Touched by Smoke

Adam I can’t remember the last time I slept more than two hours without hearing my comrades screaming in my dreams. It’s raining outside. Raining like that night. The night they sent us to die. I wake up abruptly, fists clenched into the sheets, my chest exploding with pain. My body still thinks it's on the battlefield, still believes it has to run, shoot, scream. But all I hear is silence. Too silent to be real. This house is too clean. Too cold. Too dead. Like me. I run my hand over the scar that splits my face from my left eye to my collarbone—like a gash, a crack through which all my demons have poured out. And now they live inside me. I grab the bottle from the nightstand. The liquor burns my throat, but not enough. It's never enough. I walk downstairs in silence, heavy boots echoing like on a quiet patrol. Everything is routine. I still move like a soldier. A soldier without a war. A soldier without a country. I only leave the house at night, when I don’t have to explain my face. When I don’t have to pretend to be normal. Night doesn’t ask, doesn’t stare, doesn’t judge. Day is a lie. Night is the truth. I roam the city like a shadow in black clothes and hollow eyes. Everyone avoids looking at me. Maybe out of instinct. Maybe because they see what I really am — a shell of a man, a walking grave. My eyes scan the street like I’m expecting the ghosts of my men, my brothers-in-arms, to appear at any moment and drag me down into hell. To punish me for surviving. My trained eye catches movement outside the pattern I’m used to, and my ear registers a sound that doesn’t belong in my world. A girl. Laughing. Tiny, fragile, soaked to the bone, her face turned to the sky. Laughing. In the rain. As if death didn’t exist. As if she had never felt a brother die in her arms. What does it feel like to laugh? Why does the light in her make me panic? She sees me, but she doesn’t look away like everyone else does. I’m caught too. I can’t take my eyes off her. It’s like she just cursed me. She stops, takes out her camera, and photographs something. My eye caught the brief flash of the camera, and for the first time in a long time, fear takes me. My demons are awake. I inhale. Too late. Far too late. My legs give out. I don’t know if I’m on a street, in a dream, or back there. There. In the desert. In the sand. In the blood. My eyes shut and there’s no more rain. No more city. No more night. Just light. Unnatural, burning, devastating white. The explosion. “Stay down, Adam!” I hear the sergeant’s voice. “Stay down, do you hear me?!” But there was nothing left to hear. Just that cursed ringing that drowned everything. Screams, orders, life. I see them. Every one of them. Will, his green eyes bulging out. Jackson, with half his jaw missing, still moving, still praying. “Don’t let them! Don’t let them die!” “Breathe, sir.” A soft female voice in my ear. I try to get up from the ground, to save at least the sergeant, but he fixes me with a cold stare. “Stay down, Adam. Play dead.” Then... his head flew off his shoulders and landed at my feet. “Just a little more, sir. Stay with me,” that sweet voice says again. I screamed. I think. Or maybe I vomited. I can’t remember. All I know is I came to with my fingers clawed into my own chest, a shattered bottle in my hand, blood dripping onto the floor. I’m back in the house. On the floor. My breathing is erratic, throat dry. I taste metal. Everything hurts. Reality hurts. The door is open. Wind brings rain inside. But what hurts most is that I’m still alive. I look up and see her. Kneeling on the floor in front of me, her camera hanging from her neck. She doesn’t know what she’s done. She doesn’t know the flash was a trigger. She doesn’t know she opened a door I’ve fought to keep closed with blood and silence. But now... the demons are out again. She rushes inside, returns with a cloth, pressing it against the gash in my palm I didn’t even realize I made. “Where’s the first aid kit, sir? I need to clean your wound,” she says, eyes wide and full of light, like the sun itself exploded inside them. “What the hell are you doing in my house?” I ask—or rather, I shout—and she flinches. “You probably don’t remember because of the panic attack, but I helped you off the pavement and brought you here,” she says, voice shaking. “Why the hell are you still here?” I yell again, and she closes her eyes. “I couldn’t break free from your grip, sir. And now I want to help you with your cut.” “I don’t need your help. I don’t need anyone, understand?” I spit the words between my teeth, with a hatred that isn’t hers. That isn’t for her. But it’s too late — she’s already felt it. She doesn’t move. Doesn’t cry. Just holds my gaze with a kind of foolish courage. Or maybe she’s just too young to understand the kind of man she’s looking at. “You don’t understand,” I say, my voice dropping, sharper than a bullet. “I’m not who you think I am. I never belonged in your world. I come from a place where every extra second of life is a sentence.” “Then let me be the one to sentence you to another one,” she says. Gently. As if it were simple. As if she could save what cannot be saved. She brings the cloth to my palm, and her fingers brush the wound with a tenderness that tears deeper than the cut. She pulls me back into myself. Into my skin. Into reality. I inhale deeply. It smells like rain. Like woman. Like something I haven’t felt in a long time: safety. The danger is—I like it. It’s something I haven’t smelled, felt, or seen in a long time. Maybe in another life. “That’s enough. I’m fine. Go,” I say, pulling my hand from her small palms. I can’t bear her soft touch. It makes me feel worse. Makes me wish I were dead. She stands up and wipes her bloodstained hands on her floral summer dress. I managed to stain her, too, with the darkness inside me. I feel her looking at me, maybe waiting for me to say something else, but I don’t lift my gaze from my wounded palm and the blood dripping down like in slow motion. I hear the door close behind her, and I feel like I can breathe again. It’s just me now, with my darkness, my awakened demons, and the deafening silence.