Brown Sugar and Sweet Honey

The wind wafted across her golden hair and danced as it ruffled her pink sundress. I could see her; smell her. Like brown sugar and sweet honey.

“What are you thinking about?” Her whispers were ghostly, as if she were speaking to me from another world—a better one—or a dream. Or perhaps she was trying to wake me. Had I fallen asleep in this meadow?

“I’m thinking about what I’m always thinking about,” I told her as I propped my chin on my fist. “You.”

Her smile was wide, as radiant as the setting sun behind her, filled with that bashful flattery one exudes when they are too charmed to be modest.

I reached my hand across the grass and met her fingers with mine. She took my hand and pulled me closer, her wide smile now replaced with the smirk of mischief.

I rose to my knees and leaned toward her, one hand wrapping around her waist and the other between her shoulder blades. Her hands found their way to my head, fingers brushing through my hair.

Our breaths coalesced in the shrinking space between us, warm and heavy with anticipation. Our lips brushed; our bodies pressed together. I closed my eyes, wanting only to see her, feel her, taste her. I wanted to be here and nowhere else.

She gently kissed the corner of my mouth, sending my heart racing in my chest.

“Do you know what I’m thinking about?” Her whisper was close, hot.

“What?" the words quivered from my mouth.

She bit her lip and looked around the green patch of heaven before returning her glinting, playful eyes back to me. “You got one.”

I laughed, hoping to understand the joke quickly. But my oblivious eyes gave me away.

“You got one!” She announced again, pulling away, a jubilant grin plastered across her face. “Check it for trophies!”

“What are you talking about?” I didn’t want her far away. I wanted her here, close, where I could take her in and be warmed by her hands and lips on my face.

“You awake lad?” The voice was different now: low and gruff.

I blinked twice, bringing the world back in to focus.

His golden head of hair wafted lifelessly on the ground, the wind mocking his fate, trampling on his corpse.

“Hey!” The gruff voice came from above, casting a wide shadow over me. It was Sergeant McFayden. “You got one, lad!” He nudged the body with his boot as he surveyed the kill. “Well… He’s a young one, but hey! You gotta start somewhere! Have you picked him over yet? Checked for trophies?”

Words flooded my mind quicker than they could be arranged. Instead of answering the Sergeant, I only say there, mouth agape, eyes unable to focus on him.

“No worries,” he waved away my stupor. “I’ll show you how it’s done.”

He flipped the body over, revealing a pool of blood and a surprised reaction, as if the boy was somewhat offended that I’d run a sword through his belly. Sergeant McFayden rummaged through every pocket, the boy’s blood sticking to his already crimson-stained fingers.

“Well, well. Lookie what we have here!” He pulled his hand from the boy’s shirt, producing some kind of metal tool dripping red. “Do you know what this is, lad?”

I mustered the focus to shake my head.

Sergeant McFayden looked to be doing some calculation in his mind. “Well, no. You wouldn’t, would you? This, lad, is a gun.”

A gun. I’d heard of them, but only in old stories.

He wiped the red off on a clean segment of the dead boy’s shirt before handing the piece to me handle first. “It won’t do you much good in the battle,” the Sergeant told me, “clearly!” He guffawed at the dead boy’s form, still unmoving, still surprised. “But it’s quite the lovely piece. And look! It has a bullet! Hopefully you’re smarter with it than he was!”

I took the gun into my hands. It was heavier than I’d imagined it would be, but it seemed a simple enough implement for killing.

“You just squeeze the trigger, and BANG! Instant problem solver,” he chuckled.

On the ground beside the sergeant was a small pile of the boy’s personal effects: photographs, a letter, a ring, a compass. The pictures showed the young man in the arms of a beauty, her smile wide with happiness, cheeks raised so high with delight that her eyes were mere squints.

She loved him.

Now everything that he was is lying on the ground before me: his pieces irreparably damaged; ingredients that cannot be rejoined or restored. His life was gone, and I took it.

Sergeant McFayden sighed as he stood back up, one of his boots landing on top of the beauty’s smile. “Lad,” his voice spoke in a gentle, confidential tone, “the first one’s never all that easy for most people. I mean, it was for me. It’s easy for a lot of people, really. But, uh, for some men—men like you—it can do something to your soul. It can shake you up inside.” He placed a hand on my shoulder. “Ride it out. You’ll need to be making a lot more corpses in the months to come. You can’t spend your time mourning each and every one of them, can you?” He slapped the side of my arm affectionately, offering a that’s a good lad as he shuffled away with his proud, swaggering gait.

I want to close my eyes and wake up in the meadow again. Let me hold her close, let this all be a terrible nightmare.

“No one’s around,” her voice was sultry in my ear.

I smiled. “Right here? Really?”

She shrugged one shoulder as she pulled the strap of her pink dress off the other. “Is it so wrong?”

The gun shook in my quaking hands, slick with blood and acrid with its coppery smell. Sergeant McFayden was whistling now. Whistling as he walked away.

“Don’t think about it,” she told me, leading my hands to her body. “Just do it.”

The muzzle of the gun rose to Sergeant McFayden’s back. I closed one eye and breathed in brown sugar and sweet honey.