of what had his parents all worked up but never saw clearly enough to understand. After they were all finished eating, the mother took her child upstairs, turned on a nightlight, tucked him into bed, and kissed him goodnight. Then the parents would lie down and go to sleep, forgetting the unjustifiable news reports entirely.

One night the child awoke to the sound of a loud blast. He opened his eyes to complete darkness and began crying, calling out for his mother who came running in comforting him immediately. The father lit a candle and guided his family into the livingroom. More loud blasts continued to echo around them. The family sat closely together on the living room floor in the candlelight as the father tried to call others to figure out what was going on, but no one answered. He stood up angrily and said he was going over to the neighbors to get some information. He walked out the front door into the darkness.

Within seconds, he came stumbling backwards back into the doorway with his hands held high in the air. The muzzle of an old, rusty rifle was pushed up against his forehead. As the father slowly backed up, the candlelight illuminated the man. He wore army fatigues and a black ski mask covered his face. The mother became aghast and picked her child up and held him close to her chest. The terrified child hugged her sides and buried his face into her shoulder. Two more armed men appeared, both of them wearing the same clothing as the first. The mother stood up, preparing to run. The father shifted his head to the side and grabbed the man’s gun as he began to fire. The mother scrambled through the kitchen towards the back door. As she opened the back door, one of the men grabbed her by her shirt and pulled her back causing her to drop the child. The child quickly recovered and sprinted out of the back doorway into the darkness. He heard his parents strenuously battling for their lives behind him, but he didn’t stop running. Eventually the child reached the backyard’s fence. His small size made his escape impossible, so he turned around putting his back up against the wooden wall. The child saw a figure enshrouded by darkness coming towards him. He recoiled in fear and hopelessly tried to climb the fence. The figure’s footsteps grew continuously louder until the child heard the man’s foreign voice right behind him. The man grabbed the child by the arm and dragged him against his will back towards the house. The child resisted as much as he could, grabbing the grass and the ground trying to get some leverage to escape, but he was powerless. The man dragged the child back into the house, through the kitchen, and upstairs into the bedroom. While passing through the kitchen, the child saw blood stains on the floor and watched as one of the men in the living room blew out the only source of light in the home, the candle.

Upon reaching his upstairs bedroom, the child’s back was placed up against a large metal stake and his hands were bound by rope behind his back on the other side of the stake. The child stood quietly in the darkness. He heard a soft voice crying in the room. The child called out: “Mom is that you?” Before a response could have even been given, one of the man lifted his gun and shot. The flash of the shot lit the room for a diminutive amount of time; however, the flash was long enough for the child to realize who had just been killed. The father screamed out in exorbitant anguish.

The child began to cry out to the men: “Why are you doing this?”

He heard one of the men loading his gun and whispering to the others in a foreign language. The father screamed at the men with crude language cursing their very existence and spit towards their shadowy figures. The gun raised again and a second shot was fired. The flash gave the child a glimpse of light as his father’s body fell limply onto the ground. One of the men turned on a flashlight and aimed it directly on the corpses. The child stood against the stake traumatized and helpless as he glared at his parents remains. He called out to the men again: “Why are you doing this?” No response was given. They poured gasoline onto the bodies, lit the candle, and threw it onto the remains. The men went down the stairs and left the building cheering as if they had just achieved a momentous victory.

The child tried his hardest to escape. The rope chafed his wrists until they bled. He couldn’t escape. There was no escape. He screamed out in agony: “Please! Someone please help me!” but his words were deafened by the sounds of gunfire and bombs. The child looked through the window on the other side of his room and saw hell in the darkness. Buildings were burning, people were lying dead in the streets, and soldiers were gunning down those who surrendered. He now understood why his mother covered his eyes when they watched the news.

As the flames grew higher and the heavy smoke enshrouded him, he screamed out at the world with all he had left: “Why aren’t you stopping this?”