On the Car Road

Later, they’d wonder why it hadn’t been them: Naw Htoo Lei, the youngest, sharpening her dah beside a pond of lilies and duckweed, or Naw Rachel, the eldest, spitting red jets of betel juice as she tied bundles of rosewood and pyinkado. But it was Naw Moo Dah’s foot that found the wire snaking through the ferns, Naw Moo Dah who heard a roar like a thousand waterfalls, Naw Moo Dah who found herself, somehow, lying on the forest floor.

Her sisters ran to her, Naw Htoo Lei tearing off her shirt as she knelt. Naw Moo Dah’s calf was flayed to the knee, the bone shattered. Naw Htoo Lei could see at a glance that her sister would lose the leg.

Naw Rachel stood above them, breathing hard, already calculating the distance from the pond to the village, from the village to the city.

“Please,” Naw Htoo Lei said, “hold her.”

Naw Rachel crouched and pinned Naw Moo Dah’s upper thigh with her knee. Her sister screamed like a rabbit in a trap.

Naw Htoo Lei twisted her blouse into a rope, wrapped it high on the ruined leg, and cinched it as tight as she could pull. Her sister screamed again and again. Without lifting her knee, Naw Rachel felt around for a fallen stick, stripped it of its leaves, and placed it across Naw Moo Dah’s lips. Naw Moo Dah understood, and bit down.

Naw Htoo Lei double-tied the knot and then stood. They were miles from even the outmost fields of the village. At the explosion, even the birds had fled, and the only sounds were the creaking of bamboo and the moaning of her sister.

“You need to run,” Naw Rachel said. “Get help.” Already she could hear a wheeze slipping into her voice. Her tongue felt thick and stupid in her mouth.

“There’s no time,” Naw Htoo Lei answered. “We have to carry her.” And even as she made the first cut into a culm of bamboo, she could feel the tears pressing her eyelids like children pushing to be born.

The sisters had planned to carry their firewood to the car road to look for a buffalo cart or motorcycle taxi, but instead they carried Naw Moo Dah, on a stretcher of bamboo and liana. Every two hundred paces, they stopped for fear of Naw Rachel’s asthma, though both were mad with the desire to run. At times one sister or the other stumbled with the weight, and Naw Moo Dah groaned through the stick of birch between her teeth.

“Your family’s waiting for you,” Naw Rachel tried to tell her. “Saw Kaw Ku will be coming back from the damson orchards. Your daughter will be winnowing the rice, and your son caulking his toy boat.” But Naw Moo Dah only groaned. The next time they stopped to check her, her pulse was weak and she smelled of urine.

“Remember when mother used to whip you for wetting the mat?” Naw Htoo Lei asked her, smiling, but Naw Moo Dah was too deep in shock to hear.

They’d reached the road, and though following it meant passing the army camp on foot, they agreed they could not wait.

Only a single sentry watched them from atop the hill, a boy in his teens with a rifle that looked older than he.

“Come down here if you want to stare,” Naw Htoo Lei screamed up to him in Burmese. “Come see what you’ve done, you cowards.”

“Just keep walking,” Naw Rachel whispered.

But though her shoulders burned and her breath was sharp in her chest, the words poured from Naw Htoo Lei like river water.

“Cowards! Shit-eaters! You lay landmines in our village and then hide up there licking each other’s assholes?”

The boy called something over his shoulder. More soldiers appeared along the ridge. The sisters kept moving forward.

“It wasn’t us!” one of them called to her.

“It was your people,” a mustached older man shouted down. “The KNLA ringworm.”

“Dog-fuckers!” Naw Htoo Lei screamed back...