She'd had to leave her graying mother whimpering in the basement, withered hands clutching a worn plaid blanket to her chin. She'd heard there were women learning to shoot, had to do something, not just cower with panic-stricken wives, mothers and children sheltering there in sleeping bags, petrified with every ear-shattering bomb blast. praying for their sons and husbands.
The battered apartment walls shuddered again— another brutal blast down the street. Tossing back her honey-colored braid, she grabbed the cool neck of another glass bottle, wished again it was the warm, throbbing neck of a Russian invader.
Taking action so alien to her as an artist, she dribbled sugar into the gasoline to make the flames adhere longer, grabbed a funnel, filled the incendiary bottle, yanked a knot into a length of dirty rag, jammed it in the bottle. stacked the Molotov cocktail in the box with others ready to light, drop from her window down the hatch of a passing Russian tank.
By Pat McCutcheon
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