The house was quiet. Dead quiet. 

All around, the very air reeked of cordite and copper. All around, the house whined and groaned as the damage took it’s toll; some walls crumbling, falling to pieces at a breath.

In the last untouched room, a child sat in the closet with a knife. Her dark eyes peered through the closet slats, at the new stranger who had appeared in her home. The last strangers had been much louder, and much scarier. This one wasn’t doing much but looking around. He leaned over the bodies of her mother and father, murmuring something. Jinayah watched and waited, certain that the stranger would come for her next.

Nothing else bad could happen today, because the worst had already happened. The two people who were her whole life, her dearest parents, were dead. Just like her goldfish Mr. Peppermint, they had gone to heaven.

She remembered her mother’s instructions when the shooting and screaming and chaos started.

 [i] “Hold on to this, Jinayah.” Her mother handed her a large knife from the kitchen. Jinayah had never held anything like it before – she wasn’t allowed to touch knives. “If anyone comes for you besides your father or I, I want you to poke them with the knife. Do you understand?” The child had said nothing at first, simply staring at the knife. But her mother scooped her up into her arms and hugged her, tight. She stared into her daughter’s eyes, the rich brown an equal match to her own. “Do you understand?” 

“Yes, okaa-san.” She couldn’t say anything else.

“Good. Keep moving.” [/i]

That was the last thing she heard from her mother before she was deposited to hide in the closet.

Jinayah was a good girl. Jinayah always did what her parents told her. There was a new stranger in the room, coming for her. Well, she knew just what to do.

The closet door opened soundlessly, and the child stepped out on pink-socked feet. She tiptoed up to the stranger, took a deep breath, and yelled. 

“Leave them alone!” And then she did what she had been told to do. She poked the stranger in the leg with the knife.