Free This Is How I'd Love You by Hazel Woods Page A

having inched ever closer to his own, he felt adored. His mother and father didn’t approve and both he and Tux were scolded when Charles appeared for breakfast with Tux’s blond hairs clinging to his navy uniform jacket.
    Charles tries to soothe the horse, speaking the reassurances that come without thought, the blood from his own gash dripping onto the suedelike muzzle of the dying beast.
    Its eyes are black and knowing; its lashes as thick and pretty as any girl’s. Charles lets the horse see the pistol cradled in his other hand.
    “You’ve fought as hard as any of them,” Charles says, sensing that the horse is grateful for the vibrations of his voice. He still whines with each labored breath, but he no longer screams. Charles thinks of all the carts that this creature has pulled across long distances, its regal silhouette providing comfort where there is none.
    Charles presses the chamber firmly against the horse’s forehead as his other hand rests upon the animal’s hot, slick jaw. When his Labrador had developed a tender lump under one ear and he was unable to control his bowels, Charles’s father put him on a lead and took him somewhere across the river. Charles never saw Tux again. His mother brought him the dog’s collar that night as he cried beneath his quilt. She placed the faded leather strap upon his dresser. Then, with her hand on Charles’s forehead, she shushed him. “Suffering is for little boys and the mothers who love them and hate to see them cry. It is not for animals.” Charles can hear his mother’s voice even now as he turns his face away and squeezes the trigger. The sound of the gun cracks and the bullet pushes hard against the horse’s head, yanking it away from Charles, leaving it inches away from his hands.
    Charles suddenly remembers the words from the margin of Mr. Dench’s letter. The horror that surrounds you now will recede into a past that you can leave behind. Does this girl have any idea what it means when she writes the word horror ? Can she possibly know what it might mean to him if she were to recognize his hidden message? Can she possibly imagine that he is thinking of her now, without even knowing her? Thinking of her words just after he’s fired his pistol into this poor horse’s head?
    “I’m sorry,” he says as the blood soundlessly leaks out, soaking through his pants where he kneels. He turns away from the horse and walks back to the truck and replaces the gun in its holster. Wiping his face, wincing at the throbbing he’s just noticed beneath his chin, he backs the King George away from the tree. The engine whistles slightly, a wisp of smoke escaping from the hood. He ignores it and drives on up the darkened hill to where he fears men have already died on account of his delay.
     • • • 
    T hough he continues to aid Charles in his fool’s mission to provide beds for the gassed soldiers from which they may dictate their last words, against the prohibitions of the doctors, Rogerson is loath to load any casualty who can talk. Also, he has started cursing like a soldier.
    “I don’t wanna hear their voices. I just want bodies. Give me blood, guts, shit. I’ll take a man in ten pieces so long as he keeps quiet. If they can talk, they can wait. Or they can die without giving me nightmares.”
    Charles, the memory of the horse’s terrifying moan still fresh in his mind, props his foot on the dashboard. “Would you really have shot those first three? If you’d known, I mean? Before we got them to hospital?”
    The wind whips through the cab, buffering their words with its insistent whoosh. “Do we believe in the Golden Rule during war? Or is there a moratorium on all that?”
    Rogerson lights another cigarette, his habit more and more urgent by the day. “All I know is I’d want you to shoot me, Reid. Put the bloody bullet through my head or my heart and let me go quickly. We heard them coughing out their own rotted lungs. We fucking listened to