The Ashes of Forgotten Skies

Here, in this necropolis of brick and memory,
His boots sank deep as regret into the mud,
Each step a dirge for cobblestones that knew
The weight of market carts, not cannonfire.
A tattered banner clung to its pole—
Some patriot’s ghost still refusing to fall—
While crows convened in conclaves overhead,
Debating which morsel of ruin tasted most
Like freedom.

* * *

He found her where the river forgot its name,
Bent like a willow over fractured steps,
Her fingers tracing names carved in the well-wall—
“They drank here,” she said, not turning,
“When the square still rang with flutes, not shrapnel.
See? ‘Martha & James’—sunlight through apple blossoms.
‘Henry’—a boy who traded his kite for a rifle.
All these hands…” Her voice dissolved in the wind
That carried ashes of ledgers, love notes, laws.

When their eyes met, the world split in two—
One half the present, raw and gnawing,
One half a dream of unlocked doors:
Her hair, the chestnut of a pre-war autumn,
Her apron smudged with remedies and mortar,
A scent of thyme clinging to her sleeves
Like the last stanza of a burnt poem.

“You’ve come back,” she said, and in four syllables
He heard the question sheathed within—
For whom? For what? For how long?

* * *

Nights, they met where the library’s carcass
Housed a colony of moths and memories.
By candle stub, he read her verses
Scratched on plaster with a surgeon’s hand
(Her father’s trade, now lost to gangrene
And the grave’s arithmetic).
Shelley’s skylark, Donne’s compasses—
Lines they mouthed like communion wafers,
Their breath mingling with dust of Plato,
Austen, Blake—dead mentors to their living treason.

Forbidden? Yes. The town’s surviving tongues
Still wagged like pendulums counting sin:
A veteran’s honor, a healer’s pledge,
Both sworn to mend, not rend, the fragile peace.
Her betrothed (a carpenter turned gravedigger)
Carved little crosses as he waited,
Whittling his patience into tiny wooden chains.

* * *

August arrived—a month that reeked of peaches
Rotting unpicked in abandoned orchards.
In the clocktower’s carcass (hands frozen
At the hour the first bomb fell), she pressed
A map against his chest—
“North,” she breathed, “where pines guard secrets.
A cabin… I’ve stockpiled bread, a rifle—”

He kissed her then, a clash of desperation
And dented silver flask (his father’s,
Engraved with eagles now wingless and blind).
“And become ghosts?” he asked. “Let our love
Be another casualty filed in the mayor’s ledger?
No—I’ll petition him, your father’s friend—
There are laws—”

“Laws…” Her laugh was bitter sage.
“What court still stands but the court of rifles?
The mayor trades in daughters, not justice.
My price? Six milk goats, a wagon of nails.
Love, in this arithmetic, is a deficit.”

* * *

Dawn found him at the mansion’s scarred gates,
Where ivy strangled the crest above the door.
The mayor received him amidst splintered opulence,
Sipping wine from a goblet stamped with someone’s
Stolen coat of arms. “Ah, the hero returns!
We’ve a need for strong backs at the mill—
Unless,” his smile slithered, “you’ve other… assets?”

When the name tore from his lips like a musket’s cough,
The room grew cold. A portrait watched—
Some ancestor’s eyes, blue and glacial.
“Her?” The mayor’s ring clinked against betrayal.
“You’d rip two households’ pact asunder?
Think, man! Your valor’s currency is spent.
Shall I tell them how you froze at Birchwood Creek,
Letting three conscripts drown in their own—”

The vase shattered first. Then the world.

* * *

They bound him where the market fountain
Wept rust instead of laughter. “Deserter,”
The placard claimed—a lie in twelve-point font.
Children threw stones shaped like their fathers’
Hearts. Through swollen lids, he saw her
Clutching a basket, face white as surrender.
A shake of her head—so slight—
A semaphore of doom.

Midnight. The jail’s lone candle guttered.
Iron groaned. Her whisper: “Your hand, quick—!”
Beyond the gates, a horse’s silhouette…
Freedom, snorting steam into the frost.

“Wait.” He pressed into her palm
A thing kept warm against his breast—
A book’s torn page. Her own verse,
Discovered in the library’s ashes:
*How cruel the star that grants the wish
To sail, then drowns the reckoning ship.*

“Go,” she pleaded. “Your war’s not done.”
“Nor yours,” he said. And chose the colder front.

* * *

Autumn’s fist clenched the town again.
She walks where sentinel poplars guard
The road north—watches carts arrive
Bearing pumpkins, news, young men
Who are not him. The mayor’s new decree
Nails church doors: *All unwed maids of twenty
Must elect a spouse by All Hallows’ Eve.*

Her scissors hover over chestnut curls—
A convent’s shears could cheat the law.
But in the square, a scaffold grows
Like some grotesque sunflower. Rumor’s breath:
*A traitor caught beyond the ridge…*
*…flogged raw for stealing a commander’s mare…*
*…will hang at moonrise. No last rites.*

The sunset bleeds through blackened belfries.
She barters her mother’s pearls for a horse.

* * *

Wind. Hooves. The gallows, stark
As a misplaced comma in death’s sentence.
Too late—the crowd disperses, clutching
Souvenir splinters. A child waves a rope’s
Frayed tail. Her boots sink in mud
That thirsts still, after all this time,
For a different vintage than despair.

Beneath the planks—a scrap of paper
Nailed fast. Her own handwriting,
Blood-crusted: *How cruel…* The rest
Torn off. Perhaps to light a jailer’s pipe.
Perhaps to nest in some thrush’s breast.

She does not scream. Does not
Unsheath the dagger in her skirts.
Simply stands as moon unveils her face—
A silver judge. Somewhere, an owl
Translates her silence into flight.

* * *

Dawn finds the cabin north of reason,
Where rifle and bread mold side by side.
On the threshold—a chestnut braid,
Severed clean. Further in, a note
Weighted with a dented flask:
*I’ve gone to teach the stars a new constellation—
Two lovers linked, not by fate’s design,
But the infinite space between.*

The river, when it finds her, will be gentle.
It has practice with unanchored things.