For days I have been sitting here in this deep hole filled with rainwater, my eyes crusty and closed. The dirt and dust has settled on me as on the other corpses outside the sumpy funnel. The rattling of my breath is all I hear. The explosions, the shots, the incessant screams... They are silent for me. Death no longer haunts me. But why?
What has happened since that one night? Her voice... her shadow... I can't get it out of my head.
She... can't get out of my head anymore.
When my hands press the rifle covered with rust and dirt more firmly against me, a little of the dried-up dirt dissolves from my blue-purle skin and falls down into the puddle. The same cold and dirty puddle in which my boots and my trousers slowly sink.
I notice how the mud floor begins to consume my meat. Feeds on me. The roots and branches that have wrapped around legs and arms are all that embraces me in this cold time, hollow voices halls across the battlefield.
Echoes of the dying. But there is something else...
A sob....
l open my eyes a gap. The dried-up mud crust on my skin crackles quietly when I do that. The veins in my eyes have burst for a long time, I can hardly see anything through the purent lenses. A few meters in front of me l recognize something in the pale moonlight that laboriously breaks through the dense cloud cover. A silhouette....
I notice how my entire body tenses, the black-colored, rotting blood in my veins freezes to ice for a short moment. And suddenly I'm so warm....
So pleasantly warm....
But the feeling quickly disappears as my brain slowly processes what the silhouette does.
Curved, she sits in the mud in front of the puddle, her legs bent and her face buried in her hands. Her hair hangs down into the puddle, curls on the surface of the brown water and almost seems to merge with the liquid. Black clouds of smoke wave silently around them. And although she is so close to me, her crying is further away than I would have thought possible...
I let go of the rifle and it sinks down into the mud without making a sound.
Cracking, my musty bones rise, tear themselves away almost powerlessly from the roots that bind me to the death-bringing slumber. I stand in front of her, a bent corpse drawn by the countless blows of fate and condemned to eternal death. And there she sits in front of me, like a gate out of this curse.
Two destroyed souls in a godless world.
I extend my hand to her and touch her shoulder. The wobbling shadow that makes up its presence winds like a thick fog around the broken skin that stretches my fingers. But she doesn't notice the touch. Or at least doesn't react. She is trapped between endless tears and I can do nothing but watch...
