This is How You Lose the Time War

by Amal El-Mohtar

Killing gets easier with practice, in mechanics and technique.

Silver moss devours steel, and violet flowers choke the dead guns.

Red likes to feel. It is a fetish. Now she feels fear. And eagerness.

She thirsts for contact, for a new, more worthy battle, but she is alone with the corpses and the splinters and the letter her enemy left.

The letter’s cinders die.

The world cracks through the middle.

Not every battle’s grand, not every weapon fierce.

They pass among the dead, under chandeliers of shoulder blades, rose windows outlined by rib cages.

Made you look, though, didn’t I?

Dearest Blue-da-ba-dee,

My perfect Red,

Tell me something true, or tell me nothing at all.

We lay on our backs and watched clouds together when we were young.

even infinity needs to start somewhere.

She’s kept her gloves clean, for the most part, but now she stains them red as a name.

There’s a kind of time travel in letters, isn’t there? I imagine you laughing at my small joke; I imagine you groaning;

I imagine you throwing my words away. Do I have you still? Do I address empty air and the flies that will eat this carcass? You could leave me for five years, you could return never—and I have to write the rest of this not knowing.

London Next—the same day, month, year, but one strand over—is the kind of London other Londons dream: sepia tinted, skies strung with dirigibles, the viciousness of empire acknowledged only as a rosy backdrop glow redolent of spice and petalled sugar. Mannered as a novel, filthy only where story requires it, all meat pies and monarchy—this is a place Blue loves, and hates herself for loving.

Are you okay? Do you need help? You can talk to us. You always can.

Adventure works in any strand—it calls to those who care more for living than for their lives.)

She has been so careful. She does not even think the sky’s name, often.

whirlwinds of intimate endeavour,

Desire. Longing, this longing to possess, to become, to break like a wave on a rock and reform, and break again, and wash away.

It is difficult—it is very difficult, to befriend where you wish to consume, to find those who, when they ask Do I have you still, when they end a letter with Yours, mean it in any substantive way.

So I go. I travel farther and faster and harder than most, and I read, and I write, and I love cities. To be alone in a crowd, apart and belonging, to have distance between what I see and what I am.

but Red’s letters she keeps in her own body, curled beneath her tongue like coins, printed in her fingers’ tips, between the lines of her palms.