By Andrew Michael Roberts

Featured Art: I Saw it, plate 44 from The Disasters of War by Francisco de Goya

and it wasn’t ours because we didn’t believe in it, but they shot at us anyway because we stood somewhere in the middle of them killing each other. What could we do but lie down and wait? We lay a long time, thinking, the grass like trees shooting into the sky. Bullets like birds shooting across it. Too many hours of sun in our eyes. We were thinking: if we had guns we’d use them to get the hell out of the middle of this war.

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Andrew Michael Roberts lives in Seattle. He is the author of Dear Wild Abandon, winner of the 2007 PSA Chapbook Award, and Give Up, a chapbook from Tarpaulin Sky Press. He has an MFA from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he was a Juniper Fellow and also received the Distinguished Teaching Award. His work appears in such journals as Tin House, Iowa Review, LIT, Gulf Coast, Mississippi Review, and Quick Fiction.

Originally appeared in NOR 3