After the War, Before the Silence

In a city that never quite thawed from its last winter, Elias wandered through the ruins of memory. He was no longer a soldier, yet the war had followed him home, settling into the corners of his mind like smoke that refused to lift. At times he thought the smoke had shape: a face surfacing through the haze, a hint always out of reach.

Each morning, he woke to silence. Thick, accusatory silence.
The kind that asked, What happened during the war?
The kind that stared with eyes that remembered everything he tried to forget.

He moved through the streets of Boston, where the wind bit like regret and buildings loomed like unfinished thoughts. Strings of lights flickered across shop windows, their glow faint against the cold air, as though the season's promise strained to unsettle a memory. He passed others, some running, some grinding in place, their lives idling at the edge of momentum. He saw himself in them: the ones who fled the past, resisted the present, and begged the future for mercy.
Run, the voice inside him said. Run for your life.
But Elias did not run. He walked. Slowly. Like someone tracing the outline of a wound.

One afternoon, he reached the edge of the Charles River and looked into its stillness.
He leaned over the water, expecting his face.
Nothing surfaced. Only the pale underside of clouds sliding past, air drawing tight against his skin.
He shifted, waited. Still nothing that belonged to him.
For a moment, he felt relieved. Then ashamed of the relief. No ripple, no wind, no current. Only silence staring back.
He remembered a line: In war, peace is death. Life is strife.
And he wondered whether the river was alive or merely pretending. The wind rose suddenly, tearing at the water. A wave slapped the stone and soaked his boot. He stepped back, startled.

A child approached, curious, a red scarf trailing from her neck. "Are they days, or are they chances?" she asked, offering a handful of pebbles.
Elias took one from her gloved hands. Smooth, cold, impossibly light.
"They're both," he softly said. "They come to rescue you, or to bury you."
The child looked toward the river and nodded, as though she understood, then moved away.
He closed his hand around the pebble, surprised by how something so small could steady him, and began the slow walk back.

That night, Elias returned to his apartment. Shadows climbed the walls, fleeting shapes of fear and comfort. From the street below, faint carols drifted upward, carried by voices that seemed both near and impossibly far. He set the pebble on the table; it looked no different from the gravel trapped in his boots. He swept it into the trash with the rest.

He opened a drawer he had not touched in years. Inside were a torn photograph of a friend he could not name aloud, a bloodstained letter that smelled faintly of dark earth, and a poem he had written in the trenches. He read it aloud:
A soldier stands between death and me.
The soldier is me.
He wept. Not from sorrow. Not from joy. But from the hollow feeling that had sent him home. The feeling that was everything and nothing.
The grind. The shroud. The tilt.
The lull between breaths.
And then, Elias sat to write instead of walking the city.
The page fills with unfinished sentences.
The drawer stayed open.