In the arid hourglass on the twentieth day, mid-morning—they laughed until everything hurt, and they were dead already but it felt like dying for the first glorious time. They split the sides of their sandbag bodies and innards spilled out into the desert as if they’d been there all along: here amongst heartbreak-blue skies and jangling curses in sniper-sharp mouths. Here, steeped in dirty bodies and aching bones for hundreds of thousands of years that are no longer than the moment it takes to look into your comrade’s eyes and understand everything.

They were the ones scrambling sideways in the crumbling flux of time, lying with the fallen like camouflage and easy savagery. Happy and wounded and dying and dead.

In twenty minutes it was over.

Marjorie felt the dishes crash to the floor, and following—the world wheeling sideways to the ground, the gentle flutter of a pulse in the distance.

She had wanted clarity, and soft words in sunlit parlor rooms. It was, she felt, not idealism but a particularly specific reality, one for girls who were burnt out of doors and collected dust happily with slow-aging relics.

Well, there stood the ghost of the things she killed, against the sun in the doorway of Miss Holiday’s kitchen. It wasn’t ideal, to be sure, and now with the china in graceful shards around her knees.

“Marjorie, close the door, there’s a draft.”

She gathered her skirts and turned around.

one.
And then they came to you—standing grit-blown in the desert sand, pulse still on fire. They came to you in pairs, they came alone; they came in stuttering flocks wheeling in the night, clattering pinpricks dropped in unison with the bursts of artillery like blooms of light quickly doused. You thought it would be harder. But it was as soft as all the first times the girls looked into your face with fear and absolute trust, and then you thought, yes, this is not a lie.

You thought it would come with a broken heart and a war against the world, but you're probably not thinking right, probably not doing anything right at all.

Every one of those words came to you in a hole in the desert in the middle of the furthest corner of the world. They rose to the surface like ghosts, blown across the sky in a million defiant splinters of light.

twenty-one.
You see your own words in their upturned faces as if you had something to bestow, it's bewildering but you know the feeling like an old friend. They're breathing sharply now, crass remarks and brilliant flippancy lush in their mouths; and a week's worth of sweat and grime limning every face like the sunlight—all you want to do is smile until you fall apart, and nothing matters anymore.

Instead, your voice is like steel on young flesh; your mouth full of sand and crumbling gunpowder.

two.
This is a different sort of coming. The arrival was a curse in the hands of a prophet, and now it’s too late for anything but urgency and finger-shaped bruises. In a slovenly little corner of a hovel of a factory, it is only the aching weight between his ribs and the hand along his spine that bear any semblance to reality.

Reality lived here once, he thinks wildly, insensible. Where did—

Afterwards, he's shaking from two days without sleep and a handful of guilt-encrusted pebbles to swallow and carry about later. But there's that wolf-sharp half grin when the secret meets the air, and the noise inside him is all at once clipped like laughter, terrified like children.

He's been waiting for these words for twenty-five years. But when he looks into those pacific-blue eyes, he can't remember a single one.

In the summer, Boris, is when I think again of wet, heavy days in my childhood home: the days growing dark at noon, the air so solid one felt it might very easily be peeled away, like a thick fur coat. Then, the storms, coming and going, waiting and sleeping—feeling the balcony wall beneath my fingers and the water on my cheek and trying so hard to breathe through it all.

The summer rains are gone now, my friend; the days are becoming shorter and sometimes all I can think about is the greedy mouth of time, of growing older and growing stupider and moving far away. I have the image of myself on a park bench, precisely 2 o’ clock every afternoon, with a closed book in my lap and my eyes searching quietly the faces of every shadowy passerby. They don’t even seem alive to me. Sometimes I am visited by a stranger, or a brief acquaintance, and we sit as if all at sea, as if completely at a loss. Then like in the movies, he will say something such as, “Do you believe in fate?” and I will light a cigarette and glance at the sky, and let spill secrets onto the pavement that are quickly eaten up by the pigeons.

That isn’t how it happens, though, is it? If I could just return to that place, that time when they remarked on the color of my hair and you held so still beside me I thought everything might be breaking. But the age of deliberate tragedy is over; I’m left with the sense that in that one moment, those ten years ago, the words that rose to the surface were a sort of secret incantation—one that sent children to their knees, armies to their graves. And after everything, I waited in the rain for the blow to fall.

I will tell you what happened then, Boris. I was on the roof with Eugenia watching the boys across the way pass a cigarette and a skin mag amongst themselves, drinking rum out of a tin. By then, you and she had already become very famous, you see, and those days I would often climb out of the skylight and catch the lingering edge of a storm in my smokes and in my hair.

Boris, it was then that I finally felt it: the something-terrible of your fame, your distances—it was as tactile as a second heartbeat, or your hand, passing precisely through my body. In the seconds that I swayed on that roof, I saw nothing but your old moth-eaten uniform coat, as the other boys downstairs laughed and jostled—as one gust of wind cut me through the fabric of everything.

My friend, I had chased you through the headlines, and could go no farther. I had been asleep for twenty-three years, and when I awoke, I found myself someplace strange.