No one really knew why the soldiers in Aye Myat Thu’s neighborhood wandered around with neat wooden houses, each painted a cheerful tint, sprays of bougainvillea that added more color stains.
Mr. Soe Oo took a coconut from the family palm and chopped it carefully so that the fresh water could not run out. Sounds like the button is echoing in the hazy heat.
Aye Myat Thu grabs her slice of coconut. The banging sounds pulled her away from the house. According to other residents in the area, a camouflaged presence walked past the trees. No one in the family saw him.
The hole of the bullet was so small that Mr. Soe Oo said he could not understand how it extinguished the life of his daughter, another random victim of a trigger-happy army.
“She just fell down,” he said. “And she died.”
The funeral was the next day. Buddhist monks chanted, and mourners gathered around the coffin and raised their hands in the three-fingered greeting from ‘The Hunger Games’ that became the protesters’ symbol of defiance. Wreaths of jasmine framed the girl’s face, the bullet still lying somewhere in her skull.
“I want to tear off the soldier’s skin in revenge,” said U Thein Nyunt, her uncle. “She was just an innocent child with a kind heart. She was our angel. ”
Around her body, the family of Aye Myat Thu’s favorite possessions placed: a set of crayons, some dolls and a purple rabbit, some nice and sweet cream, a Monopoly board and a drawing of Hello Kitty which she sketched two days before she. was killed. On paper, next to the cartoon cat, Aye Myat Thu wrote her name in meticulous English letters.
“I feel empty,” said Toe Toe Lwin, her mother.
Just after the funeral, Aye Myat Thu was cremated, and the flames burned her treasures with her. In other parts of the country, soldiers stole corpses from those who killed them, perhaps to hide the evidence of their cruelty. In one case, they dug up the grave of a child.
The family did not want the same for their little girl.