❝ –– perhaps it’s true that things can change in a day. and when they do, those few dozen hours, like the salvaged remains of a burned house—the charred clock, the singed photograph, the scorched furniture—must be resurrected from the ruins and examined. and suddenly, they become the bleached bones of a story.
It was not easy. In the army, it was never easy - and at the end of the day, he had so much blood on his hands that he did not know how he could wash it away. Yes, now his skin was clean,pink as it should be, but he still felt his fingers sticky with blood.
He sat by Teddy’s side in the common area, finally allowing himself to take a deep breath, the tiredness seeping through his body. He did not want to close his eyes. He did not want to see more blood.
“Five surgeries. Four corpses, and the fifth could not pass the night.” He bit the inside of his cheek, something he usually did when he felt nervous. “It was a good day.” He added, sarcastically.
Teddy knew the
feeling all too well — seeing fire
behind closed eyes when there was
none, and
knowing fear when there was nothing to be afraid
of. She, too, had held another woman’s child and
watched him
die, knowing it was her fault that
she hadn’t managed to save him.
“Was it a rough one for you, too?” Teddy asked,
her mouth twisting in sympathy. Squeezing
Owen’s arm as he sat down beside her, she
wished for a kinship in their shared regrets that
might make this cruel world just that little bit better.
“There’s just… there’s just so much death.
I never
expected there to be so much d
e a t h when I
got myself into this mess; I thought I’d seen it all
after 9/11.”
Of course, she’d
been m
I s t a k e n . Just as she
thought she’d seen the worst of it, the world
always seemed
adamant in proving Teddy wrong.
Tales of w a r and of waste
plagued her in the
hours between sleeping and waking; they never
let up, and they’d made
sure her hands would
never feel clean again for all the blood that
stained them.
