200 | 041218

A war was taking place from within my living room. I was with a platoon of people with whom I was well acquainted. There was one girl who was short and slightly overweight, with dark medium length messy hair. She always kept her upper eyelids heavy looking, somewhat half closed, which ended up making her seem very seductive. She was like something between Christina Ricci and Helena Bonham Carter and wore a thick blue sweater that had large holes all over. The enemy of my platoon was past the end of my backyard some several hundred meters away, which incidentally was a sandy beach, so they were either near or in the water. From within my living room, I was able to see their heat signatures through the walls, which was displayed in black and white. I was thus also able to see their bullets coming our way. They started peppering us, and I would first hear the sound of the guns, then the sound of multiple panes of my house's glass being penetrated, but never shattering. While frantically dodging in my living room, a bullet grazed my left forearm, and it later began to bleed. This was the first injury in the entire platoon, and when I showed it to some people it made this war finally feel real for them. As the evening wore on, they started pulling out the heavy artillery. I saw distant rockets slowly rising high into the atmosphere, targeted to come down directly upon us. Just before they hit, I was always aware of precisely the level of threat their explosions would entail. Most of the time we could protect ourselves simply by tightly closing our eyes and clenching our muscles, even if the rockets landed directly in front of our faces. Those who failed to use this tactic were obliterated, and were considered heroes by some, but considered fools by me. I saw one guy with an imprint of my cat's paw print burned into his forehead, which meant that my cat must have been burned at one point. I quickly found her, and saw that indeed her face had some burn marks, with her left eye closed, but she still seemed happy. Our bullet-dodging tactic was basically nothing more than lying on the floor. By nightfall, our enemy figured this out, and aimed all of their bullets toward our floor. So I devised a counter tactic to that: We would keep our bodies horizontal, but prop ourselves up by the ankles and elbows, keeping our torsos rigid, so that we were in effect hovering a few centimeters above the floor. We used couch cushions and any other household objects we could find to prop ourselves up this way. Morning finally came, and I could see that my backyard now contained the ruins of a futuristic metropolis, with jets flying amidst the warped skyscrapers. All of this was still on a beach, though, and the city may have been built right in the shallow water. There was a small cluster of a crumbled brick walls, which formed a loose nook, out near the edge of the water, and my brother kept insisting on hiding in there, even though it was much closer to the enemy's gunfire and not very stable.