I coughed, and then swore. I had never had broken ribs before but I was willing to bet this was what they felt like. The air tasted like smoke and something boiled too long. A woman crouched near the doorway, her scarf pulled low. She wouldn’t meet my eyes. Poured tea into a tin cup, slid it across the floor. Her hands trembled just once. I drank. It was bitter and sharp, but it was wet. Movement behind her, a tall man that had me trying to sit up. To do what, I wasn’t sure. Defend myself? If they had wanted to kill me they would’ve already. A boy peeked around her skirts. The woman, his mother I assumed, snapped a word and they both vanished.
They fed me thin lentils, hard bread, goat’s milk gone sour. Each mouthful took effort. Still, I lived. Hazel eyes danced in my mind every time I closed my own.
Time blurred. I measured it by the color of the light that slipped through the cracks in the wall. Pale gray meant morning. Orange meant I’d made it another day.
Then the fever came. I floated through nights slick with sweat, the world burning through my skin. Someone pressed cool cloths to my head; another voice hummed low and sad. Once, when I thrashed too hard, rough hands pinned me down until the shaking stopped. My skin, my bones…everything was on fire. But slowly, even that began to fade.
When guests came, I was yanked from the cot and dropped into a pit beneath the floor. They covered me with boards and a blanket that smelled of goats. I lay still, afraid to breathe too loud. Boots thudded overhead, voices trading short, sharp words. One of them laughed. Then the door creaked and silence poured in.
The woman lifted the boards. Her eyes were wide, white in the dark. She touched her chest, then mine. “Shhh.”
I wanted to thank her, but the words stuck in my throat. All I managed was to catch her hand before she pulled away. Her skin was calloused, warm.
For a heartbeat, we just stayed like that. No words. No need for them. Just two people who’d seen too much of what the world could take and still reached out anyway.
Kindred spirits. Survival stripped down to touch and breath. We spoke the same language, even if neither of us could say it.
The days folded into each other. The man mended tools in the yard. The children chased goats through dust that never settled. The smell of smoke never left my skin. When I could finally stand, they bound a stick to my arm as a crutch. I hobbled circles inside the tiny room, ribs aching, leg screaming, but movement felt like proof that I still existed.
I learned the sounds of their language—the rise of laughter, the sharp hiss of warning, the soft murmur used for prayer. I never learned the words.
At night, I lay awake listening to wind slide over the roof. Sometimes a child laughed in her sleep, and it sounded just enough like Holly that my chest cracked open.
“Got to get home,” I’d whisper into the dark. “Got to get home.”
By the third month my beard had gone wild, my hair matted. The woman combed through it once with gentle fingers, muttering, half scolding, half pity. I didn’t stop her.
When strangers came through the village—fighters, traders, it didn’t matter—they hid me again. I’d lie in the pit breathing the heat of the earth, counting heartbeats, thinking of the postcard folded against my chest.
Got to get home.
One morning the man woke me before sunrise. He pressed the stick into my hand, slung a goatskin of water across my shoulders, tucked two rounds of bread and a thin blanket under my arm. He said something low and pointed toward the horizon—mountains smudged purple against the sky. The woman said something soft in a language I didn’t know. The kids just stared. I nodded, because there was nothing else to do. Then I limped into the dark. The first step hurt like hell. The second proved I was still alive.
The air cooled fast once the sun dropped, thin and sharp enough to sting my lungs. I followed the faint thread of a dry riverbed east, the moon bright enough to paint the stones silver. It was marked by a scraggly line on my map. I followed it dutifully, ’cause what the fuck else was I going to do? The wood splint on my leg creaked with every step. Each breath whistled through cracked ribs. Every sound carried for miles, so I learned to move in bursts—thirty paces, stop, listen.
Daylight was the enemy. By dawn, I’d dig myself into whatever shadow I could find, under a shelf of rock, behind a dead bush, and wait out the heat. Sleep came in snatches, shallow and mean. Flies, thirst, fever dreams. Sometimes I’d wake convinced I was still in the wreckage, smell burning metal, hear Sarge yelling my name. Then I’d remember the map scrawled on the back of a rice sack and whisper my only prayer.Got to get home.
The second night I saw lights far off—tiny, trembling, maybe a village. It wasn’t on the map, so I skirted wide around them, afraid of what kind of eyes might be waiting. My canteen was half-empty. My lips split when I swallowed. I chewed the last of the goat jerky until it turned to dust. Swore I would never eat anything goat related ever again. If I could just make it back.
By the third night I was done. My damn leg had swollen twice its size, and the fever was back. I moved because stoppingmeant dying right there in the dirt. But damn if I didn’t fall from time to time and want to stay down. One night, I chewed on some berries I had found that curbed the hunger in my stomach without making me hurl my guts. When the sun started to bleed up over the ridge, I caught the faint scent of smoke—cooking fire, not burning fuel—and forced my body toward it.
The village appeared like a mirage: ten mud-brick houses crouched in the dust, goats tied to posts, laundry rippling in a wind that smelled faintly of cumin. I crawled behind a low wall and stayed there all day, hidden. A boy spotted me once. He froze, eyes wide as moons, then ran. My hair was long, and through the dirt, the blonde peeked through. So I wrapped the ragged bundle that had been my blanket over my head, covering the truth. If I stuck to the shadows, no one glanced at me twice.
I waited until the next dusk before moving again. That’s when I heard it. Voices carried on the wind, the click of metal against metal, a burst of laughter that didn’t belong here. English. I limped toward the sound, every instinct screaming that this could be a trap. But the words were right. Accents I knew.American.
I stepped from the shadows with my hands raised. “Don’t shoot! U.S. Marine! Lance Corporal Jackson Morgan! DOD ID five-three-one-seven-seven—” My voice broke. “Please…please don’t shoot.”
Three figures turned, rifles snapping up. For a moment, the world held its breath.
“Hands where I can see them!” one barked.
“I’m American,” I gasped. “Crash—three months ago. I—”
They glanced at each other, then at me. The one who seemed to be in charge took a step forward, “Name again!”
“Jackson Morgan.” My knees gave out. I hit the dirt, pain lighting up my leg like fire. “Lance Corporal. U.S. Marines. I just want to go home.” I reached slowly for tags still hanging from myneck and held them aloft. They watched, rifles aimed at me as I slowly removed the blanket from my head.
Silence. Then the leader lowered his rifle an inch. “Holy shit…we thought you were dead.”
