When the World Goes Quiet

by Gian Sardar

Sometimes fault is also like a wind. It slips into cracks and fills spaces.

The sky had been a beautiful horror, lit up with the Allied effort to hit the seaplane bases responsible for the bombings of London and southeast England. Evelien’s futile attempt: to try to detach meaning and see the colors as only colors.

“For once,” he says quietly, his words a heat on her skin, “I did my best. But I’ll have you know, all I wanted to do was my very worst.”