Chapter 2: Under The Same Sky

Of things gone

“Dear you, I am … not … without you, I am a shriveled raisin … wound unsunk.

Give me your skin velveteen.

Heart, oh, my heart, my love…

Carry me at the edge of your holy breaths….

Dear you, Dear …”

They told me I kept reciting these lines like holy text.

Sacred wound.

Committed to memory.

A beckoning of the heart.

From the first letter you sent me - the time when you left Grokum for Ladekhev.

I don’t know what to make of it.

You almost never cross my mind when I am in control.

My dream.

My nightmare.

My life.

The order is sometimes wrong.

My life.

My life.

My life.

Fiona and Luke told me I was very lucky.

They were berry picking in the forest when the army came and set brick and flesh on fire. They said the flames gobbled up the sky in one swift sweep. Or maybe the screams. Red screams. Colourless deaths. Then silence.

Had I been there, I could have fought.

Wounded.

Killed.

Dragged and imprisoned.

They told me I underestimated the might of the enemies.

They came in strange carriers.

Hard metals. No grass or fodder. Spitting lava.

As if born to murder.

As if blood was their fuel.

The stomach of earth was brazen. Bitter with soot and char. Smoke rolling and blinding man and beast. Jackals encircling the bloodbath.

I suffocated on tragedy.

I gasped.

Everywhere I looked, there was no break from the scene unfurled in front of my eyes as I descended downhill. Crunch under my feet. Grass covered with the rain of ash, then corpse.

I buckled.

Collapsed.

Again and again.

As I looked up at the sky, I almost smiled at its aloof, blue beauty. So far removed. So magnificent. So un-man like. So much purer.

The sky never murders; even when it sleeps.

Any soul.

You were my sky once.

The nook of your arm.

The small of your elbow.

I lay down, brow frowned, lips apart as if hushed mid-story.

I recalled that Fiona was clueless when I asked her how they managed to cure me of the black widow’s bite.

She said they didn’t.

I should have been dead.

Regardless, I was in hell.