The Language of the Dead by Stephen Kelly

it must be. The RAF man rocked his wings, then circled upward. The German in the Messerschmitt followed.
    The British pilot continued to race skyward so that his plane was nearly perpendicular to the earth. Reaching the apex of his climb, he suddenly maneuvered the plane into a backward loop and headed toward the ground in a steep dive. Lamb wondered if the German had managed to hit the Spitfire, though he saw no smoke coming from the plane. He thought:
He’s going right into the ground.
    But when the pilot was less than a hundred meters from the ground, from death, he suddenly leveled his plane and raced in Lamb’s direction. Incredibly, the German had performed the identical maneuver and continued to follow.
    The Spitfire was perhaps a hundred meters above and moving toward the meadow. A second later, it swept past Lamb at what seemed to him an astounding rate of speed—and yet he’d clearly seen theform of the pilot in the cockpit. The Messerschmitt followed. As the German plane passed Lamb, its guns fired a quick burst; it then swept away to the east. Lamb’s bowels tightened.
    The Spitfire headed sharply upward, trailing gray smoke from its right wing. Once again, when the pilot reached the apex of his climb, he turned his plane into a dive. The plane leveled out and headed back toward Lamb—though as it came on, Lamb saw that that Spitfire was losing altitude and that oily black smoke rippled from the place where the gray smoke had been.
    The fighter roared past Lamb; this time he saw that its cockpit was aflame and caught the merest glimpse of the pilot’s silhouette among the licking fire. He felt dumb, rooted, irrelevant. The plane sped on for a few seconds more before it suddenly nosed down and headed for the ground. It smacked into the earth about three quarters of a mile distant and exploded in a ball of fire that shook the ground on which Lamb was standing.
    He felt his knees give way and, an instant later, he fainted.

    He came to a few seconds later, lying on his back. The first thing he glimpsed was a remnant of the smoke from the burning Spitfire dissipating in the blue sky. He managed to pull himself to his feet. The German swarm had passed and the meadow had become so quiet that Lamb could hear the buzz of insects. He looked in the direction of the place where the Spitfire had disappeared. A dense column of acrid black smoke billowed toward the sky.
    Dead
, he thought.
The boy is dead.
    A memory of Eric Parker’s blackened, lifeless face assailed him. He thought that he should go to the plane, but realized there was nothing he could do. He had no desire to see the wreckage. Cleaning up the mess was someone else’s duty.
    Mildly confounded, he moved back through the wood to his car and drove the rest of the way to Winchester in a daze. Rather thangoing to the nick, he went directly home, to Marjorie. He found her sitting at the kitchen table, sipping tea. She’d just returned from shopping, during which time she’d spent a half hour standing in line to snag a decent-sized cod, which she intended to bake that afternoon for their tea. Lamb’s unexpected entrance startled her. She immediately saw the disquiet in his eyes.
    â€œWhat’s wrong?” she asked. She stood and guided him toward a chair.
    He sat and put his hat on the table. “I had to stop,” he said. “I was on the road, in the open.” He looked at her quizzically. “The Germans didn’t come here, then?”
    â€œNo.” She sat next to him. “Can you tell me about it?”
    Since the bombing had begun, Marjorie knew that Lamb inevitably must face a moment when the war returned to him. During the early years of their marriage, nightmares had disturbed his sleep. In the past decade or so, he’d managed to bury his memories of the Somme in the routines and concerns of his daily life, and the nightmares mostly had ceased. Seeing the stunned look in her