Our bed was a flat rock that hung from the side of the hill above the town. Frost drifted in the air like fleece. We dared not light a fire though the night sky now cavorted with the flames of our day’s work behind the hill. Even with eyes fast shut we peered into a vast black vacuum burning. A crescendo of blood pulsed through our temples. Tongues too dry for kisses, hands too rough to caress, eyes too hurt to open. Blood on our belts. And sperm. Afterbirth and all the bare remnants of lust and rage gone cold within us. Comradeship drumming in our brains, acts shared at the limit of life, extremes we saw, unrepeatable acts perpetrated on the marches. And under the pounding of the blood, drawn like a long cord through our veins and arteries, always the thin elastic whimper of a woman capitulating when the soldiers came to town. And on the march, together, we craved this, and more of this. Though tonight, the two of us had come adrift, and small against the sky lay with camouflaged legs entwined for warmth like lovers, shivering and lost, while slowly the frost and mist wrapped themselves gently about us like chiffon on the breeze. In the morning I awoke with bloodstains draped like lead laurels unearned around my neck as the sun boiled the dew from your hair. Our shroud of smoke laid its pall on the emerging day and I walked tall and seeming proud while cold and guilty you still lay. Somewhere not too far from there a woman rose with a choice of children wasting in her womb and on her clothes. Perhaps she tore her hair like flowers from a grave she could not mourn. And I walked tall as soldiers do. And you still lay and burned away with the morning dew.