Roo is sitting on her grandfather’s wooden chair, swinging her legs, her black buckled shoes tapping its legs, a low mumble escaping her lips as she reads from a book, open flat on her lap. A wind rushes in from the kitchen window over the sink. The purple ribbon in Roo’s hair flitters from the wind. Ang squeals every time a sheet is swept. Roo is irritated. She slaps her hand on the book before more pages slip. Her nose scrunches up. Ang squeals again.

Mama strides into the kitchen, wrapped in an apron, grunts her way to the window and pulls it shut. This is not the time for windows to be left open.

Outside, there is a heavy rumble.

Roo grinds her teeth. Ang curls his toes in.

A dark cloud tinges the sky from across the distance, enveloping the row of rooftops.

Mama’s eyes dart from her children to the window and in that instant, fleet to her gas mask. Hurriedly, she adjusts the mask over Roo’s mouth, pulls the strap over her head and rushes to Ang, scooping him into her arms.

“The store, Roo, go!” Mama points to the staircase descending to the storage room. Roo whirls around and races for the stairs.

“Wait, who peeled the tape off the window?” It just occurs to Mama. “Who was here, Roo?”

Roo kneels beside Ang who is still on the floor. Must find his gas mask, she is thinking, her hands searching the floor. The kitchen is slowly darkening.

“How many times have I told you not to let anyone in?” That dangerous edge creeps up her voice.

Roo is startled. She cringes to the corner. Her eye darts to Ang, flits at Mama, who catches it, holds it. Roo tries to look away, but Mama’s eviscerating frown grips her. Roo feels cornered, although Mama stands at the far end of kitchen. She remembers the soldier in her dream, a pale, bow-legged man standing at the far end of a street, stepping up and down a pavement. There is nobody, but Roo and the soldier and the long street that stretches between them. Suddenly, out of nowhere, a canary flies over, clenching her purple ribbon in its claws and swings toward the soldier. But the street begins to stretch further. The canary soars more fiercely, its wing slicing the air. Roo dashes forward, but a distraught anthem plays, slows her down. She cannot move. She holds her breath. It’s just a dream, she tells herself. She closes her eyes and the instant she opens them, the soldier stands over her face, glaring, tipping over her, ready to crush her. But the moment he loses his balance, Roo jolts awake.

Another rumble, like a deep groan rising from the pit of the earth and encumbering the accumulation of homes, throttles the earth. Ang shrieks.

A shrill whistle pierces high in to the air. A procession of boots begins to resound, a dull thump, thump, thump.

“The tape, oh no. Oh my god. Where is it?” Mama is throwing things over her and behind her, whirling amidst the clutter, her hair plastered on her glistening forehead.

“Roo, listen to me,” Mama walks over to her, and holds her tightly by the forearms. But Roo is not looking at her. Her eyes are a luminous void. “Roo!” Mama shakes her roughly, until Roo responds, with a slight blink from the window to Mama.

“Go down. Here, take Ang with you,” she hands Ang over to her. “And stay there. If you hear them come inside, oh no, they can’t. But if they do, if they see you, Roo, don’t fight. Here, take this,” she pulls out a key from her pocket. “If they persist, give them the key. Tell them to take it all. As much as they want” Mama’s voice breaks. She is crying. “Go now!”

But Roo cannot budge. Mama is holding her so tight and Ang is squeezed between them. “Go!” She keeps on saying. Roo writhes under her grip. She kicks her shin and dashes for the stairs.

She doesn’t know her, the thought races frantically in her head. She thinks of Mama on weekends, their morning hug and the warm smell of pancakes that whiffs as she trots along the kitchen, sits on grandfather’s chair, where daddy always sat before they caught him.

“Poor little asthmatic daddy,” Mama said. Emaciating by the day. He was clutched by his suspenders, wheezing, they said, for help, tugged and yanked and dragged along the floor, thrust out on the street, all the town watching, wide-eyed at his tumble into shame.

“Roo!” he shrieked, just before they pulled his pants down and jabbed the needle on his buttocks. And then the wheeze, before he squirmed on the floor. “Roo!” before his eyes dilated and his life tangled midway in his throat and his mouth, left hanging open, forever calling “Roo! Roo!” just like Mama is right now, upstairs, as she smacks tape on the windows and the doors, her body stiff, head twitching like a lizard at the slightest scuff, scratch, scrape.

But Roo was only six then; helpless.

“Shame turns to blame,” Dad said, one night, staring intently through the window, amidst the dark in the kitchen, at his neighbor, hustling with the soldiers. “It doesn’t even take time.”

But it never did. It never did.

Two nights later, he became the reflection of the man who lived opposite.

Five years pass.

Mama flicks the lights shut again.

Roo waits in the basement. The memory doesn’t flip her heart, doesn’t churn it. She cannot cry. In her dream, the soldier holds a pearl out to Roo in his dirty palm. She knows she will take it.

And Mama scurries along the kitchen. Waiting. They can shoot one of us, but they can’t take us all.

The door pounds. Roo holds Ang closer, her hand clasped over his mouth.

Mama stops mid-way, her eye frozen on the door. The pounding again, louder this time. A clutch at the doorknob and the door rattles. With her back to the chair, Mama recedes to it, bent-knee. She reclines on the chair, mumbling low, her eyes wide, frozen upon their uniforms; the horrid resignation twisting her face. They enter, one by one, erect gait, till three of them stand before her in a row, shoulders broadened, hardened eyes, right fists on their hearts.

The anthem roars. Mama screams.

Roo cringes deeper into the basement. The door clicks open and slowly opens into the basement. Far from below, he stands, the outline of his obscure figure accentuated under the blue moonlight, flooding in from the window. Roo freezes, stares at him, rapt.

“Up,” he commands.

Dazed, Roo climbs the stairs yielding to the compelling force of the trance until she reaches the top, where Mama lies on the floor; hands spread wide, a soldier stamped up on each hand with his boot, their shadows, thrown and stretched across the walls. The kitchen is dark. Only the moonlight shines in, a steely blue.

“Please,” the wheeze. “Don’t…hu-hurt her.” The soldier grinds his boot deeper into her hand. She cries out in pain. “Give him the key.”

But Roo is not listening. The soldier is whispering to her and leading her outside.

“Please, oh no, no, no, don’t. She cannot speak. Don’t.”

For a minute, Mama’s horrid gasps halt Roo. She stands over Mama’s head, the pained rancor cast upon Mama’s face, impenetrable. She doesn’t feel it, there is no shame. Time and time alone stands timeless. The minute Mama looks up at her; Daddy’s face scrunches up in her face. And when Mama looks away, between her grunted snuffles, Daddy cries. Mama twitches, Daddy screams. Daddy twitches, Mama screams. Roo can hear him. Roo can hear them all, as if they are locked into that one moment, tossed back and forth, fluxing, five years back, five years forward, all of a sudden, with the lazy bounce

She looks out. The empty street, the dark gas lingering. The soldier has made it to the street corner with a bird cage in his hand. He beckons to her; she languidly obeys. He holds out the pearl, a wavering stolidity surfacing upon his eye. He looks at her with a look of a man who would live a hundred years serving the nation, yet stumble before an enrapt little girl.

Roo takes the pearl and turns back inside.

The soldier unlatches the bird cage. The canary soars free.

Inside, they drag an unconscious Mama away.

Reaching for the key in her sock, Roo descends the basement stairs and on the floor, to the left, where the room is hollow and rarely swept with human touch, Roo kneels, knee by knee, upon a tile on the floor. Roo inserts and twists the key into the keyhole in the tile. The lock clicks open. Lifting the tile, a look of awestruck serenity that began as ghastly captivation consumes her face. Under the tile, the space is illuminated with a collection of pearls. She slips the pearl in.

With a sense of tranquil completion, Roo rises and takes a soft step back.

Dizzy with the weight of it all, Roo falls.

The anthem moans. A soldier marches.

From the distance, a deadly procession of boots resounds, all over again.