The summer was raw with skies as red as a hundred blushing Victorians. We walked the streets like dolls among the killing, humming the city to sleep while blood flowed like dishwater from the little brick houses. We played our banjos by the stream, singing of stars and kings as the mud turned to clay at our feet, cracking with every gunshot. There was no shame in the stains that soaked our jeans as we napped among the bodies that bled on the grass. We were a paraphrase, almost real, satellites of ourselves circling the Republic.