Bad Prophecies (draft 1)

XII

"I'm sorry, you did what?" I half-coughed, migraine pounding in my head.
"I joined up for the war."
Allow me to paint you a picture. September first, nineteen-fourteen. What would come to be known as the Great War had been declared less than five days before. My husband and I had been living peacefully for fourteen years until he brought me his draft papers as if begging me to be outraged.
"Why?"
"I dunno." He shrugged. To this very day, when I ask him, he says he hasn't the faintest clue what came over him that day. I suspect it has something to do with the propaganda and fear of missing out, but I suppose I'll never know, seeing as I dodged the draft.
"Lord, give me strength." I pressed my knuckles against my forehead, "I begged you not to join up." I didn't know if this was a question, a declaration, or both.
"So you did."
"Whatever am I to do now?"
Another shrug.
"Alexander, I will kill you myself if you come back from that war. They say it'll be over by Christmas, but I doubt it. Coitus, drugs, bed, then we talk."
That wasn't the particular order in which we proceeded, but we eventually did talk. We agreed he shouldn't dodge service, especially now that he'd enlisted, but he didn't want me to be lonely and encouraged me to have a paramour.
"As lovely as it sounds, you're the only one for me," I told him, straight up.
"Your stoicism is admirable, but I might be gone a while. I just want you to be happy."
"I'll consider it. And until your draft, all play, no work, you hear me?"
When came time for his draft, we parted with teary eyes, my memories are blurred by those tears to this day, I just remember I couldn't let go, and pressed my nails into Alexander's hands so hard he still has the scars from where my nails pierced through flesh and drew blood. I apologised later on for the incident, but to this day, he says he barely noticed.
It felt as though they were prying him from my cold, dead hands long after our coffin was nailed down when the dock workers had to physically pull me away from him, screaming.
"Darlin," said the familiar Scottish voice of one of the men, "Your fella gotta go now. You'll see 'im again soon. I promise, dear girl. On the river Thames, I swear."
"I'll be home by Christmas, Angel! I'll see you then!" Alex shouted from the departing ship, waving his arms manically. I could hear the breaking in his voice even from thirty or forty feet.
I just kneeled on the loading dock, sobbing hysterically while the dock workers still held my arms, trying to pull me up from my knees.
We'd been back in London, living with my parents by then. I went home, crying still. The next few weeks are hazy in my memory. When I ask Pa about it, he says I spent a long time reclining on the sofa, staring into blank space and doing nothing. No sleeping, no talking, no nothing. Even Mum was concerned, despite having slept through an entire century himself.

/

Eventually, I had partially come to my senses. Later on, it was October now, and the air was cold, crisp, and damp. London, I thought. Typical weather behaviour. I randomly decided to go to a Lesbian bar. While homosexuality for men was illegal and highly stigmatised, lesbianism had never been outlawed.
I brightly recall the spectacle it had been in the papers when the Parliament was trying to ban it, and Queen Victoria was forcing them to try to explain how exactly two women would have coitus. After all, they had no phallus. In the end, they couldn't explain, and it was a case dropped.
This meant the bar was completely legal.
I have no idea, still, one hundred and ten years later, what I was trying to accomplish. Probably some level of social interaction beyond telling the former paper-boy turned handyman, Elijah, that I was feeling rather melancholic. I didn't talk to him much anymore. It was strange, seeing the once teen boy, now a grown man of forty-something with teenage children of his own.
By then, almost everyone I had been friends with in the eighteen-eighties was either dead or significantly older.
Mr Laurence was dead, Jacob was dead,
Margaret and Oscar were getting old, and so on and so forth with almost everyone I knew.
Before long, I was a regular at the bar.

/

"Baby Angel, you've got to do something with yourself," chimed Mum, looking down at me where I curled up on the floor.
"Like what exactly?"
"You've never been rude in all your life, and suddenly your husband's off to war and you've turned into an impolite bastard. Why can't you just pop on a uniform and have a go at it?"
"I am a bastard, Mum. You know better than anyone. Besides, it's not like other wars, there'll be medical exams and soon there'll be undeniable evidence that I'm neither a man nor a human."
"Have you considered shape-shifting?"
"I'm not going to. I never wanted him to go off in the first place, now he's to be lonely as punishment for betraying me."
I hunched and hid my chin behind my knees.
"Aren't you punishing yourself just as much?"
"Can't have love without a little pain. You say it all the time."

I had finally gotten up that evening to go move to my bed, the more appealing alternative to the cold, wooden floor. When I was going up the stairs to the kitchen, I overheard my parents talking.
"I just wish you weren't such a pessimist, my dear," Pa said to Mum.
"I was never a pessimist, ever since heaven I always wanted the best future for humanity. Look, these days humans are killing themselves of their own free volition, and our daughter, yours and mine, has found herself in the crossfire!"
"You know for a fact, that is not what I meant."
"Don't say it," A tone appeared in my mother's voice that sent a chill down my spine. That's when I stopped in my tracks, and they couldn't see me listening to their conversation.
"I will, for you've said it so many times over. 'You can't have love without a little pain'."
"It's true! You can't! You've seen it, I've seen it, we've seen it! Yet you always use the same words. 'We shouldn't be fraternising', well, Angel, I think you'd agree we've done a little more than fraternising, considering the fact that our compassion for each other manifested an entire being that isn't supposed to exist under any circumstances!"
They both went silent.
"I'm sorry, Crowley, darling. I've been inconsiderate. Perhaps you should head home. You've got a meeting, haven't you?"
Mum sighed just loud enough for me to hear.
"Goodnight, Angel. Sleep well."
He disappeared.
I finished going up the stairs and found Pa in the kitchen.
"Oh, dear, Kohl, please tell me you didn't hear any of that."
I shook my head no.

/

I received my first letter from Alex on October 24th.

My dearest, Kohl,
It is officially October, the season of good food, fun, and love. And while I may be on the front line, unable to enjoy this season, I highly encourage you do. In fact, I demand that you do. Why should your immense fear of my pain barricade the doors of possibility for you? 
I love you very dearly. Being far from you has only strengthened my feelings towards you. Each day in the trenches, I rest assured knowing you are safe back home. Our home. Oh, how I long for home! Not just the comforts of clean sheets, a soft bed and my mother's borscht, but also for your gentle embrace that makes the apartment above your father's bookshop into the home that it is for me.
I wish I could pour my heart into this letter and tell you everything I want to tell you, but I'm only issued ten pages for the next three months and I have to make them last!
Find yourself a lover for the next few years. I can't stand the thought of my beautiful wife being alone for so long. I promise I won't be jealous.
Dying of boredom,
Scared of having to ask my father for a new body if this one dies in the trenches,
Dreaming of you,
alex

He had an odd system of never capitalising the first letter of his name so that I would always know it was him.
I thought about his demand for me to occupy myself with fun and thought 'Why not?' as I had never bothered to think before. In my hundred and tens, or rather the 'second chance teen years' as I tended to call them, I had picked up a habit of only doing things that I knew were good for me if someone else told me to do it. This case was no different.
Now whenever I visited the lesbian bar, I sought out conversation, discussions and companionship. I wasn't deliberately looking for a girlfriend, but I was looking for more than 'company' in a vague, undefined kind of way.
And that was how I eventually ended up meeting Effie Morris.