Tears of Amber

by Sofía Segovia

The most shocking fact about war is that its victims and its instruments are individual human beings, and that these individual beings are condemned by the monstrous conventions of politics to murder or be murdered in quarrels not their own. Aldous Huxley

Because life is hard with a skinned heart.

He’d always remember the red of the flags, though he’d never speak of it, not even with his wife when they lived far from there. For the rest of his life, that day remained a painful and almost forbidden subject.

But he’d learned to be glad for life for its own sake; glad to live another day, and another, and another. Hungry, but alive to enjoy food another day. Cold, but alive to enjoy warmth when it came. Alone, but alive to enjoy company when it found him.

He’d handed over everything, even his free will, even his peace of mind. It was too late.

Karl did as he was ordered. Every day, he hammered and he machine-gunned; he machine-gunned and he hammered. He wanted to hit his target just to take someone’s hunger away, to save a body from the pain of hunger and cold.

Demand was growing: more work, more crops, more soldiers, more devotion, more cold, more hunger, more orphans, more widows, more death, more silence. Then came the subtractions: For each wounded, how many were dead? For each death accounted for, how many men were missing?

How easy it was to turn a blind eye, whether to the government’s cruelty or the suffering of others.

Even if we win this war, he’d said, we’ll have to pay the debt in hell.

She laid him in the bottom herself. Together, the young man and the mother covered him well with the dark earth ice. They consigned him forever to the soil that had witnessed his death.

No matter how one pleads for peace, war never dies,

What happened to you? I don’t want to remember. What have you lost? Too much. What did you see? Everything.