(I go to fight in the fall, my suit pressed and clean, a lingering kiss on my wife’s peaceful cheek.)

When I wake up he is gone. The bed is cold on his side and the early morning light casts a gray tinge about the room. Never has the place seemed so barren. I want to curse and cry, but it would do me no use. Instead I follow my usual routine with a lackadaisical exuberance, painfully aware of the silence in the minute house, the only sound the bubbling of bitter coffee.

I decide to compose my first letter, though he can’t have been gone for more than a few hours.

(We arrive in the middle of the night, unprepared for the carnage that awaited us.)

My eyes burn as I stare down at the broken glass in the sink. It had been an accident, a shock as the vivid blood trickled out of my sliced finger, my ring finger. I turn to call him to get the first aid kit, then silence myself, sucking my breath in as my throat constricts.

The house is empty.

(We wait in the trench. I try to wipe the blood from my eyes, but it is stained in.)

I stare across the table, the food cooling on his plate untouched, imperfect. The clatter of my fork against chipped porcelain is deafening in the silence. The newspapers have piled up outside my door. They will stop delivering soon.

I can’t bear to look.

(I can only hear the singing tune of bullets, the lilting cry of death.)

The rain pounds outside as I wait for the mailman at my doorstep once again, protected by a shallow eave. He knows my name now, though I don’t know his. He is my hope, my salvation; he brings wind of faraway and the chance for the past to resurface in the future.

The ring on my finger blisters.

(My tongue tastes the vile flavor of a rotted corpse—the flavor of my comrades.)

Today I got a letter, but it is not from him. The lettering is typed and formal, unemotional and detached. The inside offers false hops and a sincerity that rips and shreds for one to be okay. I think I’m going to be sick.

I am lost.

(I return in the spring, a paneled box made of plywood my seat.)