Lost Everything Read Online Free PDF

“About the north?”
    “What do you want me to say?” Grendel Jones said. There was electricity between her and Sunny Jim that could have been mistaken for attraction, but was not. She was the war to him, embodied its rage. You stole my wife from me, Sunny Jim had told her once. Made me send my son away. Give me back my family. And that was before the Market Street Bridge went down.
    She reached inside her frayed overcoat, brought out a battered envelope that looked like it had been sealed twenty years ago, though it was just the night before. The paper inside first being tacked to a plank of wood spongy with rot, so Grendel could write with her only hand, fingers stained with the dirty oil burning in the lamp. The light was a target for snipers, she knew. She was not so much careless as callous. Shoot me if you can, she thought. The war keeps taking pieces of me anyway. Makes the rest of me harder to hit.
    “There’s one boat still going upriver,” she said. “Called the Carthage. ”
    “How will we find it?” Sunny Jim said.
    “You’ll find it.” Gave him the envelope. “You’ll meet the boat at the Clarks Ferry Bridge. They’ll let everyone on. Always do. But if you give them this, they’ll take extra care of you. Take you as far as you need.”
    “Thanks,” Sunny Jim said. She could tell how it hurt him to say it. In his grief, his anger, at Aline not being with him, he was making Grendel Jones complicit in her absence. The commanding officer felt it, too, the guilt and horror at her own power whenever she stopped to contemplate it. She gave an order, and people died. She could take lives just by speaking.
    “Just get your boy,” she said. Then caught his eye. I’m so sorry about Aline.
    What do you want me to say?
    That you forgive me.
    I can’t forgive you yet. Forgiving you would mean letting her go.
    In Baltimore, the bones of Grendel Jones’s left arm lay under a collapsed apartment building, softened by water. The rain was taking down all that was left of that city, the rain and the vines and trees, its accomplices. Wildflowers stormed along Falls Road. Tendrils of kudzu snaked around the Bromo Seltzer Tower. Plants and animals burying our dead for us. Turning us and all that we did into soil, then digging their roots in deep. They would never let us come back.
    Grendel was not yet a soldier when she lost her arm. She was only there to care for her aunt, an invalid. After the first rocket attacks, they sat in her aunt’s apartment, pushed the wheelchair up to the window. Watched a line of people leaving, a centipede of refugees. A family of five. The father with a coffee table and a rolled-up rug tied to his back. The mother with a bundle of clothes balanced on her head. Their children on leashes running from their waists to their parents’ hands, staggering with the movement of drunken spiders. So little sound for so many people.
    “They’re overreacting,” her aunt said, frowning. “This will all blow over soon.” Her resolve never left her, even when the rockets came dozens a day and it seemed that someone was always firing a gun somewhere. Even when the flames turned the nights into the last minutes of evening for good, as though the sun were not allowed to set. When Grendel told her aunt about the massacres, she refused to believe it.
    “People don’t do that to each other,” she said.
    Fire, fire, I heard the cry, from every breeze that passes by. All the world was one sad cry of pity.
    Grendel’s arm left her as she stood in the doorway to the apartment building. It was wearing a blue sleeve with a white cuff, was holding cooking oil in a plastic bottle. The rocket’s explosion threw the rest of her into the street, though she was already unconscious by then. When she woke up, she was lying on the deck of a barge in the Chesapeake Bay. A thin mat beneath her. The stump of her arm, bandaged, dirty. The Bay Bridge dim in the twilight. To the north and east, all of Baltimore