Dear, Aliza.

I’m sorry.

I beat you.

You drifted away and I helped row the paddles. You hate me, but I don’t have no-one else to talk to. I hear voices of ghosts, but they never respond.

Baby, I killed a man.

He wasn’t the first, but the others were silhouettes in the dark, outlines drawn against the dark trenches, barely visible enough to see whether I hit them or not because I stood so far back.

For that, The Captain called me a cautious man, like him. He thought that I didn’t go near them in case they were still alive. I didn't go near them in case they were dead.

I'm nothing like him, he doesn't understand. He wasn’t the one that was forced to eat vegetables that were grown in trenches, freshly gored with friends, with people I had just eaten breakfast with. Vegetables that ate and grew from the carcasses of dead soldiers, of people you had just walked by. He doesn’t understand and never will.

I always convinced myself I didn’t. Even when they lay there, even when they just fucking lay there as dark heaps on the ground, I didn’t go near them. I made sure I didn't, so I could hold onto some doubt, that perhaps what I shot at >wasn’t a human, maybe my eyes playing tricks on me, after being in this fucking hole in the ground for weeks.

I killed a man, But today he was human.

I walked up behind him, as I turned a corner.

I fired, the Captain taught me to ask questions later.

I killed him. I bent over as something he clutched caught my eye; it was a picture of his family. His boy and his wife, done up in nice clothes in a professionally taken photo, like that shop we used to go to on the Boardwalk after getting taffy. He also held a pencil, he was writing a letter.

His blood pasted the page, chunks of brain littering the edges and glazing the surface. It was to his wife.

I’m looking at you darling, I always kept a picture of you with me. I’m sorry for everything I’ve done, but I cannot live this life any longer, tell Jimmy his pop loves him. Please pray for me darling, please confess on my behalf. I went away to prove to you that I could change, that I was capable of good with these hands. But I’ve only worsened the evil that grows within me, within every man.

I’ve been in this fucking hole for weeks, my breath rancid from cussing and alcohol, my feet burning and rotting from trench-foot. I’m already dea-

I shot him.

He was human.

I looked down into his eyes.

He didn’t give up.

Even with a ball in his chest he tried reaching for his weapon.

It was barely out of his grasp, he reached, while he stared at the picture of you.

I held his hand.

I told him he was human.

I told him I was as well.

I promised him you’d get this.

I’m sorry, but just know, I’m next.