Free online fiction from the New Yorker. The first night I stayed in Kilinochchi, I was a little apprehensive. Most of us living in the south of Sri Lanka had come to think of this town as the nerve center of terror. Kilinochchi had been the capital of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam for years. This was the place the Tigers had then destroyed, toppling the water tower and blowing up the municipal buildings, before evacuating into the ever diminishing jungle as the Sri Lankan Army marched in, guns blazing, for the showdown of January, 2009.