The Warm Hands of Ghosts

by Katherine Arden

No one who’d been long at war gave too much thought to tomorrow.

Was the girl her parents had formed still alive inside her, believing that the end of the world must come with miracles? Or must she just spend her life kneeling at the altar of her ghosts?

Give people God’s power—to build ships like islands, or fly like birds, or set fire to the bowels of earth like the devil in his damned pit—it just writes their stupidity larger and larger until they drown the whole world. Our hands get bigger and our spirits shrink.

All that was left of Private Wilfred Charles Iven.

Crying

You’re everything I have.”

“Why, Stephen?” He shrugged a little. She waited. “I would like you to go home,” he said at last. “And I want to hear you laugh one day. Go on, Iven.”

“I remembered you,” said Freddie. “I was losing everything else—but I remembered you. I’d wake up listening for you—” Winter moved forward, sharply, and kissed him, his body warm, his grip almost bruising. It was shocking. It was inevitable. It was home. It was the first time Freddie had felt alive in his own skin since the night he went up Passchendaele Ridge.