A Cat With a Concussion

The cat with a concussion runs through the Snipers Market, formerly the Flower Market. She can no longer do the things she loved to do. She cannot toy with a dictator's laptop mouse, mischievously. This cat with pure white fur, who has been blinded and deafened by a bomb falling through the roof of a room where she had been pleasantly sunning by a window, dashes madly now into walls and the legs of running children fleeing other explosions. The bullet that enters her brain had a prayer scratched on its shell by a young man who died Tuesday. The child soldier who shoots the cat is severely reprimanded for wasting a bullet. This stern rebuke comes from another child soldier who had been one school grade above him a few months ago.