They took my soul and they took my right hand. First they took my index finger, because I used it to shame the man who killed my brother. Man? Who am I kidding? He was just a boy, aged by fear, confusion, powerlessness. Then they took my ring finger, because they wanted the shiny gold band my grandmother had given me when we fled the first time. She knew the journey up the mountain would take a toll on her. What she didn’t know was that the price wouldn’t be physical. Did you know you can literally go crazy watching your daughter cry all the time? Did you know you can go insane from knowing you brought your one and only child into such a world? My grandmother had hope at one time. She used to brush my hair in the evenings and tell me that my brother and I and our schoolmates and our neighborhood friends had a chance to break the bonds that chained people to submission. But you can’t cut free from what is obscured by hunger, horror, isolation. We tried to anyway, some of us longer than others. Some of us harder than others.

My father had built the cabin with his father last summer. I never had a chance to ask him why or how. I’m not even sure what made my father decide to take us up there the first time. Things had always been bad. What had been so different that day? I remember him storming calmly into the house, telling my mother to grab the bags and get the kids ready. She did so effortlessly, as if following some sort of movie script, ending neatly planned. When I recall that moment, I change the details a bit. Instead of my father, it’s my mother, her big belly swelling before her, telling him that it’s time, to grab the bags, pull the car around, and take her to the hospital. But who am I kidding? We didn’t have a hospital even back then. It had been rebuilt and destroyed, rebuilt and destroyed.

We climbed up the mountain much quicker the second time because we didn’t have my grandmother with us to slow us down. Maybe she was the one who told them where we were. We did, after all, leave her behind in the house she grew up in, got married in, watched her husband die in, helped my brother take his first breath in. My family’s home.

I was lucky that the son of the man my neighbor worked for was around to remove my middle finger. My father was going to do it but without anything to knock me out, he said he couldn’t stand to see me shake and sweat and cry in my mother’s arms. It was my neighbor who brought the man to our house in the middle of the night. He eventually convinced my father that a butcher is as deft as any surgeon. He didn’t have anything to numb me either, but he wasn’t bothered by my muffled screams. I passed out. My brother came in the room and cried for me.

Before, back when I was in school, when there was an actual school building filled with desks and pencils and chalkboards, my teacher told the class to close our eyes. She urged us to think of what a government would look like, if we had the chance to rebuild one. It scared me what some of my classmates described. It scared my teacher too. On the night we fled to the mountains for the final time, I saw her standing in front of her house. She hugged a book close to her chest. Nothing else, no one else, was with her. She took a step forward and then abruptly turned around, opened her front door, tossed the book inside, and walked down the steps and into the eddy of refugees heading south. She hadn’t bothered to close the door again.

They cut off my entire hand when I grabbed the short-wave radio sitting in the middle of the wood table and threw it with what was left of my 15-year-old might into the stone wall of the cabin. I couldn’t do it with my other hand, my hand with all its fingers, the left one, because it was clinging onto my mother and I was not about to let her go. I just wanted to put an end to that faceless voice pouring through the radio, its childlike taunting and gluttonous demands bounding off the walls my father and grandfather had created.

I walked all night, never stopping because I wasn’t sure what to stop for. Now, with dawn at my back, I stand alone facing the front door of my teacher’s house. I reach out with my hand, the one I have left, and push it farther open. I slowly step in, one foot, then the other, then another, until I am all the way in the front room. I am barely breathing and when I do it is forced but steady. Without my head moving, I scan the floor. I think that because she almost took it with her, it must be special, it must be valuable, it must be able to help.

On her front steps, I hold the book close to my chest. I take a step forward and then abruptly turn around. Who am I kidding? I open her front door, toss the book inside, and walk down the steps and into the risen, blinding sun. Behind me, her door is closed.