How the War Began

Two.

As the woman attends to her burning, she recalls her son asking a question. This child is given to questioning in ways she never has been. She often worries she is singularly incurious about the external world. She never once asked or thought to ask how the sun rises or the seasons change, never wanted to go to the moon or the depths of the oceans; perhaps in this way she appeared content in ways she was not, but it was enough for her that these things simply happened, giving order and predictability to a world she already understood to be neither of those things. Whereas her children are always asking where does the sea go at low tide or how does the moon reflect the light from the sun or how do we know this or that and she is so thankful for Google although she also laments the days when facts were safely categorised and checked and situated between the pages of hard bound encyclopaedias that could be pulled from shelves and balanced on small knees and still not nearly exhausted by the end of rainy afternoons.

Instead, the known world acted as a backdrop to other explorations. What she was more concerned with was what was under the skin. The blood and guts of the operation.

No sooner was she taught to use a needle than she turned it on herself; running it through the thick layers of skin on the bottom of her right foot. Observing the layers of skin, and how much force it would take to pierce right down to extract blood. Force she did not possess at appetite for. At least, not then.

It is thought, because it is safer to believe this, that instruments of torture, bombs say, or the slow sound of a drone becoming silent, live outside of the home. But she knew and still knows, that the most precise and deadliest weapons lie within close reach.