Lost Everything by Brian Francis Slattery

everything. See her brother, her brother’s wife, though Merry had never met her. Everyone who had lived in the house, Merry’s parents, her cousins, her aunts and uncles. The grandparents with their knives and rusty frying pans. All of them in the boy, looking out at her. As if the boy was the place where violence ended, where truces were made in soft voices and there was light and warmth all the time, and the only thing Merry had to do to stay there forever was to smile back.

 
    The Highway
    LIEUTENANT TENENBAUM’S SOLDIERS COULD not see out of the truck. The four of them were packed into its back with another, larger unit, bound for Binghamton, and they sat against the walls in tight rows, everyone’s legs touching. The trailer had no windows. The doors had to be bolted shut from the inside. A crack between them let in a line of light and rain. A lantern hanging by a steel cable from the ceiling threw a wan orange glow over them. The highway beneath was slow, fractured into a web of fissures that turned the pavement into a long row of broken teeth, studded with stray rocks. When the truck hit a big pothole, the lantern jumped and smoking oil sputtered to the floor. The nearest soldier smothered the infant flames under his boot. No one else moved, as if they had agreed that they would let each other do as little as possible. In return, they did not have to speak to each other, try to be friends over the loud, shuddering ride, the heat, the sweat. They could each sink into themselves, walk back into their memories before the war, try to put back together who they were, but it was getting harder to do. Every bullet that moved the air near them, the sharp shock from every explosion, scattered their pasts. They could not always find all the pieces later, could not be sure whether their memories were true or pulled from what they wanted to be true, though some had decided that the difference did not matter.
    Ketcher had all the files from the field commander on Sunny Jim and Reverend Bauxite in a leather satchel, dozens of sheets of wrinkled paper, a few blurry photographs, years old. He had not had the time to look at them, and no one else cared enough. Let Ketcher do the homework, Largeman had said. Just tell me what to shoot and I’ll do it. A pause, then a long laugh that made Ketcher and Tenenbaum shiver. Jackson just shook his head. Largeman had been in Baltimore, they had heard. Had done a few things that the army chose to overlook. A good fighting man, they had opined, and said nothing more. And Ketcher did not like it. Even before the war, he had survived on his ability to see into his fellow man. Saw into Tenenbaum within hours of meeting the lieutenant, for she had opened herself to it. Believed being a leader meant being readable, predictable. The shining lines of law that governed the squad emanating from the clear edges of her personality, the things she would not hesitate to do. But Largeman was a blank, a hole in the air. A shark, Ketcher thought then. Soon, he will do something that horrifies us. What will we do then?
    The truck hit something, bounced too hard, blew a tire. The lantern shook and two soldiers had to stamp out fires. The vehicle was limping off the road, heading for a stop, when there was a flash through the cracks between the doors. They did not so much hear the shell as feel it, a concussion that forced its way through their bodies, pushed air from their lungs, moved their bowels. The truck jumped, landed on its wheels again, stopped. Outside, they heard screaming metal, the truck in front of them falling over. Shouts and cries. A long string of shots that prompted more screams, drilled a wavering line of holes in the wall of the trailer above their heads. The soldiers scrambled, unbolted the doors and kicked them open, dropped to the ground as soon as they were out. A few became corpses. The others fired on the side of the highway, where the bullets, the rockets, were coming from. They