Pittsburgh Flash Fiction Gazette

The days and nights blended together for me until I only saw black. The more we fought, the more I wanted it to stop.  I felt numb inside and I didn’t know what it was to be human anymore, or even worse, what it was to be a man. 

We had just come back from Laos after several days of heavy combat and were told  we had two days of R and R before going back.  I remember wandering through the streets in Ha Tihn looking at people as they tried to carry on with a somewhat normal life, if you could call it that.  

But their eyes held their stories, a brother shot while trying to escape the madness, a sister taken and not seen again, a child trained to do the unthinkable.  I didn=t want to see that right then.  The next few hours were mine and who knew, they might be my last on the wretched place we called earth.  

So I sat down on a crate near the marketplace and closed my eyes, listening to the jumbled tongues, speaking quickly with tiny voices, the sounds of bicycles speeding past, hitting every mud puddle in their wake, and the sifting sound of rice being measured out for sale.  

When I opened my eyes, everything was moving in slow motion and for a moment I thought I was already dead and this was just the passage through which I must travel to reach my final destination, then I saw her.  

Her long black hair was like silk in the night, black and shiny.  Her face was dark, but not as dark as those around her.  There was a beauty about her that made my breath hitch in my chest and I just stared.  The moment her eyes found mine, she too could not look away.  

I suppose we stayed like that for several minutes, both of us speaking words in our heads that only we could hear.  Then it happened.  My feet had me moving toward her until I stood just a few feet away.  

ADo you speak English?@ I asked, continuing to look into her eyesCeyes that were the color of warm coffee filled with cream.  She didn=t answer for a few moments, then she nodded and smiled.    

There we were; two people trapped in the midst of the chaos and ruin, but for those few moments everything else was gone.  I had no hatred of the place I was stuck in and she had no heartbreak over what her homeland had been reduced to.  We were but two souls meeting for the first time, somehow calming the other.  

AMy name is A=nh,@ she said softly, never looking away from me.  

AA=nh.  It means ray of light or light…..light ray,@ I said excitedly.  

I mused at the chances of me meeting someone, a young woman, in that God forsaken place whose name meant >light ray,= and marveled at how ironic that was when my whole world had become so black.