I wish I could tell you I found your earring when you sent me back to the battlefield, but I can’t. I sincerely tried, but it’s so miniscule, a dot amidst ten square acres of smoldering fires, corpses, and nearly dead soldiers screaming in agony, so much blood soaked into the grass, it would be impossible to spot a single ruby the diameter of a pea. I know how much those earrings mean to you, given to you by your mother, who got them from her mother, and so forth and so forth for more generations than you know. Someone else might tell you you could’ve transported them better, how wearing them while making our escape from the capital is on you. I’m not telling you that. Just as I appreciate you not pointing out that blood soaked into the dead winter grass in no way resembles red, so me implying a shade that brown would obfuscate the dazzling red sparkle of a ruby was me being facetious. I also know that many people you love didn’t make it out, that so many things could be happening to them right now, and you’re praying that they, at the very least, will die quick deaths. And when you sent me back to that field, a field filled with my dead and dying comrades, asking me to search for that sparkly family heirloom, it was merely shorthand for Save anyone else you can, or Find my brother and his children and bring them back to me. I can’t give you the good news you’re so anxiously desiring, but if I had found that earring, I would say this: We would have to pawn it just like we’re going to pawn its match, the one staring at me from your left earlobe. We’ll need money, for passage off this continent, to start a life somewhere they’re not looking for you, if such a place exists, everyone in the known world wanting to run a spear through your white, immaculate breast. I know deep down, you know that earring is better off where it is, pushed into the bloodied mud of your ancestors, buried beneath the back of a countryman, some loyal subject who took a sword through his heart simply so that you can stand there, in front of me right now, and ask, without a whisper of irony, “Did you find it?”
Michael Czyzniejewski is the author of four collections of stories, most recently The Amnesiac in the Maze (Braddock Avenue Books, 2023). He serves as Editor-in-Chief of Moon City Press and Moon City Review, as well as Interviews Editor of SmokeLong Quarterly. He has received a fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts and two Pushcart Prizes.