Body Surfing

plump-fingered hand. Ileana recognized them as her grandmother’s crucifix, her mother’s, her own.
    “Sergeant Petrovic!” The young soldier practically snapped his heels together. He jerked Ileana’s head back. “I found this outside.”
    The sergeant squinted at the three crosses—Roman Catholic, lacking the second, slanted crossbar of the Orthodox crucifix—then mashed them into a ball as if they were worth nothing more than the silver they were made of, dropped them in his pocket.
    “In the corner.”
    Ileana ran to her mother, who clutched at her, sobbing.
    “Listen to me,” her father said. “We’re nothing. Nothing. I’m no soldier. My son is no soldier. My daughter, my wife, they’re innocent. Please. We have nothing to do with any of this.”
    Only then did the sergeant look up, not at her father, but at the young soldier who’d dragged Ileana inside. Only then did Ileana see the sergeant’s eyes. She gasped. It was as if they belonged to another person. His cheeks were florid, his belly strained at the buttons of his jacket, but his eyes were hard and hot as pulsing coals. They seemed to bore right into the young soldier, who stood up even straighter beneath his commanding officer’s gaze.
    “Corporal Zelimir knows no one is innocent. Isn’t that correct, Corporal?”
    “Da , Sergeant!”
    Perhaps it was the English lessons. Perhaps it was the fact that the soldier couldn’t have been more than twenty or twenty-one, just like her poet. More likely, though, it was just naivete, or stupidity.
    “Zelimir means peace,” Ileana said. “Please. Please, don’t do this.”
    The corporal’s composure cracked, but the sergeant’s eyes held him in place. The expression on the older man’s face was thoughtful, as if he were contemplating what Ileana had said. He didn’t look at her as he unsnapped the flap of his holster, didn’t so much as glance in her direction as he pulled his sidearm out and held it in his palm disdainfully, just like he’d held the crucifixes.
    “Peace?” He spoke to the gun, not Ileana. “Da . Peace.” In one smooth gesture the sergeant shot Ileana’s brother in the forehead, then her father. The two men fell like dominoes onto the flour-coveredfloor, and as the echoes of the gunshot faded from the room her mother’s screams reached Ileana’s ears.
    “Now they are at peace, da , Corporal?”
    “Da , Sergeant!”
    “You,” the sergeant said now, pointing his gun at Ileana’s mother. “Do you still bleed?”
    “What? What do you—”
    The sergeant squeezed the trigger, putting a bullet in Ileana’s mother’s thigh.
    “I said, do you still bleed?”
    Ileana’s mother seemed too stunned to realize she’d been shot. She looked at the dark patch of blood on her leg and then she looked at Ileana. She reached for her daughter’s hands.
    “No,” she whispered. “No, no—”
    Ileana saw the effect of the gunshot before she heard it: a fistful of brain and bits of skull that burst out the side of her mother’s head and splattered against the kitchen wall. Then her mother’s eyes went blank and she fell into the lap of Ileana’s favorite yellow dress.
    The sergeant smiled at Ileana.
    “They are all at peace now, sestra .” He put a hand on the corporal’s shoulder. “Soon he and I will show you a new kind of peace.”

5
    M ohinder had been waving the patient’s file around for the past hour, as if he only had to shake it hard enough and a medical breakthrough would fall out.
    “At Cambridge, I took a lecture on Lorenz. He argued that—”
    Sue bit back a scream. She snatched the folder from her colleague’s hand, resisted the urge to swat him in the face.
    “There’s a reason they call it a briefing .”
    She spun on her heel and clicked her way down the tiled hallway. She thought she might duck out for that cigarette, but she had to pass the examination room to go outside. The sight of the young man visible in the window stopped her in her tracks. He seemed naked beneath the blanket that pooled in his lap, but it wasn’t his smooth brown skin that had stopped her, so much as the fact that it was splattered with blood from cheeks to toes.
    She glanced at Mohinder’s report. Qusay, Mohammed Jr . The EMTs had cut his blood-soaked garments off to treat what they assumed would be multiple lacerations and found—this. Skin smooth as the inside of a walnut shell. Not just unscratched, but unblemished, as if he’d never once had a bicycle