Nick

by Michael Farris Smith

There could be no war. There could be no way that one man could drive a bayonet through the skin and bone of another until the tip of the blade dug into the earth underneath.

Walking along the river in the twilight when the lights first appear and there is both sadness and promise in that wonderful vagueness of day when time holds and anything seems possible.

you cannot imagine what it is to feel the earth shake with man’s destruction and see the blanket of blood across the countryside and to never be certain if there will again be the sunrise. Each morning that it comes I stare at the horizon and try and draw it inside and hold it.

So much that he wanted to say to her but he could not as if there were chains attached to his words and he was sentenced to a life of introspection.

they would be there to share in a sadness but who would be there to mourn? To gasp and pray and hurt and hope for his soul? Did anyone truly love him and did he love anyone

He snatched a café chair and stood on it as if it might lift and carry him to her but there was only the fog in every direction and nothing magical about the chair.

the small man said something to him in French that he both understood and did not understand.

The two armies settled in for recovery, hoping for rations, waiting for what was next. In an hour’s time the dust settled and revealed a cloudless sky all around them. A pale blue. Pure and clean.

“I think some men find pleasure in a war,” she said. “I cannot think of another reason to have one.” “Neither can I.” “But you do not enjoy it.” “The only men who find pleasure in a war are the ones who get to decide that we have one.”

He stared across the city and sensed not only her loneliness but the eternal loneliness that resides in us all and for the first time since he had felt the anxiousness of youth he realized that he wasn’t alone. There are others like me, he thought. And she is one.

“Tomorrow you will no longer want to see me. Or tomorrow you will no longer want to leave me.”

We have six more days. I give my days to you and you give your days to me. And if we want more when those days are finished then we can take them.

You need a special occasion to smoke that cigar. No I don’t. Yes you do, l’américain. Then I’ll invent one.

as he moved he saw the varying degrees of shadow as varying degrees of himself and he wondered how many were truly inside.

Stories that he thought he had understood then but he understood better now with the grime under his fingernails.

he said to the attic the world repeats itself. He said it with certainty as if it was something he had always known but just now found the courage to admit. I have been here before and I will be here again. I wonder what war I will fight in next and will it be worse and who will be the enemy. What hand will I try to hold somewhere in my future that will remind me of this hand I am trying to hold now.

“Can I be alone?” “Yes.” She raised her head and he saw that she did not mean for a little while. Or for the day. Beneath her eyes there was no end.

He spent the year that he was seventeen battling the guilt of feeling unsatisfied by prosperous yet predictable coming years that had no guarantee of arriving. Battling the guilt of wanting to leave.

as he walked in the shadows of the moon it seemed both strange and palpable to know your place in this world.