Alone with You in the Ether

by Olivie Blake

But the body cannot come back, it cannot rebuild itself. It cannot suffer a loss and become what it was before, no, it doesn’t work that way. If she comes back, Aldo told his father, she will be different. Will she be less? Who’s to say (yes, definitely, but this was his nonna, and Masso wouldn’t want to hear it) but either way, she will not be the person you remember. She cannot be, even in resurrection, what she was in life. This was what Regan did to Aldo: irreparable damage to his former self. Regan was Regan, but she was also the loss of a former life to which he could never return. Of course he didn’t wish to, but that wasn’t the point. It could never exist a second time. He considered what she’d said—if it all fails, Aldo, go back and erase us, make it like we never happened—and he understood that while it would be a cruelty, it would be a kindness in equal measure. Because the old him was dead, and what existed of him now could die, too, a painful death, if he were capable of doing what she asked. What he was now, some toddler of a man learning how to breathe again, would be gone. His life before her, his life without her, the Parthenon, they would all be ancient rubble. Only stories would remain to give them value. Charlotte Regan had killed him once and she could kill him again, easily. She could kill him, and that was what Masso had feared, even if he didn’t know it. She could kill him, and now Aldo understood.