Free An End by Paul Hughes Page B

something ineffable. She felt the touch of his mind: such calm, such reassurance. He loved her, she knew, even through her depression, her naps at the kitchen table, the way she would sometimes purposefully drag him painfully around the Catalyst Compound gates. She knew that he understood, and he forgave her for being the young bride of a soldier. He forgave her for giving birth to him, although somehow he knew he fucking knew what that meant for him. He would die somewhere out between the stars, just like his father. He knew, somehow, and she saw that, felt that, in the brief moment of silverthought that he projected at her.
    Hunter nodded.
    She picked him up, held him close, saw the arm of that old ratty bear sticking from underneath the couch, but she said nothing. She knew that he needed that bear more than he needed her most days.
    “Come on. Let’s have some supper.”
    He squeezed her around the neck, and she felt him smile. They went to the kitchen, where she made him a hot dog. He would sleep well that night. She would not. She would be too busy thinking about her husband, somewhere out there in the black. She would think about the days before it began, those simple days when
     
     
    the trucks drove through the town, filled with soldiers with stern faces and jaunty berets and scars and sometimes even blood. In the last days of the war, the trucks drove through the town, stopped for fuel and water and food for the soldiers, and sometimes those soldiers with jaunty berets and stern faces would turn into innocent boys on the wrong continent, just boys with big guns and insatiable appetites both for the local delicacies and the local “delicacies.”
    Helen Lofton did not consider herself a sexual being, besides losing her virginity to an overeager prick when she was sixteen just so that she could get the act over and move on to bigger and better things. She didn’t understand what the big deal about sex was until after the war when the trucks started rolling into town, and the soldiers took over.
    Walking down the street to the cafe, her copy of “The Stillness Between” clasped in the brown leather gloves that concealed her fragile and shaking hands, she turned to look at the rumble that approached from behind, a great olive green military transport, wounded and tired boys hanging from the canvas walls of the back, wrapped in bandages soaked through. Most of the boys stared at her with a nonchalant desire, more concerned about not bleeding out on the trip to the triage than with getting their dicks wet with a local.
    She could feel her heart in her chest, the beats crawling up into her throat and shaking tears into her eyes that threatened to spill over. She was just a schoolgirl holding a paperback on a sidewalk in the dying days of a continental war that had spilled over to include the impossibilities deep within the planet. These boys had been to the front. They had seen their own torn apart by silver fire and armies of light. She felt so young. So sanitized. In their eyes, she saw the human condition in these fading years: resignation and submission to a higher power.
    “Excuse me?”
    She turned and looked into him then, those engulfing, all-encompassing eyes that reached out at her, and she felt the touch for the first time, the touch of those exposed to the creature at the center of the world. He was in bloodied battle dress, dirt-caked face the perfect canvas upon which his blue-white eyes were painted.
    She was horrified to find her voice locked up just as her hands often would, and she stumbled over nonsense syllables before she finally found her eloquence again. “What?”
    He grinned. He was holding something in his hand, two somethings that she identified as envelopes. Letters. Dirty white envelopes held in outstretched soldier grasp.
    “I’m sorry, but... Could you mail these for me? I don’t know if—”
    The concussion of the explosion threw them both to the ground as shrapnel tore apart