The packed suitcase waits at the door of a building. Perhaps no one will come down for it now. For the first time, the sky is orange for everyone, reflecting the fire consuming the earth. A missile has pierced the asphalt, leaving its tail sticking out. Another opened a crater in the middle of a yard; a man stands inside it, surveying what is left of him. An improvised tourniquet grips a woman’s bleeding leg. Another has blood seeping from the bandage around her head and says with her eyes: this blood that has splashed my arms and legs is not only mine. A light is on in the dozens of exposed rooms of a building that has lost its facade. Laid bare, the intimacy of a bedroom: the bed with its sheets thrown aside in the urgency of flight, a bedside table, a toy. Facing the street, on display for passers-by, a life that belonged to someone. Always in view, the lottery of war: one building untouched and, beside it, another that burst apart after being bombed. In another building, an image of Christ on the only wall still standing. And, next to the furniture spilling out through the missing facade, the laundry detergent that remained standing where everything else exploded. A building missing a corner. The icicle-like debris pouring from the disembowelled innards of another building whose shape can no longer be recognised. Cars overturned, like insects. A look of panic, a cat clutched to its owner’s chest, a man crouched down covering his ears. A woman weeping for the destruction inside the flat she lives in. A woman who cannot cry for her destroyed home, because all she can see is ashes. A man, amid the rubble, weeping beside bodies covered with sheets. So many stories in so few images. Girls, dressed in white, marrying boys dressed in military uniform, wondering, perhaps, bouquet in hand, for how much longer. There is no shortage of improvised crosses made from tree branches, marking on the ashes the places where the earth holds those who did not survive. Joining bridges that were once concrete, there are flimsy planks, as fragile as life. On the ground, a helmet pierced by three bullets tells the end of one among so many who ended there. A large teddy bear sits where fighters lie resting – perhaps it reminds them of the children left behind with their mothers. There are those who look after the animals – war always despises them even more than it despises people. A goat with singed fur emerges from a bunker, its colour gone, but its eyes still alive. In war, everything dies. Even a tank has died, melted before a facade equally melted. It can only be recognised by its gun barrel, the sole remnant of dignity raised to the skies choked with smoke from the explosions and fires. A man walking into the middle of the flames. People searching through the debris. On the asphalt, a notebook, a soft toy, a pair of jeans and a harmonica. And, all around, earth that is black, black, black. A field of scorched sunflowers. A car with more holes than metal. And, bombed, a shanty neighbourhood that never imagined it could know greater misery. Trenches dug open to receive bodies. People kneeling, weeping over shapes covered in black plastic, again and again, ending up clinging to the cold plastic. A faceless body abandoned upon the ashes – no one will ever know who it was. The child who photographs with a mobile phone what their own memory will never forget. And what will remain in the memories of the fighters who walk towards death and, even so, smile for the photographer’s lens? The same photographer who, after years working at weddings, now captures a fly resting on a green leaf fallen upon an ocean of blood, or children wearing adult-sized camouflage and holding toy machine guns, or the flowers covering improvised graves made to receive children who no longer play, or the watermelon that satisfies several men, or the empty water bottles queued for the water supply, or the missile stopped by a pillar’s formwork, which brought everything else down except that pillar, preventing it from travelling further and striking another body, perhaps softer still. Or the man reading a book among the weeds. In the background, what must have been a house: a heap of bricks and rubble piled up – with life turned to debris, the man reads. Mines are photographed, waiting, patiently, for careless feet. The old man who decided to go and fight in the trenches is shown. The bridge resting upon the waters. The column of smoke rising between the houses. The little dog born in the midst of the bombardments. The life that, despite everything, still exists in so many eyes. The dark hangar which, so riddled with holes, looks like a starry sky. The man laid out on the stretcher, without a nose, receiving care. One more body, naked, but with its head dressed in bandages, no eyes or mouth visible. And the child who, in that hospital, is born right beside those who are dying. And, always, always, those who care and those who weep. Also those who take photographs with the soldiers, praise them and ask for their autographs. A bird crossing the horizon. A cigarette smoked or a coffee drunk between gunshots. So many who did not survive. The ferris wheel that did not fall, and other promises of joy. Life burnt to ash and, at the end, a cat stretching on a war tank and a child swinging on a swing in a city reduced to rubble.