Free Meeks by Julia Holmes

because I had not named him, not called him out? I had fled from the faintest suggestion of the Enemy—his black silhouette, his white phantom breath.
    I climbed back up the steep slope of the ridge to survey my position. I found the harbor and could see more clearly the mysterious ship upon which I had pinned all my hopes—burned out and sunk in the rocky shallows.
    A branch snapped. I spun around, terrified, and aimed my rifle into the trees, but I soon saw that it was only a wild horse regarding me coldly from between the snowy pines of the ridge. I lowered my gun. As if carved from gray ice, as if made of stone and dusted in snow, a ghost horse with black eyes. The horse and I stared at one another, both stock-still. I was thinking only of myself, of my broken heart. I could have regarded this unlikely creature either as a messenger of good tidings or as my enemy, and I felt sorry for myself, because I had thought of him immediately and deeply as an enemy of mine.
    I said, “Fine! You win,” and I threw my camp knife, and it landed near the roots of a pine tree; and I threw my rifle, and it sank into the deep snow. Then I longed for the thin illusion of life that I had always taken to be Life to be displaced by the brutal, enormous, beautiful certainty of something greater, even if I were destroyed in the process. I waited. Nothing happened. The horse sighed, scraped at the snow with his pitch-black hoof.
    There was nothing to do now but return to what I had always known and hope that what I had always known had survived the night.
    I trudged along the ridge until I reached camp—I whistled a much-loved bit of triumphal music along the way; I displayed my empty hands high overhead lest I be shot by the boy from Crippler's Field or any of the other boys.
    "I saw a horse,” I told the commanding officer as I warmed up later beside the low fire crackling in the gray light of the afternoon.
    "That's it? That's all you saw?"
    "That's it."
    "But how did you lose your rifle?"
    "I fell,” I said, “down an embankment. I couldn't find it again in the snow."
    "You're lucky to be alive. Where's your camp knife?"
    I looked searchingly around the camp. “It's here somewhere,” I said and shrugged.
    The commanding officer studied me. “Are you all right, Son?"
    "Just cold,” I said.
    "Buddy, give him your pistol."
    Buddy gave me an assessing look—who was I, and why was he always paying for the stupidity of others? He growled at me under his breath and slapped the pistol into my open palm.
    * * * *
    [Back to Table of Contents]

JULY
    * * * *
    The sea is full of life, indifferent to men,
    Just as the brown legs of the horses seem to pump infinitely—
    Until they are thrown upon the sun.
    Young Man, lay that precious, pounding hear
    of yours upon the table, and see it for what it is:
    A thing that dies in autumn.
    * * * *
    Ben
    "Shouldn't you be out on the town, hanging around people your own age, meeting young women?"
    Ben sat slumped in the infernally hot front window of the tailor's shop. “In this?” he said, and tugged at the wilted, black lapels of his suit.
    "Ben,” warned the tailor.
    Ben watched the butcher working in his shop across the street; he had been gazing into an empty display case for what seemed like hours. Maybe if Ben could emanate private pain through a layer of stoic, cool-headed conversation, the tailor's mind would shift sympathetically in his direction. “I'm sorry,” said Ben. “You're right."
    "Why don't you try to get a suit from the Brothers of Mercy?"
    "Then I might as well not bother! I might as well turn myself over to them now. I'd owe them my life."
    "You'd rather owe me."
    "One suit won't ruin you."
    "Ben, I mean it."
    "Why can't you make an exception?"
    The tailor was cutting squares of fabric into smaller squares. “Every last one of you thinks of yourself as the special case. It's interesting to me how everyone pleads the special case using such generic terms. You all feel