She held him as long as she could in their house by the sea. When she wanted to ask him to stay, fear once more stitched her lips closed. He read of mass graves, of torture, and atrocities, and leaving grew in his eyes. Over breakfasts of buttered toast, his untouched, he read to her of mud-spattered corpses, of bright poppies trampled beneath heavy-soled boots, and children crushed the same way, until their skin no longer hid their bones. Her lover read them, and every day carved deeper lines around his mouth, and between his eyes. The papers were full of men and women dying in rain-battered fields. Ten years passed in a single, conjoined heartbeat. He would squeeze her hand, echo her smile with sad patience, and say, Some day. But she found her teeth locked, her lips stitched closed. She’d smiled in return, meaning to answer every time. He’d whispered them in her ear countless times-lying side-by-side in the furrows of their sheets, offered on summer days, spoken in the midst of roof-drumming rainstorms keeping her from her dreams. She knew he was dead, because she’d never spoken the words aloud before. The War that had taken her lover had lost him. They tasted of smoke and ash drifting over a far-distant, muddy field. She woke with the words I love you on her tongue, speaking them aloud to an empty room. Series: The Tales of Gorlen Vizenfirthe.Series: From the Lost Travelers’ Tour Guide.People of Colo(u)r Destroy Science Fiction!.

The Dark House by A.C. Wise