Elif heard the impact at four eleven in the morning. Not the impact of war, which in Gaziantep was a sound that came from far away and that the walls muffled until it seemed like thunder from a storm that was not there. This impact was on the roof. The roof of the house shook like a table someone pounds a fist on, a brief sharp tremor that made the plaster of the children's bedroom ceiling fall in three spots.

The children did not wake. The younger one turned in bed. The older one pulled up the blanket. Elif stood in the doorway of their room for a time she did not measure. She looked at the ceiling. The three spots where the plaster had fallen were three dark marks on the white. The white of the ceiling was the white Elif had painted in August with the cheapest paint that covered worst but was enough for a children's room.

In the morning Elif went up to the roof. The steps of the external staircase were cement and the third step had a crack that had been widening for two winters. The roof was flat, covered with tar and gravel, and on the tar there were pieces of metal.

Four pieces. The biggest was the length of a forearm. The smallest fit in the palm of a hand. They were grey, with jagged edges, as if something whole had broken in the air and the pieces had fallen where the wind carried them. On the big piece there was writing. Elif could not read the language. The letters were not Latin and not Arabic. The metal was still warm.

Elif took the oven gloves. Not the rubber gloves for dishes: the cotton gloves for the oven, the ones with the floral pattern her mother had given her the year before. She picked up the big piece and put it in the wheelbarrow that stood in the corner of the roof where she kept the spare gravel. The piece weighed more than it seemed. The metal had a density her hands associated with something not made to fall on a roof.

The neighbor, Mehmet, was on his roof. His roof also had pieces. Mehmet was picking them up with bare hands.

«Missile,» Mehmet said from above the dividing wall.

«Whose?»

«The radio says Iranian. They shot it down above us.»

Elif looked at the pieces in the wheelbarrow. An Iranian missile shot down by Turkish air defense. The debris had fallen on Gaziantep. On two roofs, maybe twenty, maybe a hundred. Nobody had died. Elif knew this because she did not hear ambulance sirens, and ambulance sirens in Gaziantep could be heard from any point in the city because the city was in a valley and the sirens bounced off the hills.

The second piece was smaller. She put it in the wheelbarrow. The third was stuck in the tar, had pierced the surface layer and lodged in the sublayer. Elif pulled it out. Under the piece the tar was melted, a dark circle five centimeters wide where the hot metal had dissolved the surface. The hole was above the children's room. Elif looked at the hole. The piece had gone through the tar and stopped before the concrete. The concrete had held. The children slept under the concrete that had held.

Elif put the third piece in the wheelbarrow without looking at it.

The fourth piece was the one with writing. Elif picked it up with the floral gloves and turned it. The writing was in Farsi, but Elif did not know that. She knew the writing was on a piece of metal that had fallen on the roof of the room where her children slept, and that the writing had been written by someone who did not know where that piece would fall, and that the piece had not fallen where it was supposed to because someone else had shot it down first, and the downing had produced the pieces, and the pieces had fallen on Elif's roof and Mehmet's roof and the roofs of Gaziantep like a hail of metal no weather forecast announces.

Elif carried the wheelbarrow to the edge of the stairs. She brought the pieces down one at a time. She put them in the car boot. She drove to the municipal dump. The dump had an attendant who looked at the pieces and said «we've already received twenty this morning.» Elif left the pieces. She did not sign anything. There was no form for missile debris.

She went home. She went up to the roof. She looked at the hole in the tar. Five centimeters. She opened the bucket of spare pitch she kept next to the gravel. She poured the pitch into the hole. The pitch was black and thick and covered the melted circle and covered the point where the piece had stopped and covered the distance between the metal and the concrete and between the concrete and the bed and between the bed and the children.

Elif smoothed the pitch with the spatula. The roof was flat again. The impact of four eleven was under a layer of fresh pitch that would dry by evening. The children would come back from the neighbor where she had taken them in the morning and would go to bed and would not see the three spots of fallen plaster on the ceiling because Elif would have covered them first, with the cheapest paint that covered worst but was enough.