Free Those Across the River by Christopher Buehlman

behind one another. I ran past him with a yell, ducking right to avoid the blade-edge of the next man’s shovel, which missed me so nearly I could see individual dirt clots on its surface.
    Then, as in the actual fight, I grabbed the shovel with my free hand and drove my knife for my enemy’s middle. It caught the belt buckle at the wrong angle and torqued out of my hand, spinning into the muck beneath us. I grappled with the German, a boy my age with a simple white face and eyes rimmed red as if he had been fighting fever, bulling him up against the loose trench wall. I was stronger.
    I pried the shovel out of the boy’s grip and it fell, too, and then we fell, bracing our hands against each other’s faces. My little finger slipped inside the boy’s mouth and the boy bit down hard.
    In the real event I had wrestled myself on top of the boy and held his face underwater while the rest of my company rushed past and over us to get at the other Germans, one of whom must have tossed the grenade, a potato-masher. The sound it made was the clanging of St. Michael’s sword on the brain-pan, so loud its noise was an absence of noise.
    The war was over for me, and for several others caught nearby. The doctors said the only reason the shrapnel that entered my back didn’t kill me was because it had to pass through other matter first. I never learned which of my dead friends comprised that other matter. Nor did I learn the fate of the boy beneath me. Had my body saved him from the grenade, or did the weight of it finish drowning him? I knew prisoners had been taken. I liked to imagine the boy was one of them. That he was released after the war. I liked to imagine the boy surviving to robust manhood; my favorite daydream placed him on a farm in Bavaria, teaching a healthy blond son the game of locking middle fingers with an opponent and pulling to see whose grip was stronger.
    The dream was different.
    The boy and I sat up like children playing in the mud.
    Where are your pants, my friend?
    The boy clamped my wrist in an unbreakable grip and bit off the little finger at the knuckle, but he did not stop there.
    He ate every finger I had.
    Dora woke me, kneeling above me, shaking me.
    “Darling, darling, Frankie, Orville Francis,” she was saying.
    I opened my eyes wide.
    “GET OFF ME, STOP, STOP!! FUCK! Fuck. God. Oh God.”
    “You’re alright, it’s me, it’s me, my love, you’re fine.”
    We looked at each other, she kneeling above me in the moonlight, not crying as she used to when this happened.
    How like a Sphinx in her nightgown.
    A man. A man goes on four legs in the morning, two in the afternoon, and uses a cane at night.
    “You’re okay, Frankie. You’re home.”
    She kissed my fingers.
    I jerked my hand away.

CHAPTER NINE
    T HE MORNING LIGHT coming in through the lace curtains did much to restore my constitution. It was a grey light, threatening rain, and the wind was beginning to move in the boughs and under the eaves, but, as I watched Dora comb out her bob of blond hair in the mirror, I felt the unease slipping from me. It was a new day. There was nothing simpler or more healing. France and all its horrors had receded, taking that penny dreadful in the forest with it. Maybe I hadn’t seen the boy at all. My exhaustion and the poor light had made my eyes play tricks on me. The bruises and welts weren’t from stones, but from the little spill I took off Martin’s bicycle. I nearly believed all this revisionism.
    I looked at Dora in the mirror and her reflected eyes met mine, asking, Is it alright now? Have you come back to me? Then her gaze shifted slightly off mine as she noticed the firmness I was developing under the sheet. Yes, I suppose we are fine and well this morning. A smile broadened across her face, taking its time. I got out of bed, holding the sheet before me like a torero’s cape. She liked this game. She backed up, displaying the hairbrush before her in the en garde position, but I moved in