I fluttered off the stick they had pushed into the ground above the graves of the two young friends. Other flags were planted in the cemetery on the hill that overlooked the shimmering grid of irrigation and the patchwork of green fields, but I was the newest.
I flapped in the hot air blowing in off the desert.
Below me, where the land stretched away from the desert to the large river in the haze, stood the soldiers’ camp. It was a solid rectangle built around old compounds with vehicles and towers and the mortars that sent bombs high into the air. The soldiers sometimes played, kicking up dust and celebrating when they scored a goal. And beyond the camp, in the village, specks of people moved around the market strip and out into the fields.
The soldiers left the camp in their armour and helmets and holding their weapons. They walked into the tree lines and blocks of houses. Most days the popping of gunfire hung over the landscape and sometimes it sprayed over me and tore out to dissolve in the desert behind.
One week after Kushan Hhan pushed my pole into the ground and led them away from the fresh piles of rock back to the village, after the sun had risen behind me and cast my long thin shadow over the graves, a dark line of soldiers were returning to the camp, crossing the fields and passing down the sides of buildings, tiny at first—a line of insects—moving over a crossroads and through the abandoned ruins below me.
They filed out over the last open field before their camp and the lead figure disappeared in a puff of brown and then a loud bang broke over the hill. When the small cloud had drifted away there was a horizontal shape on the ground and the other soldiers came up and crouched around it.
A heavy vehicle revved out of the camp on the road and waited by the field as the soldiers carried a stretcher and loaded it on. Soon after a helicopter flared into the camp and the downdraught curled up dust. The vehicle returned to the camp and then the helicopter lifted above the walls and ducked its nose away across the desert behind me.
For days it was quiet and then cracks clipped across the fields. Sometimes they were hidden in the haze and the world seemed peaceful apart from the noise clattering in the distance.
It happened again while I was planted there. A crossroads or field would erupt in a smudge out in the flat landscape and helicopters landed and there was fighting.
It rained and became cold and the battles were less frequent. The harvest came and the colourful crops were cut away and the fields were bare again. Fighting returned with the heat and I flogged on my pole and frayed while the soldiers patrolled the countryside. But slowly the fighting was pushed farther away into the haze.
During the next summer, people returned to the ruins below me and started rebuilding the walls. They planted the field by the road and it burst into colour before the following harvest.
After the soldiers had departed in long convoys of lorries and containers and the sound of the last helicopter had trembled in my pole, the sporadic fighting moved away.
Finally, in one violent storm, when the desert wind stripped through me and I slapped in the wind, I ripped free and tumbled down the hill across the sand and caught on a rock. I stayed there, weighed down by gathering sand, and I rotted to join the dust.