Love is Always Write Anthology Volume 10

solemnly than is their habit, probably because he's a young man and a handsome man, with a coloring that strikes them as mildly exotic. He's as pale as they are, but without a trace of pink to his cheeks: pale like white smoke, pale like a talking pictures idol, and his hair is auburn and his eyes are grey as ice in twilight.
    The officer climbs into the sidecar of his motorcycle and gestures to his black-gloved driver. They pull ahead to lead the convoy off to Lake Laatokka, and as they take position, the roaring beast of a motorcycle kicks a streak of mud onto the side of Joseph's truck.
    Some mud flies through a gap in the side slats and onto the cheek of a young nurse. Joseph presses a handkerchief into her hand and offers a consolation in his competent, but awkwardly proper Finnish. She blushes. Their exchange stirs something sad in me, and I try to puzzle out why . I want Joseph to be happy—I always want him to be happy—but I also have a foreboding that nothing good can come out of this war, that anything that even hints of love will turn to ashes by the end.
    Distant rifle fire sounds. Smiles vanish. The truck engines still. The rifle fire grows louder.
    "We're behind the line," says a woman next to Joseph. "This can't be."
    "Partisans," whispers another.
    Joseph tightens his shoulders but displays no other sign of emotion.
    I told you not to follow.
    He feels death before he sees it. It's in the shuddering of the truck suspension, in the whine of metal against metal scraping beneath them as the driver executes a desperate three-point turn. "Get down!" Joseph shouts in English, forgetting himself, but the nurses are already hunching down, piling on top of each other, on top of Joseph. Bullets rip apart the top slats of the truck walls, scattering splinters.
    I raise my arms to cover and protect. They're wish-arms, desire-arms, but I never stop hoping that they'll be real, and what better time than in the thick of battle?
    To be real—to be hit by these bullets, but maybe to save someone from them, too.
    To save Joseph?
    No. Because that's not my damn job. Humans like Joseph, born without a distinct purpose, they can do what they like, but I'm not human. I'm tied to Joseph, but I'm not like him. I have a purpose, and my purpose is...
    My purpose...
    Finnish soldiers rush over and begin to pull nurses out from the truck, directing them into the next one over, one with metal sides. I know our driver is dead. Death, to me, is like the sound immediately after an ice cube falls into warm water—that irreversible moment of fracture.
    Most of the nurses slide out, hunch down, scramble away. Some have frozen in fear. The Soviet Army sometimes takes prisoners, but everyone knows their partisans have no mercy.
    Joseph pushes one of the fear-struck into the arms of a Finnish soldier. A friend pulls her down to the ground, and they're off, all three of them, leaving Joseph alone.
    A year and a half ago, he would have welcomed the chance for contact with the Soviets. To tell their story. He speaks good Russian and has more than a little sympathy for their political philosophy, having written for the Daily Worker in the past. Although the Winter War did not exactly change his beliefs, it changed his estimation of the relevancy of such beliefs.
    A bullet punches through a wooden slat not six inches from his face.
    The metal-sided truck executes a successful turn. Women scream at Joseph to join them. He launches himself out the back. His right leg gives way, as he knew it would, but he pushes to his feet with the aid of the cane, reaches out to their grasping hands—
    A fresh volley of bullets. The young woman he gave a handkerchief to—she's hanging from the back, and she's hit. There's a line of black buttons down the front of her blue dress, and a messy row of little red holes cuts across it. Another fracture in my world. I'm sorry , I want to say to her. Is there someone like me—someone nameless, disembodied, who wears the dead nurse's face—here now, watching... waiting?
    Joseph dives face down on the ground, taking cover. The truck retreats, picking up speed. Its rear wheels bite into the wet, loose earth of the forest path, spraying mud in high, frantic arcs. It fishtails and takes away, leaving Joseph behind.
    Leaving Joseph behind.
    Maybe this is why I'm here now, and have been here these past days. What I've been waiting for.
    I see the partisans now. They've ridden through the forest on horseback. Their