This Is How I'd Love You by Hazel Woods

it slam hard behind him.
    Through the night, as he does every night, Charles smokes. He lies on his cot, reading the letter over and over until he has memorized all of her lines. Even when he’s folded the letter and placed it on his chest, hoping for sleep, he recites her words, seeing in his mind the way they look on the page. He imagines her hand, her fingers, the same black ink here on this paper perhaps staining her fingertips. He tries to imagine the rest of her; he wonders what it is she’s done to label herself deviant .
    He’s spent the last six hours wishing for silence but now that it’s come, he does not feel the relief he thought he would. The latest crop of gassed boys—their continued violation of protocol—have died, each having had the chance to dictate letters home through one of the merciful, fearless nuns. This bit, an opportunity for a last word, is why they continue to defy Foulsom. Charles has made a ritual of standing in the doorway after dinner, listening, as a towheaded soldier, between coughs, entreats his younger brother to take care of their mother, to keep his hands off his girl, and to think of him when he can.
    As always, as punishment, Foulsom will see to it that it is he and Rogerson who drive the boys’ bodies up to Base Hospital #8 at dawn, where there is a morgue and crematorium. Charles can’t help but remember the way the first boys stood outside the relay post, their handkerchiefs held to their faces as if in response to a spring allergy. But, without their knowledge, their bodies had already begun decomposing; their lungs were already stinging from the burn of chlorine gas. There was nothing to be done. They watched their own deaths, feeling the clots of burned tissue against their tongues, gasping for an ever-diminishing supply of breaths. Now Charles wonders at the matter-of-fact nature of all this horror. As he lies here, listening to the quiet, imagining the weight of the body bags that he will lift come morning, he notices that panic no longer hovers around him. The boys’ flesh is now worthless, just waste to dispose of. A job to do. A part of what must be done. The thin line between living and dying that seems to be fading more quickly each day.
    He cannot stand the quiet any longer. He pulls on his pants and walks out, past the medical tents and into the field behind them. There is a long-abandoned barn, its charming shape lost in the darkness, but its white gables like the dim, slow arcs of shooting stars. The letter is still in his hand and he places it against his chest and runs hard and fast into the night so that the paper holds there, stuck to him by the force of air. He runs until his lungs burn and his legs ache. Then he falls onto the cool dirt, looking up at the stars. The perspiration on his chest has glued the letter to him.
    He watches his chest heave, working to keep him alive. The sound of his breath is like a secret code, revealing the meaning of his survival. But it remains undecipherable to his ears. He imagines those hands, those words. They are now his own. What you must do is believe with all your heart that you can come home and when you do, all the horror that surrounds you now will recede into a past that you can leave behind as simply as a train leaves a depot. He wishes she were here beside him, listening to his breath, because for some reason, he is sure that she would be able to decipher this code. He is sure that she could place her hands upon him and tell him something true. But this is yet another fantasy. He is getting so good at living without. Beneath him, the dirt has dried in hard crags after the most recent rain and it digs into his shoulder blades. He sits up.
    Walking back to his tent, he folds the slightly damp letter and holds it between his fingers, letting it swing and crinkle in the midnight breeze. These letters from Mr. Dench are never short on political commentary. Charles suspects that for Mr. Dench, winning the chess game