It was not surprising no one was paying attention to her, the little girl who was hold her two dolls close together, in a small congress of three and perhaps information is best carried when it’s with less people.

She was playing with them having them act out child like house scenes like that of a mother cleaning and that of a father coming in from the fields from work slowly completed and done to a reality of both necessity and profit. She was not paying attention to the things around her, not the men being evacuated from hospitals and then churches when the overflow became too much, not the women rushing by so quickly throwing clothes and dishes into trunks to be pushed into carriages and the backs of wagons to hopefully be pulled by horses and if not horses mules, and if all else failed to be walked down the road by the surviving family members.

But to her, papa doll had just came in from the fields and they were going to yield more this winter than the last, and mama doll had finished stitching on a new bonnet and frock for her to wear to the ball, a ball that came and passed three months before without dancing, without joy or any kind of happiness, she was unaware, unaware of the shouts to build deeper trenches for cannons were coming, she did not know what a ship was nor why it would fire on the city, a city she grew up around and on the outskirts of. She knew not of her mother or father, that latter had gone to war with all the ceremony and kindness her countrymen could provide claps on the back and blessings of many family members before he mounted the only horse in the family stable and rode off at sunset. Her mother had to nurse as most women did and most often came home with hands the color of red from the blood soaked after trying to hold the lives of men together with bits of prayer and pressure and some sort of thought of preservation. These were not the worries and thoughts of the daughter she had many of her own stresses minor as they may be but to her they were a kin to the world ending, where had mama doll’s shawl gone? How could she hold the lantern for papa doll to come home if she was cold on the porch. Where was papa doll’s horse? He always had it had she left it at the farm? These were the thoughts in her heart even as the men laid dying and the stench of flesh hit her nose and enveloped her, even as the shelling began and the courthouse fell and then the armory and even as the walls came down like Jericho and men surrendered marched out of the city like less than beings she still wondered what mama doll and papa doll would be doing tomorrow and how she’d play in the long grass on the farm again one day.