.:ELECTRIC VELOCIPEDE:. The Spaces Between Things by Matthew Kressel

David was in love with his aunt Masha. In the months after his father died, she came over for dinner often. While she ate, he’d watch her chest rise and fall, and for long, uncountable minutes he’d stare at the soft, pink skin of her arms, wanting to run his fingers along her smoothness and squeeze her until he fell asleep. He’d stuff forkfuls of mashed potatoes into his mouth and listen to his mother and aunt talk freely and harshly about people David barely knew. He’d study Masha’s green-within-green eyes, the chocolate folds of her hair, the funny way in which her nose curved just a little bit at the tip, as if God himself had laid a tiny imperfection upon her just to remind the world that she wasn’t an angel. But what most captured David’s attention, what his eyes wandered to as they’d finish dinner and move to the couch for coffee and cake, was the thick, brown leather belt that hugged her waist.

He knew the feelings in his body were the beginnings of manhood. But he was told that boys were supposed to like breasts and lips, butts and legs. And he did like those things—yet he couldn’t help but cross his legs when he saw her stomach bend under the thick leather strap, and nightly he dreamed of her smothering him as the heavy brass buckle pressed painfully into his groin. He pretended to listen to his mother and aunt, learning to nod his head when they looked his way, until he became skilled at predicting the paths of their eyes, at avoiding their gazes. And when the spell of conversation held the women in its thrall, when his mother’s words grew slow and stupid with wine, David stared deeply into the folds of Masha’s belt, studying the images stamped in its sides. He saw flowery jungles with fruit-bearing trees, a dozen birds hanging from limb and sky, and tufts of wavy, leafy vines that tangled throughout. Often, as the women talked, he imagined himself floating inside her belt, unable to escape its secret pull, forced forever to wander under its hot sun and glimpse out at all the world from the two-dimensional confines of her waist.

It was warm and safe there.

And so when his mother said, “Grandpa’s not doing very well. I need you to stay with your Aunt Masha for two weeks,” David nodded his affirmation as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. That year was 2056.

The war exploded in 2071. For fifteen years, David and the rest of the nation had tried to ignore the growing violence, the increasing casualties. But now, mothers willingly sent their children to war, and the nation took up arms against itself. David joined the ranks because he believed he was fighting for the preservation of society, of civilization itself. But as the war progressed and he watched the blood flow in nation-long rivers, he discarded those noble feelings like shed skin; to survive in a realm of pain meant one needed to be plastic.

Smoke billowed from the front lines, seventeen miles to the west, fogging the evening. David stopped his battalion and set up camp under the shadow of the forest. Months had passed since he had to worry about satellites or reconnaissance planes spying overhead. Technology had obsoleted itself; the war had seen to it that neither side had the advantage of the sky. But their electromagnetic detritus was another matter. At the slightest hint of man-made radiation, the Prags would send a volley of projectiles in their direction. David’s men prayed for rain and thunder; an electrical storm meant they could listen to the radio and hear life outside the war.

Perhaps it was just one of those false but uplifting stories the generals used to rouse the troops, but David was told that despite the constant bloodshed, despite the ever-shifting fronts, even though men tossed fire and hell across imaginary borders, simple slips of ink-smeared paper made it through to the other side. It was as if the nation knew, as it had in the past, that History would examine these times, and only by the careful dissection of the era’s most humble letters could the war be truly understood. David warmed himself with these thoughts as he wrote by penlight, trying not to deceive himself too much.

“I imagine you read these letters several times, smelling the paper for hints of gunpowder and smoke, for hints of me. You put them in a little shoebox at the top of your closet, and when the war is over, you’ll show me the box and all my letters, and you’ll tell me how you wrote me every day but the post never got through. We’ll hug and cry and reminisce. The war will be over then.

“You live behind the Western front. The men here call it the ‘river,’ but I prefer to think of it as chalk lines painted onto a sport’s field, all of us players in a stupid game, all of us hoping for one torrential rain that will wash away the borders and remind us that we’re really playing for the same team, that we’re all born from a single, great nation. I read the reports daily to see which cities are under siege, which towns have been obliterated. Your town, Masha, is still there. I pray to God that you are, too.

“I don’t know if I’m going to die tomorrow. So I might as well ask. Do you remember when I first moved in with you? Something happened one morning in your room. Do you remember? I was looking in your closet

“I’m sorry, but it’s almost dawn and I have to ready the troops to move. I’ll write again soon.

Aunt Masha’s house was very different from David’s, and though he had visited many times, his stomach hurt with homesickness when his mother left for the airport. The air smelled funny, like the stale odor of church, and her rooms were filled with dusty books and crooked pieces of art that made no sense. Masha had a spare bedroom next to the tiny den, and she made sure David was settled in before she left him alone.

He looked out the window, its cross-hatch of panes like the bars of a prison-cell. Naked trees groaned in the breeze outside. Moldy leaves covered the yard, and rusty trails dripped from the neighbor’s shingles. He felt barren.

Then Masha came back in. His heart leapt as she sat on the bed next to him and pressed her warm body against his. While her green eyes stared off in daydream he snuck a peek at her waist. For as long as he could remember, she had worn the same brown, jungle-etched belt. But the one she wore today was engraved with a breaking wave curling over a snow capped mountain. A circle with two dots, a Yin-Yang, like the symbol on some of his action-figures, adorned the sky. The earth swarmed with sword-bearing samurai poised for attack, snarling at some unseen enemy.

The scene terrified him, but that thought was quickly quenched by another: Masha had more than one belt. Perhaps, he thought giddily, she had dozens. That night, he held his ear up to the wall, trying to hear her unbuckling it for bed. He only heard the bitter groan of the tree outside as it swayed in the autumn wind.

Sweat clung to David in the bitter silence, punctuated only by an occasional rumble from the Western front. He finished encoding a message to Command, stamped it with a wax seal, then lifted a small birdcage from the corner of the tent. A pigeon, trained to return to Command upon its release, fluttered wildly inside.

“All this damn technology,” he muttered, “and we rely on birds.”

He stuffed the tiny scroll into the pigeon’s pouch, sealed it, and released the bird into the night. He hoped it would find its way home in the fog.

He sat back, took out a penlight, and wrote his aunt under its weak orange glow.

“The Prags pounded us again. It seemed as if they knew where we were going before we did. I didn’t give the battalion a destination until the very last moment, so if we were betrayed by one of our own troops, he or she passed the message instantly. But what I don’t understand is how that’s possible without EM transmitters. Our Techs, so far, have detected nothing. As a precaution, I’ve ordered all the mail searched from now on, including my own. Some Prag could be using the letters to guess our positions. Too many people have died under my command, Masha. I don’t know if I can do this anymore.

“There was this kid, Charlie, eager, hopeful, bright-eyed. You see so little of that now. I don’t usually fraternize with my men, but Charlie was different. Sometimes we’d share a smoke and he’d tell me these wild stories about girls, boozing, life before this hell. And just for a little while, I’d forget about the war and remember how things used to be. He reminded me, just a little bit, of Dad.

“But Charlie... Shrapnel tore off his head four days ago. Funny thing is, I don’t know if I miss the man as much as I miss his stories. When you find something that helps you forget a horrible truth, you don’t want to let it go.”

David stopped writing and quickly tore the letter to shreds; it revealed too much. It would never get through. He tried writing again, but the words wouldn’t come. Sleep was impossible; his nerves were too frayed.

He needed to do something with his hands, so he took the bullets out of his magazine and lined them up on the desk. Then, from his breast pocket he removed a silver one, different from the others; he had memorized this bullet’s barcode, its shape. He remembered the battle of Callous Hill, when that Prag kid, just a boy really, aimed his rifle at David’s face and pulled the trigger. But his rifle jammed. David stared into the boy’s terrified eyes as he lifted his own gun, as his finger pulled the trigger. He watched the boy’s eyes, stark and wide, as the bullet flew across the space between them, almost in slow motion, and pierced his forehead. The boy’s eyes stayed open as his quivering body fell limply to the ground.

His army won that battle; he nodded as they patted his shoulder, as they praised him for a battle well-fought. And while his men wandered the pockmarked field, searching for injured men, “euthanizing” the moaning Prags, he searched too. He found the boy’s body among the arrays of bloody corpses. Here, he thought, I have obliterated myself. He took the jammed bullet out of the boy’s gun—the bullet that was meant for his skull—and held it up in the moonlight.

In his hand was death averted, a second chance.

On that corpse-laden field he promised himself that whenever his hatred of the enemy threatened to consume him, whenever the last cinder of compassion threatened to wink-out from his heart, he would use this shell to remind himself that there were men and women just like him fighting for the other side, really just boys and girls with families and homes and loved ones praying behind newly chalked lines that their children were going to come home.

Rage woke him from his reverie, and he knocked over the stacked bullets. They tumbled in succession like dominoes. But the boy’s golden, Prag bullet remained standing. It shone above all, an enemy victorious.

A weary-eyed soldier entered the tent and delivered the latest missive from Command. David excused him, then broke the letter’s wax seal. Having committed the last cipher to memory, he translated the message in his head: “Prags using unknown intel to deduce troop positions.”

“No shit,” he said.

“Heavy casualties reported in third, seventh, and sixteenth battalions. More expected. Prags using unknown, perhaps ultra-low-EM technology. Report all anomalies to Command. Use cipher QX5. End Message.”

He placed a drop of neutralizer onto the card and watched the paper disintegrate to ash. With a swipe of his hand he sent the golden bullet flying across the tent. But an instant later, he jumped to retrieve it. He apologized to it, kissed it like a hurt lover. Then he placed it securely back in his breast pocket.

Masha took David to the mall one afternoon, and inside a huge department store she offered to buy him new clothes for school.

“Mommy will get me new clothes,” he said.

“But Mommy isn’t... Okay, David.”

She didn’t have to finish the sentence for David to understand. He should get his new clothes while he had the chance because his mother wasn’t coming for him anytime soon. But David wasn’t ready to accept that. Not yet.

The mall’s fluorescent lights were cold and bleak, and the stupid, mesmerized faces of the shoppers around him only added to his feelings of emptiness. He sat on a stool as Masha tried on makeup, as the saleslady, robed like a doctor, painted Masha’s face until she was alien to him, until David felt something not quite like hunger churn in his belly. Who was this woman who sat before him? He didn’t recognize her. It was as if Masha was made of plastic, and the cosmetics, the clothes, the belts that she and everyone wore were all just costumes, lies that everyone told themselves in order to make sense of a world mostly filled with pain.

Then she unbuttoned her shirt and he saw her belt.

He hadn’t seen this one before. It was thick and brown like the others, but stamped with eagles, mountains, and hundreds of shotgun-toting cowboys on galloping horses. And just like the last belt, all the men snarled in one direction, readying for a battle David couldn’t quite see.

As he walked through the department store, her belt’s magic pull sucked him in. He rode with the cowboys; the bright fluorescent lights became the desert sun; the leather reek from the shoe racks became the smell of saddle; the glistening department-store floors became the trickling rivers that weaved through desert canyons.

“How do I look?” she said, trying on a new shirt.

“Beautiful,” he said, staring at her belt.

She asked him to hold a bag on the car ride home, and with his arm around it in the passenger seat he gently touched the side of her belt with the back of his hand. He kept it there for the entire ride home. She looked at him oddly, but if she suspected anything, she didn’t say it.

Late that night, he stared up at his bedroom ceiling, unable to sleep. Through the walls he heard his aunt’s muffled voice.

“I’m sorry he hasn’t got long but... What about your son? He keeps asking for...What?... Are you drunk? ... Look, David needed new clothes for school... No, he wouldn’t let me... He’s waiting for you... Do you want me to wake him so you can tell him that yourself? ... So you want me to lie to him? ... You’re pathetic, June ... Yeah... Yeah... Okay. Goodnight.”

David pulled the covers over his head, but he couldn’t sleep. He tried to imagine what it was that he had done wrong. Only a dirty, misbehaving boy, he thought, would be so unwanted by his mother.

The moon hung over the plains, a lidless eye that made David feel naked and exposed as he lay, bleeding and exhausted, outside the makeshift hospital-tent. Five thousand men and women were moaning or dead under the cold light of the moon while medics and nurses moved among the bodies like maggots. David pushed off doctors as they tried to attend to his wounds. Adrenaline, anger, and morphine kept his pain, for the moment, at bay.

How did they fucking do it? He’d randomly changed his direction several times! No Prag battalion could have changed position so quickly, not without warning! It was almost as if the Prags knew his position before he did.

He needed to find a messenger pigeon. He sat up from his gurney and looked around for a commanding officer.

“Sit back, Sir,” said a nurse. Her eyes dilated wildly in the moonlight as she flitted from patient to patient, hiding the fear that David knew lurked behind her silence. “You’ll need your rest.”

“Where’s General Desmond?” he said. “I need to speak with him now!”

“I’m sorry,” she said, “The General’s dead, Sir.”

“Dead?” he muttered. “What about General Eriksson, is he alive?”

She shook her head as she moved to check a woman’s IV.

“Then who’s in command here? General Matsui?”

She met his eyes and he finally saw her fear. “I think, sir,” she said, “that there’s just you.”

David awoke early to the sound of chirping birds. It was Saturday, and for the first time in the six weeks he’d been living with his aunt he heard the birds sing loudly, as if they were trying to tell him something he couldn’t quite understand. It was seven-thirty, and he rolled out of bed as if ready for school. But there was nothing to do today except relax. As he passed the bathroom he heard the toilet flush, the shower turn on, and a few notes of song escape from Masha’s lips, an echo of the singing birds outside. He stood before the closed door, remembering how she liked to take long showers, how she blow-dried her hair and put on her makeup in long, careful steps, and he realized he was temporarily alone, that he had at least twenty long minutes before she emerged from the bathroom clean and dry.

He glanced toward her bedroom and found the door open. He tip-toed down the hallway as he peered back at the bathroom door to make sure his aunt was still securely inside. Then he stepped into her bedroom, a room slightly larger than his, where tall white curtains dangled from the far wall. A breeze blew from an open window and sent icy chills running over his feet. Her closet doors were open, revealing her jumbled and colorful assortment of clothes. Trembling now, cold and shaking all over, he approached her closet and looked inside. He thought he might find dozens of her belts here, each with a different theme to reflect her changing moods. But, after quickly searching the closet, he found just one, looped around the hanger rod. And he hadn’t seen this one before. Etched into it, hundreds of sword-bearing samurai clashed with gun-toting cowboys. David was so nervous he could barely lift his hand, and when he finally touched the belt an electric surge raced through his heart and settled unexpectedly in his groin. He heard the shower running through the open door and the sound of his blood pumping in his ears, and David thought if he were to put on the belt something magical would happen, that if he wrapped her belt around his waist and closed his eyes he would enfold himself completely in its two-dimensional world and forever escape this universe outside which was so cold.

His heart was beating so fast now that he was seeing spots before his eyes, but he still took the belt from the rack, running his fingers over the intricately carved surface and smelling its cool leather scent that hinted of Masha’s perfume; then he finally wrapped it around his waist and closed the buckle. His penis popped right out of his pajamas’ fly hole, but he didn’t care because it felt so good to close his eyes right there in his aunt’s cold bedroom wearing her leather belt and escaping into the magical flatland that enveloped him. Everything here, he knew, would suddenly and forever make sense. But he heard someone gasp and opened his eyes.

Masha stood there in a white bathrobe, eyes wide, mouth agape, staring for much too long before she said, “David, what the hell are you doing?”

David flinched, turned his body away, unbuckled the belt, and threw it to the floor. He watched it fall as all the good feelings it brought drowned under the shame and embarrassment and most of all hatred toward himself for doing such a disgusting and forbidden thing—for this was perhaps the same reason his mother left him—and as he looked down at the belt that now lay curled and impotent on the floor he saw not sword-bearing samurai or gun-toting cowboys but piles of bones and cracked skulls, all under torn, bloody, and rotten flesh, a landscape dreamt of only in hell, a sky burning with ash and cinder, clouds like mushrooms, and no sun to speak of, as if the belt had mocked him for his utter repulsiveness. He slid by her as fast as he could, not daring to look up into her eyes, and buried himself under his covers, crying until his eyes grew dry. “I’m sorry,” he said to her, to himself.

He heard her footsteps some minutes later, felt her warm body at the foot of his bed, and smelt the flowery shampoo from her hair, but all he could do was press his face deeper into the pillow, trying to make everything disappear.

“David?” she said. “Can I talk to you?”

He felt her hand on his leg. “I’m sorry!” he said.

“I’m not mad at you.”

“No, you’re not! You’re just at that age where certain feelings start to, well, come up.”

David trembled, but he listened.

“I’m really not the one who should tell you about these things.” He peered up at her. She was grimacing, staring out the bedroom door.

“Why not?” he said angrily.

“It’s something your mother should do.”

“But my mom’s not here now. Now there’s just you.”

“I can call your mother and—”

“I promise I’ll never go into your room again. Please, don’t call her. Please just forget about this! Please!”

“Okay, David,” she said as she stood. “I’ll try and forget.”

Maybe it was the morning light, he thought later, and the way it had fallen on the belt in the shadowed room. Maybe there was another belt, sitting on the floor all along that he hadn’t seen. Maybe he was just scared and he imagined it—after all, his blood was pumping loudly in his ears. Or maybe it was the belt itself, the magical flatland, that had rejected him. A repulsive boy whose mother hates him and who sneaks into his aunt’s room and rummages through her closet isn’t in the least bit deserving of happiness or magic.

They hid in a nearby town, a landscape once arrayed with buildings five stories tall. But the homes had long since been reduced to heaps of brick and stone, and the once straight line of the rooftops now bobbed and sagged where the bombs had fallen. The ruggedness of the terrain, the sheer stupidity of hiding in a place that was nearly impossible to traverse, made David choose to bring the last of his troops here; the Prags would think this the most unlikely place for weary soldiers to hide. Nineteen men and women, weak from their wounds, died on the journey. The survivors walked with their unwept tears close to the surface, but no one cried; hardly a soul even talked. Instead they carried on with the weariness of the half-dead. He felt each death more strongly than the last, but he couldn’t leave this final battalion exposed on the plain, not with the Prags so close to destroying them utterly. They made camp in the late afternoon, finding shelter in a still-standing apartment complex.

A young woman paced before David in a small space that might have been a living room before the war, a place where people sat and watched TV, maybe even kissed and made love. But now, the furniture was used to block the shattered windows or was thrown into the street to make room for the soldiers and their equipment. The woman’s name was Joan, and if it wasn’t for the dirt and blood smearing her face and hair, the still-bleeding cuts across her brow and nose, the bags of fear and exhaustion that hung from her eyes, she might have been beautiful.

As she talked, he thought of his Aunt Masha.

“None of our men could have revealed our position to the Prags,” she said.

“No,” David said. His ribs throbbed.

“Maybe a plane?” she said. “Were we tagged with something?”

“Perhaps. But it doesn’t matter anymore.”

“How can the death of fifteen-thousand people not matter?” Joan snapped. “Right now the Prags know they’ve hit us hard. Maybe they’ve defeated us. But they’re not certain. They’re probably combing the entire Eastern front, assessing the damage. It’s only a matter of time before they discover we’re the last of the last. Sir, with all due respect, you can’t make this decision alone.”

“And what would you do?”

“Strike now! Strike fast and hard!”

“We have less than five hundred soldiers. Most of them are in no shape for an assault.”

“We do have one weapon we haven’t used yet.”

David shivered. “No. I won’t do that.”

“What other option do we have?”

“It’s mutual assured destruction. I can’t, I won’t do that to my country.”

“It won’t be our country anymore if the Prags win. You’ve seen what they’re capable of. We’re about to lose, General, and right now we’re sitting ducks, waiting to be found, waiting to die.”

“I’ve had enough death...”

“You took an oath to defend this country against all oppressors! If you don’t act now, you’ll have failed all of us!” And then, as an afterthought. “Sir.”

David knew, in his heart, that she was right.

“You do know the codes, yes?” she asked.

“Then what are you waiting for?”

“I can’t nuke my own country.”

“Then we might as well surrender.”

“There’s one more thing to consider,” he said. He held up a small slip of paper. “This was found in General Matsui’s hand when he died.”

“A missive from Command,” he said. “‘Prags witnessed using technology to send messages back in time,’” David read.

“Bullshit,” she said.

“‘Technology imperfect,’” he continued. “‘Messages smear the further back in time they go, turning into metaphor. Troop positions become the sudden rearrangement of rations in a ration-pack. Troop numbers become the page number of a book blown open to a random page. Metaphor alters with each message. Sender does not perceive the change in his past, but others will notice the shift in reality. Tech is working on counter-prototype. ETA unknown. Report all coincidences and suspected metaphors to Command. Use cipher QL7. End Message.”

For a long moment, they said nothing.

“So you’re right,” David said. “We are sitting ducks. We could be gone from this town for six weeks, and some Prag soldier randomly finds one of our ration packs left behind, and just to be prudent sends a message back in time to his commander, telling him to destroy this building. We can’t defend ourselves from technology like that.”

“You believe that nonsense?” she said. “It’s a Prag trick, trying to confuse and scare us.”

“The cipher was real. It’s an option I have to consider.”

She shook her head. “Look, even if all that time travel nonsense is true, it doesn’t change our situation. Time isn’t on our side. If you’re going to authorize a nuclear strike, you need to do it now.” She walked to the corner and lifted a small birdcage. A gray pigeon fluttered nervously against the thin metal bars. “This is our last messenger bird.”

“We don’t even know if Command still exists,” he said.

“We don’t know that it doesn’t.”

David’s body shook as he brooded. “I need time to think. Give me ten minutes. Alone. I’ll make my decision before then.”

“In ten minutes we could all be dead.”

But he looked into her eyes and showed her, without words, the heavy decision that weighed upon his shoulders.

She nodded. “Ten minutes,” she said.

Spring turned into summer, and David got used to talking to his mother on the telephone. She’d ask him about school and if he was making friends in the new neighborhood. And when he’d ask his mother about the scary reports he’d heard on the radio and TV, she’d tell him that those were just pranksters and fools, that she and Grandpa were safe and sound, that nothing would ever happen to her. So after a while, Masha’s house began to feel like home, and David went about his life as he did before, though he rarely looked at Masha’s belt for fear the hellish landscape would return. But when he did chance a look, he saw that she always wore the original one, the belt with the jungle, trees, flowers, and birds singing under the sun. He never saw the others again.

One night in June, when the days were long and the evenings smelled of honeysuckle and lilac, David played in the front yard with a girl from across the street. Together they caught fireflies in glass jars.

“Put them by your bed when you sleep,” she said. “So they’ll be like a night-light.”

Yet before she went home to her mother she opened her jar and released the insects to the evening. “More for next time,” she said.

And David, too, opened his jar to let the fireflies go. But a stubborn one clung to the side of the glass and would not go free. Fine, he thought, you’ll be my night-light. He snuck the jar into his bedroom and watched the firefly glow as he sat in darkness. But its light soon faded. It probably wanted to be with its family, its mother, so he opened the jar by the window. The insect tumbled out, slammed into the window frame, and came to rest on the ceiling. It was too high for him to reach, even with a chair, so he left the window open, hoping the firefly would find its way home. He fell asleep watching it, waiting for it to light up again.

A few hours later, his aunt entered his room.

“David?” she said.

“David, there’s something I have to tell you.” She sounded sick.

“What’s wrong?” he said.

“David, there’s been an attack. Your mother, Grandpa, the whole town...”

David tried to find her face in the darkness.

“They’re dead, David,” she said, squeezing him. She sobbed and hugged him harder as her words sunk in.

“Mommy?” David said. “She can’t be dead.”

“I’m sorry, David. I’m sorry!”

“It’s not true!” David said. “She said she was coming home soon. She’s coming to get me soon!” He ran out of his bedroom into the kitchen. He picked up the phone and dialed his mother’s number. Masha came running after him. The earpiece chirped like mad birds, two tones repeating over and over again. Masha grabbed the phone from him.

“David,” she said, tears streaming down her face. “Please. They’re gone.” She looked ill and turned towards the trash bin to throw up. The phone fell from her hands, dangling from the spiral cord.

He ran to her. “Masha, I’m scared.”

She wiped her mouth and turned to face him, and her eyes—her green-within-green eyes—had never stared at him with such intensity. She put her hands on his shoulders. “You must remember, David, Mommy’s always with us now. When people love each other, invisible strings grow between them. You could be a million miles apart but you’re still connected. Nothing, not even death, can sever them. If you love someone, David, then there are no spaces between things.”

She led him past the dangling phone still chirping its mad birdsong and back into his bedroom. Then they lay together on the bed, until their tears dried on their cheeks, until Masha fell asleep next to him, her arm around him. But David did not sleep, and instead he stared up at the firefly stuck to the ceiling, hoping it would glow once more to show him that his mother was alive, that she was connected to him by an invisible string. But the insect never glowed, nor did it find its way to the window. It sat motionless on the ceiling for three weeks, until one night, David looked up and saw that it was gone.

“I can’t believe this decision rests in my hands. I know you’ll never receive this letter. It’s more for me to make sense of my thoughts than it is for you. But part of me prays that you will get this. Then you can tell the world why I made my decision.

“I love this country, and I don’t want to destroy it, but I can’t give it up to the Prags. When the war started I believed the propaganda, the lies, the jingoisms. But all the bloodshed, the death has sickened me to that mindlessness. Yet—something stirs in me now, something from those earlier times that reminds me that ideas are worth fighting for, that my hopes for the future cannot die merely because I find myself backed into a corner. I can’t give up, but how can I unleash the unthinkable?

“I can only assume two things. That the message from Command is fake, a Prag trick to confuse us, or that it speaks the truth—that they have the technology to send messages back through time. It seems to me it doesn’t really matter what I do. We’re dead wherever we go. Perhaps the Prags are decoding a message right now that’s telling them where to send a new volley of bombs. Whether it’s from the future or the past is entirely irrelevant.

“I never got to ask you about that one morning when I was living with you. But if I’m going to die soon, I’ll have no other chance. I remember strange things. You had these engraved belts. One was etched with a fertile jungle. One had dozens of samurai, and Mt. Fuji, and a Yin-Yang in the sky. One had cowboys with horses and shotguns. And I saw a fourth belt when I went into your room, one where the samurai were fighting with the cowboys. I put that belt on and you walked in on me. Do you remember? I was so embarrassed that I wanted to die. When you surprised me I threw the belt on the floor, and it changed. I saw bones and blood and hell etched onto its leather.

I’ve thought a lot about that day, wondering how much was real, how much I imagined. I know it sounds childish, but sometimes, with all this death around me, I escaped into the flatland of your belt. In there I found peace.

“It would be wonderful if we really could send messages back in time. I’d use it to stop the war before it ever started. Wouldn’t you? So I’ll imagine this: I’ll imagine that you’ve received all my letters, each and every one. And you will receive this letter soon, and you’ll read about the Prags’ ability to send messages back through time, and how they get smeared, turned into metaphor. And you’ll read carefully as I tell you that I was the one who authorized the nuclear first strike. And you’ll witness the holocaust that results, and after that senseless horror you’ll know that I was the single person who could have prevented that nightmare from starting, but only if I hadn’t authorized that first salvo. And you’ll seek out someone from the Prag army, a General or a Tech, and you’ll tell him of your nephew, General David Shaw, of what I was responsible for, and together you and he will conspire to send me a message, perhaps so far back in time that there will be no mistaking it, to a time and a place and a situation where I can’t deny its authenticity, because until this point I haven’t told a soul about what I saw in your bedroom that day, not even you. What if, Masha, you sent me a warning, a message, not to fire the nukes, not to turn this planet into hell, and that message got smeared, turned into metaphor, landing in the one place where my attention was heavily focused in the past: your leather belt.

“On it I saw East vs. West fight a bloody war, leaving nothing behind but a nuclear wasteland with mushroom clouds in the sky.

“But of course, I could be deceiving myself. Life is full of metaphors. Any one of them could be a message from the future, any one could be a coincidence. Perhaps this is one last fantasy I’ve created to avoid the responsibility that now weighs on my shoulders. I’ve a good imagination. I could have dreamt this up as I sat in the trenches waiting for the bombs to fall, as my friends and comrades died, as I slowly moved up in rank. I have used dreams of my life with you, before the war, dreams of escaping into the flatland around your waist, to hide from the hell that enveloped me daily. Look at me! Even now I’m avoiding my responsibility by writing a letter! And I’m the one who’s to decide the fate of the nation?

“A world run by Prags is no world to live in, but a world destroyed is no world at all. Dear Aunt Masha, what in God’s name should I do?”

David put down his pen and looked out the window at the perfect sky. He thrust his hand into his pockets and out came the golden Prag shell. He held it up to the light. His mother, she never got a second chance, but someone else’s mother would. He neatly folded the letter and inserted it into the pigeon’s neck pouch. He opened the window and, while firmly clasping the bird with both hands, he held it outside. Its head bobbed around excitedly as it scanned the open space. David had to make sure that it wouldn’t fly back inside and get stuck, like the firefly.

“You can finally go home,” he said.

Joan burst into the room as he was holding the bird outside the window frame. She stared at the golden Prag shell on the table and looked up into his eyes. Her eyes were so green, so like Masha’s, eyes that understood without words. The bird-cage, propped before the open window, cast a web-work of shadows all about the room, connecting everything everywhere with invisible strings.

David smiled and let the bird go.

And he kept on smiling even as he heard above the sound of the pigeon’s fluttering wings the horrible whine of incoming Prag shells.