fic: your neighbors at hand (nano)
YOUR NEIGHBORS AT HAND
band of brothers/the pacific/inglourious basterds/original. the war ends, so you find a house: four strangers at the start and end of their world. liebgott/shosanna, hoosier/oc, hoosier/leckie, shosanna/hellstrom, liebgott/oc, liebgott/webster. rated pg-13. 8692 words.
notes: happy holidays, slybrunette! among the options you requested for fic, one was the Nano Project of Crossover Doom! so, um, here it is? or here, rather, is a pretty barebones sketch of what's happening on that front? it's still super rough (as in, all over the place), i still would someday love to toy around with more things and more, well, everything (i swear, like 80% of this is hoosier and alice making out or something lol), but that'll come later i guess, haha. but i do hope you enjoy, bb!
We are not traitors but the lights go out.
(R. SIKEN)
How long will ye slumber? when will ye take heart
And fear the reproach of your neighbors at hand?
(CALLINUS)
I even loved a few times in my disgusting human way -
(L. GLUCK)
I. LIEBGOTT
This starts with that letter you never wrote.
Dear Mom. Dear Dad. Dear So-And-So I met down at the bottom of the hill that long weekend in San Francisco. It was a long weekend not in time but in the unnatural stretch of the low tide that season and all you could see was beach and a hint of white broken surf. Your name was Edith or Edie or just plain Elizabeth. Dear You. We made love after I paid for your cab but I didn’t buy you dinner. Yes. You. Dear You.
I’m home now.
You didn’t do any of that. You snuck back into this country like a big-time crook, a regular Dillinger, and if anyone caught wind of your arrival and survival, your days would end there.
Pop. A bullet to the head outside a theater. Pop pop. You know a bullet discharged from its chamber doesn’t sound like that. It’s a rat-a-tat-tat, concussive and angry, accompanied by a bright burst of light just around the muzzle. A bullet at the head wouldn’t go pop, but you think it anyway.
You heard they were showing Leave Her To Heaven and you liked the sound of that.
There are other letters you will never write.
Dear Webster. I owe you a thank you somewhere, but it’s stuck in my throat and stuck upstairs and I don’t know how to get it out, especially for you.
It’s the especially for you part that sticks the most, isn’t it?
II. THE BRIDGE
In this story, you will meet people you do not feel deserve to be saved. You will say: these are hard times and hard times need hard people. And this is true - we all have our burden to carry and we all at one point or another grin and bear it, trundle across and through the dust and over the graveyards and pretend that our own hearts do not twinge when we think of all the things that rest under our feet.
And someone will ask you, if you don’t think they deserve to be saved, do you also believe they do not deserve to be loved? You will not like this question, no one likes questions regarding the love of others, too much fear that our own words will betray our innermost wants, fears, the beat and the tick to our own heart. So you will shake your head and say that it is not for you to say, that the two aren’t related, they don’t converge like that (but you won’t use the word converge, you aren’t known to speak that way, using words like converge). You’ll say: like talking about a man gone been robbed blind then asking what he’s gonna do with the money he has left. It’s not like that at all, but you can go right on ahead and think that.
To be loved is to be saved, in a way. This part, you won’t get from anyone; no one’s gonna tell you that, ‘s just something everyone assumes you already know.
A man’s got a body of water, and there’s gonna come a time when he’s got to cross it. You got the divide between the here and now against the what’s next and what’s coming. You got the divide between one life and the next, no life lived as just one in full, but rather, parts. We get from there to here, here to there, but you ain’t coming back, and it all comes down to a single question: how we gonna get there? Through what passage shall we take, and when we arrive, what will we have left to burn?
III. THE HOUSE
Joe was the first to move in.
Alice came next and then Hoosier. Shosanna was the last, and the quietest to arrive. The four were not the house’s only occupants - the attic taken over by a family of three originally from Czechoslovakia, the husband’s English broken and indecipherable, his wife’s nonexistent, and the baby wailed in that universal cry of hunger and need.
Hoosier is on the first floor, a view of the alley through his small bedroom window and a broken slatted-fence separating the landlady’s property from the abutting building.
Alice is on the second floor, as is Shosanna, and Liebgott has a small room on the third floor, across an aging veteran from the first World War.
After the war Hoosier went home first, and then he went to Baltimore. What you goin there for, his father had asked, you dont have any kin there.
Exactly, Hoosier had said.
IV. THE INTRODUCTIONS
Shosanna met Aldo covered in ash, her dress red and the bottom stained rust and torn, the hem too long and raked over coals.
Word on the wires is that you boys be shippin outta here a damn sight sooner than I got a yearnin to leave, he says. Winters merely nods while Nixon squints at the man. Aldo the Apache’s name and the origin of this name had made its way through the ranks of most divisions of any and all armed forces dispatched to the European theater of the war.
Considering we’re scheduled to leave at 0800 tomorrow, I would have to agree, Winters says, and Aldo nods.
That it is then, Aldo says, arms braced behind his back. He shifts his weight and his hip forward and leans in to Winters and Nixon. Got a favor I’ll be needin from ya, if you be so kindly obliged.
The woman’s English is poor, and her German is only slightly better.
Ooh la fucking la, Luz teases and the men laugh but the woman does not appear to notice or care. Her small frame is draped in an oversized woolen coat and the boats on her feet are clearly too large for her, each step more of a careful stumble and shuffle forward.
Alice and Hoosier meet on the front steps of the building. He is sitting there smoking a cigarette when she comes back from work. He doesn’t notice her at first, his eyes glazed over and a burnt-down cigarette held up to his lips. In order to ascend the stairs she would have to step over him.
Hey there, she says, both guarded and friendly. He blinks and looks up at her, a wry smile half-heartedly twisting.
Hey yourself. He flicks his thumb and ash skitters onto the sidewalk. He takes a drag off his cigarette as he looks up at her, eyes narrowed, an expression of amused appraisal. You live here then? he asks.
I do, she answers slowly. Second floor, first door on the right. He nods, his face clouded by smoke for a moment. He nods his head towards the entrance behind them.
First floor, first door on the right, he tells her. He smirks. Guess that puts me right under ya.
Alice smiles, close-mouthed and unsurprised. Guess so, she says; her voice is cold.
Got a name? he drawls.
Alice, she tells him and extends her hand, Alice Wheaton. He takes her hand and shakes it, his hand warm around hers. And you are? she asks.
Hoosier, he says, then quickly corrects, Bill. Bill Smith.
She sits next to him. They talk about the landlady - she tells him that she’s nice, pretty lenient. She was good while Alice was looking for work.
What were you lookin for?
Oh, she says. A nursing position. But, well, there’s sort of a lot of us these days.
You workin now?
Yeah. Over at Polly’s, you know. A block over.
A waitress, huh. Polly’s any good?
The cherry pie’s good. She shrugs. That’s about all I’d recommend.
He nods and inhales from his cigarette. You a nurse during the war?
Yeah, she says. I was. With the Army.
He looks at her. You stationed here, or . . .
North Africa, she answers. At first. And then Italy - we were in Anzio for awhile, and then back here in D.C. You?
Marine Corps., he says, and it’s all he says at first. The Pacific, out on the most godawful little spits of land a man could imagine.
Alice doesn’t know what to say about that, so she doesn’t say anything at first. You meet Joe from upstairs yet? she asks. He was in the Army, Airborne, or something, over in Europe.
Which one’s Joe? he asks.
The only man who lives upstairs who isn’t seventy-five years old and walking with a cane.
Yeah, that fucker, he teases, and Alice chuckles.
V. THE STRANGER
What the hell were you doing in France anyway?
I live in France, she says curtly. I can ask you the same. Her English is better these days, though hardly perfect, a sharp, almost childlike nasal edge to most of her words, thickened by emotion or speed.
I believe I was there liberating you people.
Her face is blank when she looks at him. I thank you then? Her voice is snide, the hands on her hips confrontational, and even with that blank face of hers, he feels there is a whole host of emotion to be read there: defiance and mockery are the easiest to spot, but there’s more still, more familiar than he’d care to admit.
Joe takes a large bite of his apple, the crunch as his teeth crush into the thin skin and pulp of the fruit loud in her quiet apartment.
I am always appreciative of gratitude, Betty.
She frowns. You know my name.
He waves a hand, takes another bite of his apple. A joke, he says, mouth still full.
The girl just stands there, and up close she is much younger than she first appeared. Alice is scarcely taller than her, but she holds her head high all the same, and the girl does too.
You say your name’s Vivian, yeah? she asks, and the girl just nods. Alice knows the girl can speak English, marked up and slurred with that French accent, and she also knows Vivian isn’t her real name. Alice isn’t one to press it. She doesn’t care. She can’t think of a damn thing this girl might have done in the previous years the other party didn’t deserve. War’s like that, she thinks. There are the rules, but they’re not real rules. What rule matters when it ends the same, in the same stink of blood and shit and human remains. That doesn’t mean she likes her, this Vivian. She doesn’t.
VI. THE APARTMENT
He’s too big in her kitchen. The crowded space feels even smaller to her as she stands at the gas stove; the match won’t remain lit, a draft brushing in through the cracks along the window, and she burns through three before she manages to light the burner - whoosh of blue flame she hides with the burnt bottom of the kettle.
“You want some coffee?” she asks, and he doesn’t answer. He stands by the corner of her kitchen table, fingers the red and white faded tablecloth. “Bill? Coffee?” she asks again.
“Yeah,” he drawls, his eyes narrowed as he looks at her. “Pass me those?” he says, a jerk of his head towards the matches in her hand. She tosses them to him and he nods his thanks, lights a cigarette quickly and does not offer her one.
She is acutely aware of his body, aware of her own, and the limited space between them. He stands over her, the mug small in his hand and she can smell the coffee, the sweet tang of tobacco, made flat and dull by the lingering stench of smoke thick along his clothing, his skin. Alice realizes these are all extraneous, scents not his own but added to himself, that what she is smelling is more than him - that under the clothes and under the curling smoke from his lit cigarette, besides the cup of coffee she made for him, he smells like a man, like sweat, like unwashed skin and used flesh, that so many similar men have been laid out under her hands; she knows what a man who has not bathed smells like, the way grime builds up to encase a man, like scales on a fish, the way blood dries brown and not red and how it flakes, how even if you scrub at it with a wet cloth it still comes off in flakes, a snake giving way to new skin, the dark giving way to red and pink and white.
She does not expect to find that under his shirt, his pants. She expects to find a man whole, a man, lazy as this one seems, clean and relatively unburdened.
The way he looks at her, she thinks, is akin to the opposite, a paradox. Bill looks at her like she is a mystery, that he doesn’t understand her in the slightest and is unsure whether he wants to know her or not, if there’s any value to be had in such a discovery. But at the same time, there’s that slant to his eyes, the uptick to the corner of his mouth as he slots his cigarette between his lips and his chest expands on a long inhale; he looks at her like he knows her, like he has known all women, that under her clothes are a pair of tits and a wet gash between her legs for him to claim as his own, and that’s all. That’s all any woman is, all any woman wants is him, that space between his legs and hers, and a frenetic union that lasts for that limited stretch of time bearable for the both of them. Alice knows that look, would say she has grown accustomed to it and would go on to blame the war, but that’s not entirely true. She knew it before she left. Men like to look at women like that. And maybe a woman likes it when a man looks and expects the bare minimum. Maybe she likes that.
What you staring at, she finally asks. He shakes his head slightly, a dim smile, and he takes a large gulp of the coffee, grimaces.
You don’t got any sugar, do you? he asks, and she glares. She reaches for the small bowl of it and passes it to him anyway. Their fingers brush over the porcelain, his large and dry, and her own cold and thin. Goddamn, he mutters as he scoops first one spoonful and then another into his coffee and stirs. Amazing how much you miss such basic shit like this.
Alice doesn’t say anything to that, doesn’t really see it as a statement that needs a reply. He does this sometimes, she has found. He’ll make these small statements referencing the war, and she imagines they are not as innocent as they seem. He’s ferreting her out. He wants to see what she’d say in response. Oh yes, maybe she’d say, I remember that and it was terrible. War is terrible, war is hell, and isn’t it nice to be home. Or maybe he wouldn’t expect her to say that. Maybe he met some of those nurses over in the Pacific, and maybe they were so kind and so gentle and that could be what he wants from her too, but she doubts it. If he wants commiseration, if he wants to chat about the war, well, she’s not the one for that, not right now.
VII. THE BLOOD
Got in a fight, he tells her, his voice congested, blood dried along the bridge of his nose and caked above his lip.
I can see that, she says. Come in. Come on.
He reaches for her and his knuckles are bruised, oozing red. Jesus, she sighs. Let me get some gauze - go on, sit down.
He grabs for her wrist anyway, even after she has turned her back to him, the small apartment dark and yawning in front of her. His fingers sweat against her skin, the grip strong, but she shakes him off.
Come on, she says again. When she looks over her shoulder he looks at her like he wants to still be touching her. She shakes that off too, and the bare lightbulb in her bathroom isn’t bright enough and the bottle of iodine isn’t in her medicine cabinet. The shuffle of his boots against the wood floor can be heard, and Alice leans forward on her knees, rests her forehead on her hands which clasp the lip of the sink, the search for gauze and anything else she owns abandoned for the moment.
Sit down, she calls to him, and after a beat, a chair scrapes across the floor and he sighs.
Why’d you do it?
Why did I do what? Alice asks, a hand on her hip and Bill slumped in a chair at her kitchen table.
The nurse thing. The Army. You went to fuckin Africa. Why, he sighs, would you do that.
I don’t know, she says quietly, her eyes trained on the wall. She knows he’s still looking at her, she can feel it, but she doesn’t look away from the wall. I wanted to do it, she says.
Alice sits down with him at the table, the wet rag with his blood on it still in her hand. She never did ask him about the fight; she finds she doesn’t really care.
My brother died just after the Japs hit Pearl Harbor. Bill’s eyes narrow and he looks on the point of speaking, so Alice shakes her head. No, not because of it or anything like that. It was a few days before Christmas and he was in New York. Our parents had a brownstone there, and he was staying in it, had been for awhile, and he was driving, and, God, he was always such a terrible driver - Manhattan certainly didn’t help that. And I don’t know - maybe there was some ice, maybe the car in front of his stopped, pulled out, but there was an accident and he died. She snaps her fingers. You’re here, and then you’re gone. It’s such a rotten cliche. Alice smiles small and looks at him, the frown on his face, the angry gash across his nose, the split lip.
I know what you’re thinking, she says, and that’s not it. I didn’t do this for him. She laughs, a rueful puff of air. Jesus, Charlie never would have wanted the war, never. But he died, and come the new year I found myself downtown in Philadelphia signing up at the Army office.
You say it like you’re still doing it. Like it’s somethin that’s still happening.
You don’t think it is? she asks, his face swollen and bruised, the rag in her hand smeared with him.
I don’t think you’re any more of a nurse right now than I am a soldier. It’s all shit in the past, shit that’s come and gone.
She looks to the bottle of iodine sitting on the kitchen table between them, the roll of gauze and scissors next to it. She arches an eyebrow but she doesn’t say anything. Neither does he.
The Wheaton family was never anything vaguely respectable. That development came recent, came in with her Daddy’s money and the fortune he made out of a plot of land run thick and deep with oil. That black slime came to cover everything, became their everything, and when the Governor sent her father to the Washington, D.C., her mother was big with Evelyn. Evelyn was born in a Washington hospital, as were the rest of her mother’s children - Charlie and Jacqueline last, Alice in between. Alice didn’t know those Texas summers the way her father did, the way her mother loved them. Her mother’s people still had a ranch out there, a ranch with a well buried deep into dry ground, and her Daddy’s people had the black sludge and the new house in Houston with the white crown molding in the kitchen and the housekeeper named Fanny who kept them in sausage and grits and a clean household.
Alice and her sisters, her brother, they never knew different. They knew the big house on Massachusetts Avenue, they came to know the house Daddy bought in New York and the other house he had in Philadelphia. They never knew Texas and they never knew the dirt of the front yard of the small house her Daddy bought first, the first in the chain of property owned. He never did sell that house and no one ever did come and live in it. They drilled deep around it and it became a canteen of sorts for all the oilmen that came through, sweaty and greased, dirty boots and dirty hands passing over the pink tiled floor and the new windows they put in when they thought this was going to be home.
When he kisses her, an eventuality that breaches its limit, his lip is still split and the taste of blood gets in her mouth, colorful, of rust, and it makes her hands stutter down his chest. She knows that taste. She’s been here before - been so scared she bit the inside of her cheek hard enough to draw blood, too sharp behind her teeth. He tastes like that, his lips dry and his face bruised, but he’s reaching for her, he’s guiding into the kiss, so she opens her mouth to him - his tongue thick and hot, muscle twisting with her own. He is humming what sounds like pleasure against her mouth, the sound low and guttural, and she can feel it in his chest, his ribcage pressed tight against her own, the edge of the sink uncomfortable at her lower back.
Alice doesn’t know what she expected of Bill. There’s a quietness and a remoteness to him she doesn’t usually know what to do with, but this is different. This is angry and passionate, his hands everywhere, his hands fighting to climb inside her and stay there, the way he moves against her desperate and hungry, and the most shocking part of it all is that she is behaving just the same - her hands in his hair, her hands pulling at him, her teeth biting at his bloodied lip.
She gasps a little, her legs spread and his hand pushing up under her skirt. His eyes are open and on her, one hand cradling her jaw and the other flat and hot against the skin of her thigh.
Tell me to stop, he mutters, and Alice begins to feel nervous. Is that a challenge? she wonders. Tell him to stop and see if he stops. Ask her to tell him to stop and see if she does, see if she really wants this.
Why would I do that, she asks and the evenness of her voice surprises her. It surprises him too; he cocks his head a little, looks down at her, his hand raising higher on her thigh.
He stops at the lace edge of her knickers, the fabric flimsy and delicate under his thumb, between his fingers as he slides his third and fourth fingers under the fabric and under the lace, the tips of this fingers hot against that line of skin, the triumvirate of thigh and hip and groin.
VIII. HOOSIER
It isn’t an event he would ever use as a self-identifying moment, but Hoosier was never the sort to have a history of self-identifying moments. It made sense at the time. It made sense. How many times had that justification surfaced? They never speak of it. It was just something that happened, and what he will never know is the stock Leckie took in that moment, and no, not just that moment, a collection of moments he thought made a larger picture, something tangible and concrete a man can cling to when future events have stripped a man of that original feeling. If Hoosier knew this, he would say, you’re wrong. It don’t work that way. You got this and you got that, and sometimes you have this and that, but it don’t add up to much at all. You try to add it up and you get a goddamned mess.
And maybe there is more to this idea than just the island, maybe it was only Hoosier who believed in it - that you don’t look back. There’s nothing waiting for you back there but what you managed to escape, more or less intact. Why return to that. Why reach back for all that pain and all that suffering, mindless even then. Aint nothing good there. Aint nothing there but dirt and shit to leave a man wanting.
A man wanting. Maybe that’s what happened. Maybe he was once a man wanting, still is a man wanting, but he has always been a man to take what he wants.
(Leckie started this, a detail that is a little surprising since of their misfit crew Hoosier always came across as the most debauched of them all, and maybe he is, maybe, but in that instance it had been Leckie who reached for him. Leckie, with his dirty hands and his tired eyes, the mud scratched across his neck, dried and crumbling, and when their mouths did inevitably meet, they shared the same dank, earthy taste, a taste of the swamp and jungle, an island locale in revolt, taking over the both of them, making them, this, as much a part of the war and as much a part of the geography as the gunfire, the blood, the endless stretch and suck of mud. They only did this once. It was only the one time. Their clothes had stuck to their sweat-drenched skin and everything about each other felt wrong and wet. Hoosier had never tasted a man before, and he thought the same could be said of Leckie - they mirrored each other as though caught in a dance, two men fighting for the lead, a position they had only ever known.)
You, Leckie said, want to know what it feels like to be loved. And that’s a damn fine hard thing to know if you’ve never loved.
The fuck you sayin? Hoosier asked, mouth clamped tight around a cigarette and it bobbed as he spoke, ash sprinkling down onto his stained dungarees.
He told him this in Melbourne. The sun was warm and not hot, and Leckie was still in love with Stella, still in love with Vera, still in love with the world in that needy, destructive way of his. Hoosier never got that - loving the things that are only ever going to bring you down.
You’re drunk, Alice says into his mouth. He doesn’t deny it, he just licks around her mouth and bites at her bottom lip. You’re drunk, she says again, her hands insistent against his chest. She doesn’t know if she is trying to push him away or trying to hold him still, but her fingers thread into his shirt, her nails scratching at his skin through the thin fabric, and he sighs. He had bourbon tonight. She can taste it in the hollows of his mouth, as her tongue slides over the inside of his cheek, around and under his tongue. There’s the taste of smoke there too, old and thick and male, and he tips her head back, pulls at her hair and lengths her neck - their noses bump, and his mouth is open just before hers, just out of reach.
Yeah, he drawls, I’m a goddamn drunk. She doesn’t correct him. She doesn’t tell him that she wasn’t calling him a goddamn drunk. She was telling him that he was drunk, that the only reason he has a hand knotted in her hair and her body bending under his, is because he is drunk.
Instead she tries to look him in the eye. She tries to catch his eye, but he’s looking at her mouth. She raises up on the tips of her toes then, her hand light along the side of his neck and she kisses him. She kisses him, her lips barely brushing his, and if she means something by that, she means something. She never kisses him first. It’s always him, always him with the taste of the night on his mouth as he descends on her, the door to her apartment not even closed, the handle biting into her skin, the curve of her hip, the small of her back. He kisses like he wants to eat her, that there’s something inside her that is rightfully his and if he kisses her hard enough, if he shakes her, he’ll find it.
She reaches for him again, the tip of her tongue against his bottom lip, his bottom teeth; his fingers tighten in her hair, brutal against her hip, but he doesn’t kiss her back. His mouth opens a little wider, invites her in, and she says his name. She says, Bill.
He says, Alice. He says her name, and it is the saddest thing she has ever heard.
It’s probably why she says what she says next, why she draws her body away from his and leans back against the wall, his fingers snagging in her hair as she slips away, the hand at her hip falling away. No part of them touches and his face is unreadable, eyes hooded and mouth still parted.
She nods towards her door, the key still in the lock. You gonna come in? she asks.
He raises his chin and looks down at her. You want me to come in? he parries back.
She braces herself, stands that much straighter - her shoulders pressed to the wall but her back arched away, arched towards him. Yes, she says steadily, pauses. Yes, I want you to come in.
Bill looks like he is turning something around in his head, if she means what he wants her to mean.
Yes, she repeats, but it’s not a repetition, not really. She isn’t repeating the answer she voiced before - she is answering the unasked. I want you, come on, she says quietly.
He moves to the door, turns the key and opens it - the hinges whine in protest and he waits for her there, his body filling the doorframe. She runs her hand down the length of his back as she passes him, and he shuts the door behind them.
He’s steady with her in the bedroom, and she had not anticipated that. Every time before that he had kissed her it was rough and needy, but alone with him, the bed hitting the backs of her knees, she’s the one trying to claw under his collar, her fingers running over the sparse chest hair. He doesn’t begin to lose himself until she takes to her knees and takes him in her mouth.
IX. THE DOLL
A strand of her blonde hair catches on her bottom lip as Alice raises her face to yours. She’s a wretchedly skinny and pale thing, pale enough that it makes you doubt her word on Africa, and you like that, you like the idea that she has lied to you, that she’s lied this entire time and the only thing worth knowing about her is that you can’t trust a damn word that leaves that bitten mouth of hers. She pulls her dress over her head and you watch the way the bones of her chest ripple under her skin, the sternum and ribs, you know that much, but you know that she knows more - that she must have learned charts and must have mapped this out before they pushed her onto a boat and said, best luck. No one said best luck to you before you played follow the leader off the shore and into the great blue of the Pacific, but you are sure someone would have said it to her - her blonde hair still clean and curled, her lips pressed with wax and red. She would have made a very pretty nurse. You don’t think she would now though. Her mouth has gone too cruel.
Here is a body, you think. Here is a body and you can take it, you can animate it as you wish, bend it and crack it open, see if that mouth you tried to eat of hers was only hiding lies, so you do, so that’s what you’re going to do - string her up like a puppet and ride her, make her ride you, and if that’s not power, you don’t know what is.
You don’t have the nightmares you know she’s itching to ask you about. You know she wants to tell you, I’ve seen it before, I’ve seen what war does to men like you, but no, no, no, you think - you’ve got her arm under your hand now, you can wrap your fingers clean ‘round her upper arm and she doesn’t flinch, not even when you squeeze, not even when it’s just your fist and the bone, she opens her mouth but she doesn’t flinch - that ain’t right at all. That open mouth and those black eyes, she doesn’t give a fuck, she doesn’t give a fuck about you, not unless you’re going to fill her, and you are. That must be why she has opened her mouth, her bones and your fists.
(And she is so wet under your hand, squirming as you pry and press, wet under your hand like ripe fruit cleaved open to drip.)
X. ALICE
You always had steady hands. They do not begin to shake and betray you until you are back here, back home, the term home used loosely at best. You are slicing an apple the first time you notice it - the knife unsteady against the shining red skin of the fruit. You withdrew your hand and then moved to slice again, but the tremor was still there, small and slight, something a person would only ever notice of himself.
You cut that apple into six even pieces and even though your hands shook the entire time you handled the knife sure enough. You want to know when this started to happen. You want to know the exact moment your hands began to shake, a minute mutiny against yourself and the order of things, the structure of the human body, a nervous system cloaked in blood and tissue.
Maybe it started right then and there, the apple and the knife, and as the wood handle fit into the curve of your hand the muscles reacted. The nerves failed. Suddenly your fingers were shaking and it was because of that apple, perfectly ripe, and that knife, dulled and blunt, not sharp enough.
The apple was nice and red. Even after you cut it, even after you marveled at the way your fingers danced lightly on nothing but air, a tectonic shift all its own, you ate each and every slice. It was delicious, you thought, and with each bite the red skin made a cracking sound.
XI.
You wrote a letter home and then you left it in the snow. You think it got lost after that, the wet snow making the ink bleed, become unintelligible, just like that private you watched writhe and shriek, the better part of a piece of shrapnel embedded in his chest, the snow under him gone first red then brown and bloodied black.
A lot of good boys died like that, wet with themselves and gibberish on their tongue. It’s a hell of an exit, and maybe makes a macabre sort of sense - leave this bullshit nonsense world with the same spewing from your mouth.
You wrote a letter and what you said was - it is cold and I am cold, I hope you’re not cold, too. It was a terrible fucking letter, and you wondered if the censors would have had a problem with that - he says it’s cold, sir: would you say that’s too telling? Your parents would have received a letter and all it would have read is it is and I am, I hope you’re not. That is if you were writing to your parents at all.
(Do you have parents? Everyone has parents. Everyone had parents. Is that the operative word you use? Did you leave them in California? Did you bury them underground? Do they have a sunny bright kitchen where your mother pours orange juice and your father reads the obits over a plate of eggs? Or does your father use the belt and is your mother’s mouth sour and used and that’s why you don’t write to them at all? Did they wish you dead once and now you’re trying to do one good thing and bring that to fruition?)
XII. SHOSANNA
When Shosanna fucked Dieter Hellstrom, when she was fucked by him, he held a gloved hand over her mouth and all he saw when he looked down were her wide, wide eyes. He decided what he saw was fear, and it was. There was fear there, but there was also pleasure, and for that Shosanna had felt ashamed.
You don’t know what it’s like, he spits at her, and Shosanna doesn’t know to what he refers. She doesn’t know what what feels like? It is such a dumb accusation, something a child would shout at a parent, and her opinion of him lessens for that.
She has tasted violence. She has felt the hot rush of it, the way your hand can reach for a gun, the easy way it fits into your hand, even her soft, small hand, the gentle arc of the trigger behind her curled index finger - it is so impossibly easy. The kickback is supposed to be the shock. The kick of the gun as you pop first one round and then another, another, off - it made her shoulders ache for days after, a deep muscle ache she felt all the way to her bones. The turn of her neck or the circle she could draw as she stretched her shoulder - she didn’t know what to call the emotion that would rise up in her: shame or guilt, pride, relief, it was a mess of them all. She had watched the way his blood, deep red, near black in that light, had colored the back of his white jacket.
Shosanna had not hated Fredrick Zoller. But she had not wanted him either.
War creates disposable humans. She has seen that, she has seen to that.
I could break your neck right now, Hellstrom had told her, her body spread under his, a feast and a slaughter she had offered herself up for, and she had asked him: why don’t you? But the words got lost. He wanted another taste of her and the words got lost.
And Joe, this Joe wants to tell her she doesn’t know what it’s like. She wants to hit him for that, but she doesn’t. She keeps her eyes hooded and she keeps her face blank and she does not offer him a glass of wine as she pours from the bottle.
She takes a thick sip from it.
I want to tell you a story, she says to him. He scowls, the boy always scowls, but he rubs at the back of his neck, a nervous gesture, and she knows that means he will stay and listen. He doesn’t sit though. He never sits. He prowls her kitchen, he keeps an eye to the window and the closed door. Her entire apartment is one large room, a bed in the corner and a stove at the opposite end. He is so different from the boy who lives downstairs, that other boy from the war.
Story hour at Chez Vivian? he snorts, and she dismisses it. The wine is too warm in her mouth, but she swallows it.
A family lived in the countryside of France for a time, she starts. They were farmers. Their people that came before they came - they were farmers too. They worked the land, like good farmers do, and they help and feed the village, their neighbors. They were good people, and the people of the village, their neighbors, they were all good people too. But you know, and I know it, that sometimes the bad things happen to the good people.
The look on Joe’s face is guarded, but he is listening to her. He has stopped pacing and his attention is solely on her.
This family, she continues, their name was Dreyfus. And a bad time came, so they did what they could: they hid. And the village, it was a good village, and their neighbors, they were good neighbors, and they help them hide too. When the soldiers would come they would go into the ground. They would hide under the floorboards of their good neighbors’ house and they would wait. You cannot breathe, but you wait.
And it is hard, it is hard to be mad at people during war, especially those people who say they are on your side. Because they say there are rules, but there are not any rules. You do what is best by you, and that is all. They were still good neighbors, good people, but you cannot, you cannot fault them for wanting to live too. It is only when you think the time has come to die that you make the big decision. The bold ones.
This is the most Joe has ever heard her speak at one time. There is a toothpick caught between his teeth, and he stands there, stock still, a hand raised to his mouth but seemingly frozen in the motion.
What happened? he asks her.
She looks him square in the eye, her mouth stained from the dark wine.
The Dreyfus family died, she says, and the good neighbors were left to go free.
XIII. THE FAREWELL
He’s never been the sort of man to understand. You’re a scavenger, Alice told him once, on more than one occasion, and to that he nodded, didn’t see any point in denying it. Alice was wrong though, applied the wrong insult to the right man. He wasn’t a scavenger. He didn’t roam over the dead and take what he thought he needed, what he wanted a taste of from their graying bones. He didn’t do that. If any of them were scavengers, maybe that was her, Alice, the woman who attached herself to the dying, the gloaming, who thought she could give them something with her lips and her mouth and her hands.
Bill wasn’t a scavenger, he just simply couldn’t be bothered.
When he left Baltimore it was without fanfare. He packed his few belongings and he paid Mrs. Botts the rent he owed her and she still smelled of boiled potatoes and unwashed clothing, stiff with dried sweat. You’re leaving us then, she said and he nodded, told her it was about time he got on with the doing of things. What things? she asked him, and he snorted, lit a cigarette and ignored her disparaging frown. Things, he said, vague, but not on purpose, because that was the thing with him - he wasn’t opaque on purpose, he wasn’t trying to hide himself behind this obtuse sketch of a man. He just never saw the purpose of all this talking. Aint gonna get you far. Aint gonna get you much at all.
But he left. He left Baltimore and he left a note under Alice’s door, his cramped, crabbed handwriting. Got places to go, I’m no good here, was all it said. She hated him for that. Hated him something so fierce and so hot she didn’t know what else to do other than rip the note into small pieces. She regretted it near immediately, but she swept the remnants up into her hand deposited them in the trash.
You think that’s how it ends. She thought that was how it ended. You get a glimpse of something, of someone, and then they’re gone. But he wrote her. He wrote her first, and if he cared, if he could be bothered, that would mean something.
I’m assuming you’re still holed up in that shack. Indiana’s just as I left it.
She didn’t rip that letter up.
Alice fucked Joe once.
Sadness is easy. It’s so easy to lose yourself in it, to let that cool tide wash over and then remain, waiting for the next lap of surf the tide will send to shore, to you.
And he fucks like an angry boy, all skinny limbs and open mouth, his hips juddering fast and without rhythm against her own. She wonders if he fucks all women like this, if he is as young as she imagines him to be in this moment. She blames the drink, the stale taste of whiskey on his tongue, a taste that leaks across her skin, his open mouth searching out spots of weakness.
Bill’s been gone for two weeks, and she’d like to say that doesn’t matter.
It doesn’t matter.
XIV.
You met that Nazi on the hill, and he was the only one you ever squared off with like that. Personal. In his face. Did you want an apology? Did you want absolution? Or did you just want to see what pattern his blood would spray on the wall as you fired straight into his face? It isn’t that hard, is it, to hate an idea and by extension hate an entire group of people.
You wished you made that killing shot. You wish it had been you.
You didn’t talk to Webster much for the rest of the day, a sullen heaviness weighing you down. You thought about how he stood there. You thought about all the green around the both of you, the worn green of his uniform, how he had watched you with that mild disappointment, like you were a child throwing a fit at a parent for taking from you what you wanted, what you thought you deserved, and he, an older brother, could only muster disapproval.
This began with that letter you never wrote, that message you never sent.
XV. THE EPILOGUE
Shosanna goes to New York City; she is shot and killed in a botched armed robbery not two months after she moves there. None of the three will be the wiser of it and will merely believe she had slipped away, gone and disappeared just as smoothly as she had entered their lives. She will baffle the New York public for the better part of a news cycle - the mysterious Jane Doe gunned down in an alleyway, her identification fake, no one come forward to claim her as their own.
They’ll forget her just as swiftly.
Years later, Bill mentions Baltimore at the dinner table. I lived there, stretch of time after I got back, he says. Yeah? his wife asks. Where you stay then? You dont got any kin there.
No, he says. I dont. He pauses. I found a place.
It was good for awhile, he says. Pass the yams.
Bill and Alice exchange letters for the duration of their lives. He lies to his wife, tells her it aint nothin, just an old war buddy is all, and Alice’s penmanship, strict and masculine scrawled across the envelope never gives her away.
The letters between them fall off as time intervenes. There’s the chicken scratch at the bottom of a drugstore Christmas card, a late birthday card from her. And then nothing. It would make him sad if he thought to remember it, her, but he doesn’t.
She doesn’t either until one day she sits down and she writes him a letter. She writes him a long letter and she doesn’t pause, not to think, not to correct any mistakes, any misspellings or missing words. She says she’s sorry. She says it a lot, repeating herself across the page, until she finds herself writing - It’s been a real long time, but I’m always still thinking of you.
Alice pauses then, she looks at the words committed to the page. She bites her bottom lip, and then she starts writing again.
He writes her a letter back. He tells her nothing at all, but he talks about his job and his wife, their children, the weather, small town Indiana. He’s been doing some work down at the hardware store, not that you want to hear nothing about that, he says.
He tells her these small things she could have assumed and figured on her own, and she wants to think that coming straight from him that makes them mean a little more, that if she tried she could picture it all a little clearer, but she finds that isn’t true.
Despite the passage of years, she still sees him as that young man sitting outside that brick house in Baltimore. Alice runs a hand over the page. She finds she cannot remember what he said to her that day, but she does remember how the sun had just begun to set, how it was the end of summer, still muggy and humid, but a taste of the cooler weather to come sticky on the air. Sometimes she remembers it as they shared a cigarette, but she knows that wasn’t true, that it would have been a gesture far too intimate for her, though she doubts he’d have felt the same - cigarettes still as currency in those days, a wealth to be shared; the way he continued to smoke those packs of cheap cigarettess, eyes open but vacant, dark, removed to a place she had never been. He doesn’t write to her about that evening or about his cigarettes, if he still smokes (she tells him in a letter once that she has quit, her doctor says so, and she’s never been one to know what to do with guilt, now has she?).
He signs his name Bill, and that’s all. Alice is disappointed, and that mere fact disappoints her in turn, a vicious cycle.
She doesn’t write him again, but another letter arrives for her a month later. He has sold the hardware store - did he tell her he bought the store? he asks, and she remembers - he had. Louise and him are taking the kids up to the lake, he tells her, and truth be told, I get to thinking I should hate the beach more than I do, because goddamn, got nothing but really bad fucking memories of the beach, but guess that’s a Jap beach and aint one of our own then.
I get to forgetting, he writes.
I get to forgetting.
Al, at the bottom it reads, I like hearing from you and I don’t want you stopping on my accord. I don’t talk like that, and you know it. I never been good with that. Alice folds the letter and she keeps it stashed at the bottom of her jewelry box on her dresser. He calls her Al, and it is a single page of scratched out words and smudged ink, but the message is clear.
I know, he goes on to say, I used to wonder too. I still wonder about you a lot sometimes.
(I love you, she had written to him. Past tense doesn’t suit me, not for you.
I love you, )
Dearest,
I can remember the taste of your mouth. It tasted just like mine.
You never sent that letter either. You never even wrote it down.
fin.
band of brothers/the pacific/inglourious basterds/original. the war ends, so you find a house: four strangers at the start and end of their world. liebgott/shosanna, hoosier/oc, hoosier/leckie, shosanna/hellstrom, liebgott/oc, liebgott/webster. rated pg-13. 8692 words.
notes: happy holidays, slybrunette! among the options you requested for fic, one was the Nano Project of Crossover Doom! so, um, here it is? or here, rather, is a pretty barebones sketch of what's happening on that front? it's still super rough (as in, all over the place), i still would someday love to toy around with more things and more, well, everything (i swear, like 80% of this is hoosier and alice making out or something lol), but that'll come later i guess, haha. but i do hope you enjoy, bb!
We are not traitors but the lights go out.
(R. SIKEN)
How long will ye slumber? when will ye take heart
And fear the reproach of your neighbors at hand?
(CALLINUS)
I even loved a few times in my disgusting human way -
(L. GLUCK)
I. LIEBGOTT
This starts with that letter you never wrote.
Dear Mom. Dear Dad. Dear So-And-So I met down at the bottom of the hill that long weekend in San Francisco. It was a long weekend not in time but in the unnatural stretch of the low tide that season and all you could see was beach and a hint of white broken surf. Your name was Edith or Edie or just plain Elizabeth. Dear You. We made love after I paid for your cab but I didn’t buy you dinner. Yes. You. Dear You.
I’m home now.
You didn’t do any of that. You snuck back into this country like a big-time crook, a regular Dillinger, and if anyone caught wind of your arrival and survival, your days would end there.
Pop. A bullet to the head outside a theater. Pop pop. You know a bullet discharged from its chamber doesn’t sound like that. It’s a rat-a-tat-tat, concussive and angry, accompanied by a bright burst of light just around the muzzle. A bullet at the head wouldn’t go pop, but you think it anyway.
You heard they were showing Leave Her To Heaven and you liked the sound of that.
There are other letters you will never write.
Dear Webster. I owe you a thank you somewhere, but it’s stuck in my throat and stuck upstairs and I don’t know how to get it out, especially for you.
It’s the especially for you part that sticks the most, isn’t it?
II. THE BRIDGE
In this story, you will meet people you do not feel deserve to be saved. You will say: these are hard times and hard times need hard people. And this is true - we all have our burden to carry and we all at one point or another grin and bear it, trundle across and through the dust and over the graveyards and pretend that our own hearts do not twinge when we think of all the things that rest under our feet.
And someone will ask you, if you don’t think they deserve to be saved, do you also believe they do not deserve to be loved? You will not like this question, no one likes questions regarding the love of others, too much fear that our own words will betray our innermost wants, fears, the beat and the tick to our own heart. So you will shake your head and say that it is not for you to say, that the two aren’t related, they don’t converge like that (but you won’t use the word converge, you aren’t known to speak that way, using words like converge). You’ll say: like talking about a man gone been robbed blind then asking what he’s gonna do with the money he has left. It’s not like that at all, but you can go right on ahead and think that.
To be loved is to be saved, in a way. This part, you won’t get from anyone; no one’s gonna tell you that, ‘s just something everyone assumes you already know.
A man’s got a body of water, and there’s gonna come a time when he’s got to cross it. You got the divide between the here and now against the what’s next and what’s coming. You got the divide between one life and the next, no life lived as just one in full, but rather, parts. We get from there to here, here to there, but you ain’t coming back, and it all comes down to a single question: how we gonna get there? Through what passage shall we take, and when we arrive, what will we have left to burn?
III. THE HOUSE
Joe was the first to move in.
Alice came next and then Hoosier. Shosanna was the last, and the quietest to arrive. The four were not the house’s only occupants - the attic taken over by a family of three originally from Czechoslovakia, the husband’s English broken and indecipherable, his wife’s nonexistent, and the baby wailed in that universal cry of hunger and need.
Hoosier is on the first floor, a view of the alley through his small bedroom window and a broken slatted-fence separating the landlady’s property from the abutting building.
Alice is on the second floor, as is Shosanna, and Liebgott has a small room on the third floor, across an aging veteran from the first World War.
After the war Hoosier went home first, and then he went to Baltimore. What you goin there for, his father had asked, you dont have any kin there.
Exactly, Hoosier had said.
IV. THE INTRODUCTIONS
Shosanna met Aldo covered in ash, her dress red and the bottom stained rust and torn, the hem too long and raked over coals.
Word on the wires is that you boys be shippin outta here a damn sight sooner than I got a yearnin to leave, he says. Winters merely nods while Nixon squints at the man. Aldo the Apache’s name and the origin of this name had made its way through the ranks of most divisions of any and all armed forces dispatched to the European theater of the war.
Considering we’re scheduled to leave at 0800 tomorrow, I would have to agree, Winters says, and Aldo nods.
That it is then, Aldo says, arms braced behind his back. He shifts his weight and his hip forward and leans in to Winters and Nixon. Got a favor I’ll be needin from ya, if you be so kindly obliged.
The woman’s English is poor, and her German is only slightly better.
Ooh la fucking la, Luz teases and the men laugh but the woman does not appear to notice or care. Her small frame is draped in an oversized woolen coat and the boats on her feet are clearly too large for her, each step more of a careful stumble and shuffle forward.
Alice and Hoosier meet on the front steps of the building. He is sitting there smoking a cigarette when she comes back from work. He doesn’t notice her at first, his eyes glazed over and a burnt-down cigarette held up to his lips. In order to ascend the stairs she would have to step over him.
Hey there, she says, both guarded and friendly. He blinks and looks up at her, a wry smile half-heartedly twisting.
Hey yourself. He flicks his thumb and ash skitters onto the sidewalk. He takes a drag off his cigarette as he looks up at her, eyes narrowed, an expression of amused appraisal. You live here then? he asks.
I do, she answers slowly. Second floor, first door on the right. He nods, his face clouded by smoke for a moment. He nods his head towards the entrance behind them.
First floor, first door on the right, he tells her. He smirks. Guess that puts me right under ya.
Alice smiles, close-mouthed and unsurprised. Guess so, she says; her voice is cold.
Got a name? he drawls.
Alice, she tells him and extends her hand, Alice Wheaton. He takes her hand and shakes it, his hand warm around hers. And you are? she asks.
Hoosier, he says, then quickly corrects, Bill. Bill Smith.
She sits next to him. They talk about the landlady - she tells him that she’s nice, pretty lenient. She was good while Alice was looking for work.
What were you lookin for?
Oh, she says. A nursing position. But, well, there’s sort of a lot of us these days.
You workin now?
Yeah. Over at Polly’s, you know. A block over.
A waitress, huh. Polly’s any good?
The cherry pie’s good. She shrugs. That’s about all I’d recommend.
He nods and inhales from his cigarette. You a nurse during the war?
Yeah, she says. I was. With the Army.
He looks at her. You stationed here, or . . .
North Africa, she answers. At first. And then Italy - we were in Anzio for awhile, and then back here in D.C. You?
Marine Corps., he says, and it’s all he says at first. The Pacific, out on the most godawful little spits of land a man could imagine.
Alice doesn’t know what to say about that, so she doesn’t say anything at first. You meet Joe from upstairs yet? she asks. He was in the Army, Airborne, or something, over in Europe.
Which one’s Joe? he asks.
The only man who lives upstairs who isn’t seventy-five years old and walking with a cane.
Yeah, that fucker, he teases, and Alice chuckles.
V. THE STRANGER
What the hell were you doing in France anyway?
I live in France, she says curtly. I can ask you the same. Her English is better these days, though hardly perfect, a sharp, almost childlike nasal edge to most of her words, thickened by emotion or speed.
I believe I was there liberating you people.
Her face is blank when she looks at him. I thank you then? Her voice is snide, the hands on her hips confrontational, and even with that blank face of hers, he feels there is a whole host of emotion to be read there: defiance and mockery are the easiest to spot, but there’s more still, more familiar than he’d care to admit.
Joe takes a large bite of his apple, the crunch as his teeth crush into the thin skin and pulp of the fruit loud in her quiet apartment.
I am always appreciative of gratitude, Betty.
She frowns. You know my name.
He waves a hand, takes another bite of his apple. A joke, he says, mouth still full.
The girl just stands there, and up close she is much younger than she first appeared. Alice is scarcely taller than her, but she holds her head high all the same, and the girl does too.
You say your name’s Vivian, yeah? she asks, and the girl just nods. Alice knows the girl can speak English, marked up and slurred with that French accent, and she also knows Vivian isn’t her real name. Alice isn’t one to press it. She doesn’t care. She can’t think of a damn thing this girl might have done in the previous years the other party didn’t deserve. War’s like that, she thinks. There are the rules, but they’re not real rules. What rule matters when it ends the same, in the same stink of blood and shit and human remains. That doesn’t mean she likes her, this Vivian. She doesn’t.
VI. THE APARTMENT
He’s too big in her kitchen. The crowded space feels even smaller to her as she stands at the gas stove; the match won’t remain lit, a draft brushing in through the cracks along the window, and she burns through three before she manages to light the burner - whoosh of blue flame she hides with the burnt bottom of the kettle.
“You want some coffee?” she asks, and he doesn’t answer. He stands by the corner of her kitchen table, fingers the red and white faded tablecloth. “Bill? Coffee?” she asks again.
“Yeah,” he drawls, his eyes narrowed as he looks at her. “Pass me those?” he says, a jerk of his head towards the matches in her hand. She tosses them to him and he nods his thanks, lights a cigarette quickly and does not offer her one.
She is acutely aware of his body, aware of her own, and the limited space between them. He stands over her, the mug small in his hand and she can smell the coffee, the sweet tang of tobacco, made flat and dull by the lingering stench of smoke thick along his clothing, his skin. Alice realizes these are all extraneous, scents not his own but added to himself, that what she is smelling is more than him - that under the clothes and under the curling smoke from his lit cigarette, besides the cup of coffee she made for him, he smells like a man, like sweat, like unwashed skin and used flesh, that so many similar men have been laid out under her hands; she knows what a man who has not bathed smells like, the way grime builds up to encase a man, like scales on a fish, the way blood dries brown and not red and how it flakes, how even if you scrub at it with a wet cloth it still comes off in flakes, a snake giving way to new skin, the dark giving way to red and pink and white.
She does not expect to find that under his shirt, his pants. She expects to find a man whole, a man, lazy as this one seems, clean and relatively unburdened.
The way he looks at her, she thinks, is akin to the opposite, a paradox. Bill looks at her like she is a mystery, that he doesn’t understand her in the slightest and is unsure whether he wants to know her or not, if there’s any value to be had in such a discovery. But at the same time, there’s that slant to his eyes, the uptick to the corner of his mouth as he slots his cigarette between his lips and his chest expands on a long inhale; he looks at her like he knows her, like he has known all women, that under her clothes are a pair of tits and a wet gash between her legs for him to claim as his own, and that’s all. That’s all any woman is, all any woman wants is him, that space between his legs and hers, and a frenetic union that lasts for that limited stretch of time bearable for the both of them. Alice knows that look, would say she has grown accustomed to it and would go on to blame the war, but that’s not entirely true. She knew it before she left. Men like to look at women like that. And maybe a woman likes it when a man looks and expects the bare minimum. Maybe she likes that.
What you staring at, she finally asks. He shakes his head slightly, a dim smile, and he takes a large gulp of the coffee, grimaces.
You don’t got any sugar, do you? he asks, and she glares. She reaches for the small bowl of it and passes it to him anyway. Their fingers brush over the porcelain, his large and dry, and her own cold and thin. Goddamn, he mutters as he scoops first one spoonful and then another into his coffee and stirs. Amazing how much you miss such basic shit like this.
Alice doesn’t say anything to that, doesn’t really see it as a statement that needs a reply. He does this sometimes, she has found. He’ll make these small statements referencing the war, and she imagines they are not as innocent as they seem. He’s ferreting her out. He wants to see what she’d say in response. Oh yes, maybe she’d say, I remember that and it was terrible. War is terrible, war is hell, and isn’t it nice to be home. Or maybe he wouldn’t expect her to say that. Maybe he met some of those nurses over in the Pacific, and maybe they were so kind and so gentle and that could be what he wants from her too, but she doubts it. If he wants commiseration, if he wants to chat about the war, well, she’s not the one for that, not right now.
VII. THE BLOOD
Got in a fight, he tells her, his voice congested, blood dried along the bridge of his nose and caked above his lip.
I can see that, she says. Come in. Come on.
He reaches for her and his knuckles are bruised, oozing red. Jesus, she sighs. Let me get some gauze - go on, sit down.
He grabs for her wrist anyway, even after she has turned her back to him, the small apartment dark and yawning in front of her. His fingers sweat against her skin, the grip strong, but she shakes him off.
Come on, she says again. When she looks over her shoulder he looks at her like he wants to still be touching her. She shakes that off too, and the bare lightbulb in her bathroom isn’t bright enough and the bottle of iodine isn’t in her medicine cabinet. The shuffle of his boots against the wood floor can be heard, and Alice leans forward on her knees, rests her forehead on her hands which clasp the lip of the sink, the search for gauze and anything else she owns abandoned for the moment.
Sit down, she calls to him, and after a beat, a chair scrapes across the floor and he sighs.
Why’d you do it?
Why did I do what? Alice asks, a hand on her hip and Bill slumped in a chair at her kitchen table.
The nurse thing. The Army. You went to fuckin Africa. Why, he sighs, would you do that.
I don’t know, she says quietly, her eyes trained on the wall. She knows he’s still looking at her, she can feel it, but she doesn’t look away from the wall. I wanted to do it, she says.
Alice sits down with him at the table, the wet rag with his blood on it still in her hand. She never did ask him about the fight; she finds she doesn’t really care.
My brother died just after the Japs hit Pearl Harbor. Bill’s eyes narrow and he looks on the point of speaking, so Alice shakes her head. No, not because of it or anything like that. It was a few days before Christmas and he was in New York. Our parents had a brownstone there, and he was staying in it, had been for awhile, and he was driving, and, God, he was always such a terrible driver - Manhattan certainly didn’t help that. And I don’t know - maybe there was some ice, maybe the car in front of his stopped, pulled out, but there was an accident and he died. She snaps her fingers. You’re here, and then you’re gone. It’s such a rotten cliche. Alice smiles small and looks at him, the frown on his face, the angry gash across his nose, the split lip.
I know what you’re thinking, she says, and that’s not it. I didn’t do this for him. She laughs, a rueful puff of air. Jesus, Charlie never would have wanted the war, never. But he died, and come the new year I found myself downtown in Philadelphia signing up at the Army office.
You say it like you’re still doing it. Like it’s somethin that’s still happening.
You don’t think it is? she asks, his face swollen and bruised, the rag in her hand smeared with him.
I don’t think you’re any more of a nurse right now than I am a soldier. It’s all shit in the past, shit that’s come and gone.
She looks to the bottle of iodine sitting on the kitchen table between them, the roll of gauze and scissors next to it. She arches an eyebrow but she doesn’t say anything. Neither does he.
The Wheaton family was never anything vaguely respectable. That development came recent, came in with her Daddy’s money and the fortune he made out of a plot of land run thick and deep with oil. That black slime came to cover everything, became their everything, and when the Governor sent her father to the Washington, D.C., her mother was big with Evelyn. Evelyn was born in a Washington hospital, as were the rest of her mother’s children - Charlie and Jacqueline last, Alice in between. Alice didn’t know those Texas summers the way her father did, the way her mother loved them. Her mother’s people still had a ranch out there, a ranch with a well buried deep into dry ground, and her Daddy’s people had the black sludge and the new house in Houston with the white crown molding in the kitchen and the housekeeper named Fanny who kept them in sausage and grits and a clean household.
Alice and her sisters, her brother, they never knew different. They knew the big house on Massachusetts Avenue, they came to know the house Daddy bought in New York and the other house he had in Philadelphia. They never knew Texas and they never knew the dirt of the front yard of the small house her Daddy bought first, the first in the chain of property owned. He never did sell that house and no one ever did come and live in it. They drilled deep around it and it became a canteen of sorts for all the oilmen that came through, sweaty and greased, dirty boots and dirty hands passing over the pink tiled floor and the new windows they put in when they thought this was going to be home.
When he kisses her, an eventuality that breaches its limit, his lip is still split and the taste of blood gets in her mouth, colorful, of rust, and it makes her hands stutter down his chest. She knows that taste. She’s been here before - been so scared she bit the inside of her cheek hard enough to draw blood, too sharp behind her teeth. He tastes like that, his lips dry and his face bruised, but he’s reaching for her, he’s guiding into the kiss, so she opens her mouth to him - his tongue thick and hot, muscle twisting with her own. He is humming what sounds like pleasure against her mouth, the sound low and guttural, and she can feel it in his chest, his ribcage pressed tight against her own, the edge of the sink uncomfortable at her lower back.
Alice doesn’t know what she expected of Bill. There’s a quietness and a remoteness to him she doesn’t usually know what to do with, but this is different. This is angry and passionate, his hands everywhere, his hands fighting to climb inside her and stay there, the way he moves against her desperate and hungry, and the most shocking part of it all is that she is behaving just the same - her hands in his hair, her hands pulling at him, her teeth biting at his bloodied lip.
She gasps a little, her legs spread and his hand pushing up under her skirt. His eyes are open and on her, one hand cradling her jaw and the other flat and hot against the skin of her thigh.
Tell me to stop, he mutters, and Alice begins to feel nervous. Is that a challenge? she wonders. Tell him to stop and see if he stops. Ask her to tell him to stop and see if she does, see if she really wants this.
Why would I do that, she asks and the evenness of her voice surprises her. It surprises him too; he cocks his head a little, looks down at her, his hand raising higher on her thigh.
He stops at the lace edge of her knickers, the fabric flimsy and delicate under his thumb, between his fingers as he slides his third and fourth fingers under the fabric and under the lace, the tips of this fingers hot against that line of skin, the triumvirate of thigh and hip and groin.
VIII. HOOSIER
It isn’t an event he would ever use as a self-identifying moment, but Hoosier was never the sort to have a history of self-identifying moments. It made sense at the time. It made sense. How many times had that justification surfaced? They never speak of it. It was just something that happened, and what he will never know is the stock Leckie took in that moment, and no, not just that moment, a collection of moments he thought made a larger picture, something tangible and concrete a man can cling to when future events have stripped a man of that original feeling. If Hoosier knew this, he would say, you’re wrong. It don’t work that way. You got this and you got that, and sometimes you have this and that, but it don’t add up to much at all. You try to add it up and you get a goddamned mess.
And maybe there is more to this idea than just the island, maybe it was only Hoosier who believed in it - that you don’t look back. There’s nothing waiting for you back there but what you managed to escape, more or less intact. Why return to that. Why reach back for all that pain and all that suffering, mindless even then. Aint nothing good there. Aint nothing there but dirt and shit to leave a man wanting.
A man wanting. Maybe that’s what happened. Maybe he was once a man wanting, still is a man wanting, but he has always been a man to take what he wants.
(Leckie started this, a detail that is a little surprising since of their misfit crew Hoosier always came across as the most debauched of them all, and maybe he is, maybe, but in that instance it had been Leckie who reached for him. Leckie, with his dirty hands and his tired eyes, the mud scratched across his neck, dried and crumbling, and when their mouths did inevitably meet, they shared the same dank, earthy taste, a taste of the swamp and jungle, an island locale in revolt, taking over the both of them, making them, this, as much a part of the war and as much a part of the geography as the gunfire, the blood, the endless stretch and suck of mud. They only did this once. It was only the one time. Their clothes had stuck to their sweat-drenched skin and everything about each other felt wrong and wet. Hoosier had never tasted a man before, and he thought the same could be said of Leckie - they mirrored each other as though caught in a dance, two men fighting for the lead, a position they had only ever known.)
You, Leckie said, want to know what it feels like to be loved. And that’s a damn fine hard thing to know if you’ve never loved.
The fuck you sayin? Hoosier asked, mouth clamped tight around a cigarette and it bobbed as he spoke, ash sprinkling down onto his stained dungarees.
He told him this in Melbourne. The sun was warm and not hot, and Leckie was still in love with Stella, still in love with Vera, still in love with the world in that needy, destructive way of his. Hoosier never got that - loving the things that are only ever going to bring you down.
You’re drunk, Alice says into his mouth. He doesn’t deny it, he just licks around her mouth and bites at her bottom lip. You’re drunk, she says again, her hands insistent against his chest. She doesn’t know if she is trying to push him away or trying to hold him still, but her fingers thread into his shirt, her nails scratching at his skin through the thin fabric, and he sighs. He had bourbon tonight. She can taste it in the hollows of his mouth, as her tongue slides over the inside of his cheek, around and under his tongue. There’s the taste of smoke there too, old and thick and male, and he tips her head back, pulls at her hair and lengths her neck - their noses bump, and his mouth is open just before hers, just out of reach.
Yeah, he drawls, I’m a goddamn drunk. She doesn’t correct him. She doesn’t tell him that she wasn’t calling him a goddamn drunk. She was telling him that he was drunk, that the only reason he has a hand knotted in her hair and her body bending under his, is because he is drunk.
Instead she tries to look him in the eye. She tries to catch his eye, but he’s looking at her mouth. She raises up on the tips of her toes then, her hand light along the side of his neck and she kisses him. She kisses him, her lips barely brushing his, and if she means something by that, she means something. She never kisses him first. It’s always him, always him with the taste of the night on his mouth as he descends on her, the door to her apartment not even closed, the handle biting into her skin, the curve of her hip, the small of her back. He kisses like he wants to eat her, that there’s something inside her that is rightfully his and if he kisses her hard enough, if he shakes her, he’ll find it.
She reaches for him again, the tip of her tongue against his bottom lip, his bottom teeth; his fingers tighten in her hair, brutal against her hip, but he doesn’t kiss her back. His mouth opens a little wider, invites her in, and she says his name. She says, Bill.
He says, Alice. He says her name, and it is the saddest thing she has ever heard.
It’s probably why she says what she says next, why she draws her body away from his and leans back against the wall, his fingers snagging in her hair as she slips away, the hand at her hip falling away. No part of them touches and his face is unreadable, eyes hooded and mouth still parted.
She nods towards her door, the key still in the lock. You gonna come in? she asks.
He raises his chin and looks down at her. You want me to come in? he parries back.
She braces herself, stands that much straighter - her shoulders pressed to the wall but her back arched away, arched towards him. Yes, she says steadily, pauses. Yes, I want you to come in.
Bill looks like he is turning something around in his head, if she means what he wants her to mean.
Yes, she repeats, but it’s not a repetition, not really. She isn’t repeating the answer she voiced before - she is answering the unasked. I want you, come on, she says quietly.
He moves to the door, turns the key and opens it - the hinges whine in protest and he waits for her there, his body filling the doorframe. She runs her hand down the length of his back as she passes him, and he shuts the door behind them.
He’s steady with her in the bedroom, and she had not anticipated that. Every time before that he had kissed her it was rough and needy, but alone with him, the bed hitting the backs of her knees, she’s the one trying to claw under his collar, her fingers running over the sparse chest hair. He doesn’t begin to lose himself until she takes to her knees and takes him in her mouth.
IX. THE DOLL
A strand of her blonde hair catches on her bottom lip as Alice raises her face to yours. She’s a wretchedly skinny and pale thing, pale enough that it makes you doubt her word on Africa, and you like that, you like the idea that she has lied to you, that she’s lied this entire time and the only thing worth knowing about her is that you can’t trust a damn word that leaves that bitten mouth of hers. She pulls her dress over her head and you watch the way the bones of her chest ripple under her skin, the sternum and ribs, you know that much, but you know that she knows more - that she must have learned charts and must have mapped this out before they pushed her onto a boat and said, best luck. No one said best luck to you before you played follow the leader off the shore and into the great blue of the Pacific, but you are sure someone would have said it to her - her blonde hair still clean and curled, her lips pressed with wax and red. She would have made a very pretty nurse. You don’t think she would now though. Her mouth has gone too cruel.
Here is a body, you think. Here is a body and you can take it, you can animate it as you wish, bend it and crack it open, see if that mouth you tried to eat of hers was only hiding lies, so you do, so that’s what you’re going to do - string her up like a puppet and ride her, make her ride you, and if that’s not power, you don’t know what is.
You don’t have the nightmares you know she’s itching to ask you about. You know she wants to tell you, I’ve seen it before, I’ve seen what war does to men like you, but no, no, no, you think - you’ve got her arm under your hand now, you can wrap your fingers clean ‘round her upper arm and she doesn’t flinch, not even when you squeeze, not even when it’s just your fist and the bone, she opens her mouth but she doesn’t flinch - that ain’t right at all. That open mouth and those black eyes, she doesn’t give a fuck, she doesn’t give a fuck about you, not unless you’re going to fill her, and you are. That must be why she has opened her mouth, her bones and your fists.
(And she is so wet under your hand, squirming as you pry and press, wet under your hand like ripe fruit cleaved open to drip.)
X. ALICE
You always had steady hands. They do not begin to shake and betray you until you are back here, back home, the term home used loosely at best. You are slicing an apple the first time you notice it - the knife unsteady against the shining red skin of the fruit. You withdrew your hand and then moved to slice again, but the tremor was still there, small and slight, something a person would only ever notice of himself.
You cut that apple into six even pieces and even though your hands shook the entire time you handled the knife sure enough. You want to know when this started to happen. You want to know the exact moment your hands began to shake, a minute mutiny against yourself and the order of things, the structure of the human body, a nervous system cloaked in blood and tissue.
Maybe it started right then and there, the apple and the knife, and as the wood handle fit into the curve of your hand the muscles reacted. The nerves failed. Suddenly your fingers were shaking and it was because of that apple, perfectly ripe, and that knife, dulled and blunt, not sharp enough.
The apple was nice and red. Even after you cut it, even after you marveled at the way your fingers danced lightly on nothing but air, a tectonic shift all its own, you ate each and every slice. It was delicious, you thought, and with each bite the red skin made a cracking sound.
XI.
You wrote a letter home and then you left it in the snow. You think it got lost after that, the wet snow making the ink bleed, become unintelligible, just like that private you watched writhe and shriek, the better part of a piece of shrapnel embedded in his chest, the snow under him gone first red then brown and bloodied black.
A lot of good boys died like that, wet with themselves and gibberish on their tongue. It’s a hell of an exit, and maybe makes a macabre sort of sense - leave this bullshit nonsense world with the same spewing from your mouth.
You wrote a letter and what you said was - it is cold and I am cold, I hope you’re not cold, too. It was a terrible fucking letter, and you wondered if the censors would have had a problem with that - he says it’s cold, sir: would you say that’s too telling? Your parents would have received a letter and all it would have read is it is and I am, I hope you’re not. That is if you were writing to your parents at all.
(Do you have parents? Everyone has parents. Everyone had parents. Is that the operative word you use? Did you leave them in California? Did you bury them underground? Do they have a sunny bright kitchen where your mother pours orange juice and your father reads the obits over a plate of eggs? Or does your father use the belt and is your mother’s mouth sour and used and that’s why you don’t write to them at all? Did they wish you dead once and now you’re trying to do one good thing and bring that to fruition?)
XII. SHOSANNA
When Shosanna fucked Dieter Hellstrom, when she was fucked by him, he held a gloved hand over her mouth and all he saw when he looked down were her wide, wide eyes. He decided what he saw was fear, and it was. There was fear there, but there was also pleasure, and for that Shosanna had felt ashamed.
You don’t know what it’s like, he spits at her, and Shosanna doesn’t know to what he refers. She doesn’t know what what feels like? It is such a dumb accusation, something a child would shout at a parent, and her opinion of him lessens for that.
She has tasted violence. She has felt the hot rush of it, the way your hand can reach for a gun, the easy way it fits into your hand, even her soft, small hand, the gentle arc of the trigger behind her curled index finger - it is so impossibly easy. The kickback is supposed to be the shock. The kick of the gun as you pop first one round and then another, another, off - it made her shoulders ache for days after, a deep muscle ache she felt all the way to her bones. The turn of her neck or the circle she could draw as she stretched her shoulder - she didn’t know what to call the emotion that would rise up in her: shame or guilt, pride, relief, it was a mess of them all. She had watched the way his blood, deep red, near black in that light, had colored the back of his white jacket.
Shosanna had not hated Fredrick Zoller. But she had not wanted him either.
War creates disposable humans. She has seen that, she has seen to that.
I could break your neck right now, Hellstrom had told her, her body spread under his, a feast and a slaughter she had offered herself up for, and she had asked him: why don’t you? But the words got lost. He wanted another taste of her and the words got lost.
And Joe, this Joe wants to tell her she doesn’t know what it’s like. She wants to hit him for that, but she doesn’t. She keeps her eyes hooded and she keeps her face blank and she does not offer him a glass of wine as she pours from the bottle.
She takes a thick sip from it.
I want to tell you a story, she says to him. He scowls, the boy always scowls, but he rubs at the back of his neck, a nervous gesture, and she knows that means he will stay and listen. He doesn’t sit though. He never sits. He prowls her kitchen, he keeps an eye to the window and the closed door. Her entire apartment is one large room, a bed in the corner and a stove at the opposite end. He is so different from the boy who lives downstairs, that other boy from the war.
Story hour at Chez Vivian? he snorts, and she dismisses it. The wine is too warm in her mouth, but she swallows it.
A family lived in the countryside of France for a time, she starts. They were farmers. Their people that came before they came - they were farmers too. They worked the land, like good farmers do, and they help and feed the village, their neighbors. They were good people, and the people of the village, their neighbors, they were all good people too. But you know, and I know it, that sometimes the bad things happen to the good people.
The look on Joe’s face is guarded, but he is listening to her. He has stopped pacing and his attention is solely on her.
This family, she continues, their name was Dreyfus. And a bad time came, so they did what they could: they hid. And the village, it was a good village, and their neighbors, they were good neighbors, and they help them hide too. When the soldiers would come they would go into the ground. They would hide under the floorboards of their good neighbors’ house and they would wait. You cannot breathe, but you wait.
And it is hard, it is hard to be mad at people during war, especially those people who say they are on your side. Because they say there are rules, but there are not any rules. You do what is best by you, and that is all. They were still good neighbors, good people, but you cannot, you cannot fault them for wanting to live too. It is only when you think the time has come to die that you make the big decision. The bold ones.
This is the most Joe has ever heard her speak at one time. There is a toothpick caught between his teeth, and he stands there, stock still, a hand raised to his mouth but seemingly frozen in the motion.
What happened? he asks her.
She looks him square in the eye, her mouth stained from the dark wine.
The Dreyfus family died, she says, and the good neighbors were left to go free.
XIII. THE FAREWELL
He’s never been the sort of man to understand. You’re a scavenger, Alice told him once, on more than one occasion, and to that he nodded, didn’t see any point in denying it. Alice was wrong though, applied the wrong insult to the right man. He wasn’t a scavenger. He didn’t roam over the dead and take what he thought he needed, what he wanted a taste of from their graying bones. He didn’t do that. If any of them were scavengers, maybe that was her, Alice, the woman who attached herself to the dying, the gloaming, who thought she could give them something with her lips and her mouth and her hands.
Bill wasn’t a scavenger, he just simply couldn’t be bothered.
When he left Baltimore it was without fanfare. He packed his few belongings and he paid Mrs. Botts the rent he owed her and she still smelled of boiled potatoes and unwashed clothing, stiff with dried sweat. You’re leaving us then, she said and he nodded, told her it was about time he got on with the doing of things. What things? she asked him, and he snorted, lit a cigarette and ignored her disparaging frown. Things, he said, vague, but not on purpose, because that was the thing with him - he wasn’t opaque on purpose, he wasn’t trying to hide himself behind this obtuse sketch of a man. He just never saw the purpose of all this talking. Aint gonna get you far. Aint gonna get you much at all.
But he left. He left Baltimore and he left a note under Alice’s door, his cramped, crabbed handwriting. Got places to go, I’m no good here, was all it said. She hated him for that. Hated him something so fierce and so hot she didn’t know what else to do other than rip the note into small pieces. She regretted it near immediately, but she swept the remnants up into her hand deposited them in the trash.
You think that’s how it ends. She thought that was how it ended. You get a glimpse of something, of someone, and then they’re gone. But he wrote her. He wrote her first, and if he cared, if he could be bothered, that would mean something.
I’m assuming you’re still holed up in that shack. Indiana’s just as I left it.
She didn’t rip that letter up.
Alice fucked Joe once.
Sadness is easy. It’s so easy to lose yourself in it, to let that cool tide wash over and then remain, waiting for the next lap of surf the tide will send to shore, to you.
And he fucks like an angry boy, all skinny limbs and open mouth, his hips juddering fast and without rhythm against her own. She wonders if he fucks all women like this, if he is as young as she imagines him to be in this moment. She blames the drink, the stale taste of whiskey on his tongue, a taste that leaks across her skin, his open mouth searching out spots of weakness.
Bill’s been gone for two weeks, and she’d like to say that doesn’t matter.
It doesn’t matter.
XIV.
You met that Nazi on the hill, and he was the only one you ever squared off with like that. Personal. In his face. Did you want an apology? Did you want absolution? Or did you just want to see what pattern his blood would spray on the wall as you fired straight into his face? It isn’t that hard, is it, to hate an idea and by extension hate an entire group of people.
You wished you made that killing shot. You wish it had been you.
You didn’t talk to Webster much for the rest of the day, a sullen heaviness weighing you down. You thought about how he stood there. You thought about all the green around the both of you, the worn green of his uniform, how he had watched you with that mild disappointment, like you were a child throwing a fit at a parent for taking from you what you wanted, what you thought you deserved, and he, an older brother, could only muster disapproval.
This began with that letter you never wrote, that message you never sent.
XV. THE EPILOGUE
Shosanna goes to New York City; she is shot and killed in a botched armed robbery not two months after she moves there. None of the three will be the wiser of it and will merely believe she had slipped away, gone and disappeared just as smoothly as she had entered their lives. She will baffle the New York public for the better part of a news cycle - the mysterious Jane Doe gunned down in an alleyway, her identification fake, no one come forward to claim her as their own.
They’ll forget her just as swiftly.
Years later, Bill mentions Baltimore at the dinner table. I lived there, stretch of time after I got back, he says. Yeah? his wife asks. Where you stay then? You dont got any kin there.
No, he says. I dont. He pauses. I found a place.
It was good for awhile, he says. Pass the yams.
Bill and Alice exchange letters for the duration of their lives. He lies to his wife, tells her it aint nothin, just an old war buddy is all, and Alice’s penmanship, strict and masculine scrawled across the envelope never gives her away.
The letters between them fall off as time intervenes. There’s the chicken scratch at the bottom of a drugstore Christmas card, a late birthday card from her. And then nothing. It would make him sad if he thought to remember it, her, but he doesn’t.
She doesn’t either until one day she sits down and she writes him a letter. She writes him a long letter and she doesn’t pause, not to think, not to correct any mistakes, any misspellings or missing words. She says she’s sorry. She says it a lot, repeating herself across the page, until she finds herself writing - It’s been a real long time, but I’m always still thinking of you.
Alice pauses then, she looks at the words committed to the page. She bites her bottom lip, and then she starts writing again.
He writes her a letter back. He tells her nothing at all, but he talks about his job and his wife, their children, the weather, small town Indiana. He’s been doing some work down at the hardware store, not that you want to hear nothing about that, he says.
He tells her these small things she could have assumed and figured on her own, and she wants to think that coming straight from him that makes them mean a little more, that if she tried she could picture it all a little clearer, but she finds that isn’t true.
Despite the passage of years, she still sees him as that young man sitting outside that brick house in Baltimore. Alice runs a hand over the page. She finds she cannot remember what he said to her that day, but she does remember how the sun had just begun to set, how it was the end of summer, still muggy and humid, but a taste of the cooler weather to come sticky on the air. Sometimes she remembers it as they shared a cigarette, but she knows that wasn’t true, that it would have been a gesture far too intimate for her, though she doubts he’d have felt the same - cigarettes still as currency in those days, a wealth to be shared; the way he continued to smoke those packs of cheap cigarettess, eyes open but vacant, dark, removed to a place she had never been. He doesn’t write to her about that evening or about his cigarettes, if he still smokes (she tells him in a letter once that she has quit, her doctor says so, and she’s never been one to know what to do with guilt, now has she?).
He signs his name Bill, and that’s all. Alice is disappointed, and that mere fact disappoints her in turn, a vicious cycle.
She doesn’t write him again, but another letter arrives for her a month later. He has sold the hardware store - did he tell her he bought the store? he asks, and she remembers - he had. Louise and him are taking the kids up to the lake, he tells her, and truth be told, I get to thinking I should hate the beach more than I do, because goddamn, got nothing but really bad fucking memories of the beach, but guess that’s a Jap beach and aint one of our own then.
I get to forgetting, he writes.
I get to forgetting.
Al, at the bottom it reads, I like hearing from you and I don’t want you stopping on my accord. I don’t talk like that, and you know it. I never been good with that. Alice folds the letter and she keeps it stashed at the bottom of her jewelry box on her dresser. He calls her Al, and it is a single page of scratched out words and smudged ink, but the message is clear.
I know, he goes on to say, I used to wonder too. I still wonder about you a lot sometimes.
(I love you, she had written to him. Past tense doesn’t suit me, not for you.
I love you, )
Dearest,
I can remember the taste of your mouth. It tasted just like mine.
You never sent that letter either. You never even wrote it down.
fin.