Fetal Clinch

In Sarajevo they found a children's body burned beyond recognition, stickle with gasoline and shrapnel. The mother couldn’t identify the body, the child’s body, bowed into a fetal clinch, singed black like oilman’s tar, the eyes gout with flies and ash. What had he witnessed before his death, before the flares lit up the sky, and burning gasoline clung like a fever to his skin? I will never understand the war, she said, or why they left the body out in the rain like a dog, the eyes bloated with flies, the smell of gunmetal, and his feet pulled tight into his chest.