Touched by Smoke

Chapter 4

Adam

Their bodies were falling around me like rag dolls pierced by bullets. Jared was calling my name, but I didn’t reach him in time. I ran, I shot, I screamed orders into a broken radio, but it was all too late. When I found him, his eyes were wide open, and the blood was pouring out of him like a raw wound of the world itself.

“Corporal, I dreamed last night that I was going home...” he told me the night before, while we were sharing a can of bitter beans. He was nineteen. He kept a photo of his sister in the chest pocket of his vest, and now... now I was holding him in my arms, trembling, filthy, his hands clinging to my gear. He died asking for forgiveness. As if any of it had been his fault.

I wake up with a dull ache in my chest, fists clenched in the sheets, struggling to breathe. The memory still smells like gunpowder and burnt flesh. I can still feel it in my nose. I still carry it in my skin.

I realize I’m in my room only when I hear a plate being gently set down in the kitchen. Her footsteps are light, almost innocent. I stretch, rubbing my face with a hand, trying to shake off the remnants of the nightmare. But they never really go away.

Elara.

She’s here again. She didn’t ask. I didn’t invite her. And yet she comes every day. Cleans. Cooks. Leaves flowers. Smiles.

Naive.

Stupid girl.

She thinks she can bring light into a place that was built from darkness. Thinks that if she leaves a vase of flowers in the living room, the walls will stop bleeding. She doesn’t understand that every corner of this house knows death by name.

Maybe she’s doing it out of pity. Or from some twisted need to save someone. She doesn’t know that I’m not the kind of man you save. That when you touch me, hell pulls you down with me.

I wish I could tell her to stop coming. To go live her little girl life, laugh in the sun, and never set foot in my world again. But I don’t have the strength. Or the courage. Some sick part of me wants to see her, to hear her steps around the house, to feel that life still exists… somewhere, somehow.

Maybe I’m more selfish than I thought.

But it doesn’t matter. One day I’ll push her away. I’ll show her who I really am. And then she’ll leave.

They all do.

Elara just hasn’t figured it out yet.

“Hey, are you okay in there?” she asks from the other side of the closed door.

Okay? I don’t know her definition of okay, but I haven’t blown my brains out yet, so...

“Adam,” she continues when she doesn’t hear anything from me.

So irritating. I don’t get what she wants. Why she’s still here after a week of failing to bring light into my life. Why she keeps torturing me with the illusion of a life long gone. Why she keeps coming, even when all I ever give her is silence or the same cold command to leave.

“Yeah...” I mutter, just to shut her up.

I know what it means to live in the light, but she doesn’t understand that I’m terrified of it now. Like I said, light is a liar. It makes you believe in good things, then night falls and takes it all away.

I hear a soft sigh on the other side of the door, then her footsteps recede. She’s probably gone back to the kitchen, among those damned flowers that have started to lose their scent. The lilacs are wilting. That’s what happens to everything this house touches. It wilts. Rots. Dies slowly.

I lie there, staring at the ceiling, muscles tense like a bow that never loosens. I can’t breathe right. I can’t sleep. I can’t feel anything but guilt. And her — Elara — she’s there like a heartbeat I can’t stop. Like a memory that isn’t mine, but haunts me anyway.

She doesn’t understand. Doesn’t know what it means to sleep on mattresses stained with dried blood, to hear the screams of your comrades in your ears even when it’s silent. She doesn’t know that every night, Jared dies again. That Scott screams again. That I... I’m alone again.

She doesn’t understand that her light is just another form of torture for someone who lives in ruins.

I hate her for still being whole. For still laughing. For showing up every morning with her warm voice and eyes that have never seen death. I hate her because she doesn’t run. Because she makes me wonder what it would be like if… if I were still human.

I slam my fist into the wall. It cracks slightly, but I feel no pain. My pain is elsewhere. Deep inside, in that void no Elara could ever fill.

But the sickest part?

The part I hate myself most for?

Is that somewhere in me, in the filthy depths of what I am... I want her to leave the kitchen. To come back to my door. To knock. To ask. To not give up.

Because if she does... if she leaves... then I really have nothing left.

It takes a massive effort to pull myself out of bed and walk out of the room. In the living room, I find her arranging I-don’t-know-what. When she hears me, she turns with that wide smile and I feel like I’m drowning in bitterness.

I’m drowning in contradictions. It’s something new. Something I haven’t felt in a long time.

I want to wipe that smile off her face — the one that hurts more than the memory of my fallen brothers. I want to tell her to laugh and never stop. I want to tell her to leave and never come back, because if she does come back, I’ll make sure she knows what pain is. But... I also want her to keep coming every day, even if her visits do nothing to help me.

“I have a surprise for you,” she says, grinning ear to ear.

She gestures for me to sit on the couch, and I do. Not because she asked, but because I’m tired. After I sit, she turns on a lamp that wasn’t there before, and I can’t tell if she’s messing with me or not.

“I know it’s not much, but since you’re surrounded by darkness, I wanted to give you a little light,” she says, looking at me with hope.

“The darkness will swallow it,” I say, watching her.

“No, look.” She moves next to the lamp and makes me shift my gaze. “No matter how strong the dark is, it can’t drown out the light it gives off.”

I stare at the spot where the light spreads and I don’t know whether to be terrified or to accept it.

My chest tightens, like invisible wire is wrapping around my ribs. That little light — frail, warm, steady — burns me. Not like fire. Like hope. And that hurts more than any flame.

I look at her standing there, next to her stupid lamp, and I want to grab her by the shoulders, shake her, scream at her that she doesn’t understand. That light changes nothing. That my monsters live in the day too, not just the night. That I’ve seen things so horrifying they can’t even exist in darkness — because bringing them to light would set the world on fire.

“Why are you doing this?” I ask, without lifting my eyes from that pathetic bulb flickering like an uncertain heart.

“Because you’re not,” she says simply. Too simply. Like I was expecting it. Like I already hated the answer before hearing it.

I swallow hard and turn my head toward her. She’s so alive it hurts my eyes. And at the same time... at the same time, some part of me is screaming that I need this. Her. Her absurdity. Her warm voice and fearless gestures.

“Light doesn’t fix what’s broken in me, Elara.”

“Maybe not. But it reminds you that you still have an outline. You still exist. You still deserve to be seen.”