Inevitable Lament on the Battlefield
by Michelle Cristiani
“I don’t look forward to killing you tomorrow."
His eyes were narrowed, foe-like. If not for lust, he wouldn’t care either way, she knew that.
Kess rolled onto her stomach and eyed her lover. Her face was serious, too, but she jokingly said, “You could switch sides, you know.”
He sighed and shook his head. “It’s not --”
“You don’t think I can best them.” She slid off the bedroll and started dressing.“You don’t find them deplorable?”
“They find me employable. That’s all that matters.”
She turned back to him, sober as death.“I won’t spare you.”
He grinned. “You won’t win, Kess. But if by some luck you do, I don’t expect to be spared.”
“Luck.” Kess spat the word back, defensive. Then she palmed her weapon, and loudly opened his makeshift tent, unafraid that anyone would hear. She mourned his lack of judgment. He didn’t know he’d already lost.
When the next day dawned, Kess crouched patiently above the camp, smoking the stubby cigarettes she’d looted off an enemy. Her lover eventually stumbled out of his tent. He was drowsy but unsettled at the quiet. There was no one in the camp but him.
Kess observed his unease as he swiftly but quietly inspected tent after tent. She watched him check the now-dimmed fire for clues. His pace quickened until he reached panic; she could track his thinking. Abandonment? Mutiny? Ambush? Was he spared? Forgotten? Where are the bodies? Once he had looked all around, she knew, next he would look up. Eventually his eyes raised, frantic.
Only then did she call out, “They’re all dead.”
He staggered away from the sunrise, squinting and shielding his eyes.“Kess?”
She nodded and hopped down from the tall stone, limber, keeping her cigarette in her non-dominant hand. She repeated, “They’re all dead.” Her tone didn’t match her words, but neither gave comfort. They both knew what would happen next.
He was defiant, rageful, but looked a little frightened now. “No one heard your battle?”
“The battle was last night. Before I came.” She circled around him, offering her cigarette half-way around. He took it, spinning with her, afraid to show his back even now that the battle was over.
He opened his mouth to speak, but she interrupted him, turning his lips to a scowl.
“You seem not to mourn for your lost compatriots. So you might be loyal to those who pay, but not to those standing beside you?”
He sneered at her, then met her eyes proudly.“Then kill me. We can do each other no good any longer.”
“Noble, now? But all right.” Kess drew her knife to his neck; to his credit, he did not flinch. Then she flipped the knife to the flat end and pushed it into his skin, lamenting what the moment had come to. But on the outside, both of them, emotionless as stone.
“You could have lived. Hadn’t I told you before: you should have trusted my skills,” she said.
“I trusted one of your skills,” he said. “I just trusted the wrong one.” He leered at her dusty, tired body, pleased to throw a barb before dying.
Kess didn’t hesitate in thought or deed. She flipped the Bowie downwards and thrust back up through his ribs, pressing their bodies as close as they’d been the night before in pleasure.
“I pity,” Kess said, bringing the knife back up to his throat, “your tunnel vision.”
The blade slid, letting him die in her arms just as he had slept there a few hours before. It looked nearly the same: his eyes glazed over, emptied of stress. And Kess closed her eyes, too -- a flickering, silent grief -- then looked up to the sky as she dropped him to the ground.
When the watchmen came, she gestured to the dead man. “Clean up,” she said, marching away, expressionless. It was only in the privacy of her own cabin, washing the blood off her breasts, that she cried.
Michelle Cristiani teaches reading and writing at Portland Community College in Portland OR and has a PhD in anthropology from the University of New Mexico. She won the Margarita Donnelly Prose Prize from Calyx Press in 2018 for her memoir of stroke recovery at age 42. She is now working on a memoir on that stroke and the brain surgeries that followed. This year, she has been published in SadGirlsClub and Apple in the Dark. Michelle has upcoming stories in the anthology Crowded House by Cleis Press and the anthology Devilish Deals by Thurston Howl Publications, and a poem in Wingless Dreamer: First Love Anthology. Previously she has been published in Awakenings Review and Verseweavers (Oregon Poetry Association). She won the OPA's 2015 Experimental Poetry contest and placed in the New Poet category also. You can find Michelle at heart-pages.com and on Twitter @heart_pages.