The cloth bag is coarse. Small specks of light shine through it. The rope cuts into my wrists, my injured side rubs on the helicopter’s metal floor and my ears are assaulted with the roaring of motor and wings cutting air. A perpetual series of images flicker across my retinae: my hand on Runner’s chest, the explosion, the noise, the cloud, my hand on Runner’s chest.

I’m numbed by the fear of his death, by hopelessness, by my own failure to be or do the right thing at the right moment. My eyes seem to already forget the beauty of his smile; my tongue cannot recall the taste of his kiss. I try hard to summon images and flavours; I need to see and taste him. So much. Just once. Just this once.

My hand on his chest, his heartbeat within, his hand covering mine and him asking, ‘Are we holding each other hostage?’ — that’s all my mind shows me of him, over and over again. Even when I open my eyes and try to squint through the holes in the fabric that covers my face, I can still see our hands, his broad chest, his dark-brown shirt. 

My words and memories begin to lose their flavours. My mouth seems to fill with ash.

I feel the stirring of something new. Somewhere behind my navel, a knot forms. It’s cold and hard. Comforting in a way. And deadly precise.

———

They have plundered the world, stripping naked the land in their hunger… they are driven by greed, if their enemy be rich; by ambition, if poor… They ravage, they slaughter, they seize by false pretences, and all of this they hail as the construction of empire. And when in their wake nothing remains but a desert, they call that peace.

Tacitus, The Agricola and the Germania