Gone

It had been twenty-four years since she’d last seen it, but the place looked exactly the same. Her childhood home stood untouched. Time had been kinder to the house than it had to the family that once lived in it. 

Mari hadn’t been back since before the war. She’d been gone already when everything went to crap, across the sea, in a foreign country when the fighting broke out, and about to head home when all-out war had been declared. 

She’d been conscripted before long, forced into a war she wanted no part of. 

She felt more comfortable holding a gun in her hands now than a book, and it felt wrong to wear anything other than her military combat boots. 

It had been spring when she left, it was fall now. Her shoes crunched over the bright fall leaves, hands in her jacket pockets as she gazed at the peeling blue paint that had faded from its original bright color. 

She remembered being eight years old, outside with her family as they repainted the home over the summer. Her younger sister had picked the color out, running around the store clutching the paint swatch, squealing with happiness as their parents chased her.  

Mari hadn’t seen her in twenty-four years either. She had no idea if her sister was even still alive, if any of her other sisters were still alive, much less where they might be. 

Communications had been all but destroyed during the war, for all she knew her family had moved to Cuba and become farmers. Sometimes it was easier for her to imagine scenarios like that, daydreams where her family had gotten out, and were living safe in some untouched corner of the world. 

It was easier than the truth that reality brought with it. 

They had been happy before everything, not perfect, and not without fault, but happy. Mari’s older sister had gotten married barely a year before fighting started. She had no idea if she’d been able to have kids like she wanted, Mari hoped so, hoped she had beautiful healthy children. Her sister’s husband had been a doctor, and in times of war the healers find more work than they ever wanted. 

She hoped none of her sisters had had to fight like she did, however unrealistic it was she hoped they hadn’t been turned into soldiers. 

The war had ended six years ago, Mari wanted to come home as soon as she escaped the army, wanted desperately to find even a mention of what had happened to her mom, dad, and three sisters. Only now had things been stabilized enough for her to be able to travel. 

It made her laugh now, everything in the surrounding area had been levelled, crushed rubble and flattened beams were all that remained of the houses of her neighborhood. While her home stood untouched, serene even, the trees were as unchanged as Mari could remember. Everything else was completely gone for miles, except for this. 

She had come home. 

She wasn’t the same seventeen-year-old that left all those years ago, she had left to find herself. To travel and explore, she had taken only her laptop and an old beat up backpack. Mari couldn’t remember that girl anymore. 

She wasn’t even entirely sure if she remembered any of it correctly, head trauma had taken a chunk of her memories, and a bullet too close for comfort had taken a chunk of her dog tags. She’d been left with fuzzy half recollections, and four-letter names that didn’t sound quite right, no matter how many years went by. 

She remembered having three sisters, her mom and dad smiling, a brother in law, and little out of time moments; the paint swatch, and her sister’s wedding, leaving home, but things like her own name, her parent’s voices, and where she had even gone to school, she couldn’t seem to dredge out of the pit in her mind.  

She could remember where she lived, but couldn’t tell you her last name, couldn’t tell you her sister’s names either for that matter, she only knew she’d had them. 

But she knew she was a different person. 

She couldn’t sleep without a knife under her pillow, a rifle under the bed, and her boots on her feet, even now, even though the war had been officially over for more than half a decade. It hadn’t truly ended for her, for any soldier. 

Unknown to the public the fighting hadn’t really ended six years ago, small holdouts, and rebel cells had continued fighting and it had been people like Mari’s job to ‘take care of them’. Her unit stood head and shoulders above everyone else, their war hadn’t truly ended until last year. 

The moment they’d been granted leave, her squad had dispersed without hesitation, they’d shared a goodbye grin, knowing they would probably never see each other again. They might have gotten permission to leave, but they were the best of the best, and absolutely none of them had any plans to come back. 

She walked around the side of the house to the backyard, leaves crunching, the old glider chair was still back there, a weird off green color and slightly uneven. An old shed sparked something in her brain. The ugly rotting thing had been there even when she was a child, she guessed it’d just never been taken down. 

The grass was overgrown, weeds sprouted up through the concrete of the patio, she could see the remains of a fire pit in the middle of the yard, cinder block stones covered in dirt and moss. 

There off to the side, were five things she didn’t remember. 

Five oval rounded stones, engraved with names and dates. 

Gravestones for her family. 

Her mom. 

Her dad. 

Her brother-in-law.

And two of her sisters. 

She finally knew their names again. 

Jen and Teresa. 

Mari dropped to her knees, resting one hand against the cold surface of the stone. The dates were all different, but they were all from during the war.

Five, there were only five, she had three sisters. If everyone was buried here then she must still be alive, right? Unless there was no one to bury her, a small part of Mari whispered. 

She shoved it down. They couldn’t all be gone, they couldn’t, she couldn’t remember enough about them, for them to be gone. 

Tears streaked down her face, she couldn’t even mourn her family properly, she had no words to say, nothing to remember them by, nothing but five stones in an empty yard filled with dead leaves.

Only blurry recollections that warped liked a waterlogged book. 

Her hand fell over the side of her mother’s stone, and her fingers caught against something. She let the tears flow uninterrupted as she crawled around the marker. 

She stared numbly at the back where more words rested. 

It was a message, a message for her. 

Her name, her full name was at the top. 

Mariam- If your still alive, if you’ve found this,

come find me, look for me in what used to be

Olympia Alaska. -Mika  

Mariam stood, swiping the tears away, she pulled her shoulder bag open to retrieve an old U.S map. 

“My sisters died as soldiers,” she whispered bitterly, “but we won the war and that was all that mattered, they got their armies, and we lost our families, I’m going to find her, I’m going to see my little sister again.”

And that was all that mattered.