Liberation

They left her there, at the junction, bleeding from torn rags that once had placed her in the company of the city's bourgeoisie, as one of them, she should have known and listened when the siren screamed its warning, the ridge just to the South fully alive with soldiers, small as olive beetles, Kalashnikovs reflecting, dully, their souls, they'd smelled like rancid beaver hide and led the girls and all their mothers, into the barns and to the school's gymnasium. The men that had been left, fragile and old were taken with their feeble voices to the wall, where words inscribed read Rest In Peace, they shot them all while grinning broadly, and spread their rancid souls throughout, like outcast animals in mean pursuit of what the Devil wanted to have done. A captain caught her eye, she beckoned, and with a quick and desperate hand she took the fully loaded weapon from his arm, the sound was strangely dull inside her mouth.