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stared up at the ceiling, her eyes unready for
sleep, her thoughts unsettled. She felt a heaviness pressing down on her chest, a domineering weight
of darkness and gloom. It pushed the air from her lungs and seized her gut with its thick, probing
fingers until she felt unable to breathe. Her lips parted and she inhaled deeply as though she could
dislodge the weight, but when she exhaled it remained, pinning her to the mattress.
    She thought about Christine and her unremarkable life, her unremarkably normal life. She envied
the woman for parents who loved her, for a home with walls papered in sanity. She imagined
Christine sitting at the kitchen table with her brothers and sister, eating Sunday breakfast together as
a family. She could see Christine’s mother smiling over a plate of pancakes and fussing over her
children’s manners. She thought of Christine in high school, imagining her circled with friends,
going to dances, giving parties. She thought about how Christine loved Joe, but let him go off to war
without her heart.
    Christine’s life was so unremarkable that the thought of it stabbed Bonnie like a bitter reminder
of how different her life had been. Bonnie yearned for a life so normal. Tears burned her eyes and
she cursed the emptiness of her life, the ugliness, the dark shadows. Bonnie’s sobs became louder as
she pulled the pillow around her face. Her throat tightened, her lungs heaved, but she could not
dislodge the weight from her chest. It consumed her, swallowing her whole until she was lost in the
blackness of her soul.
She surrendered to sleep and dreamed about Christine and pancakes and Sunday afternoons.

Chapter 3
    Italy 1945
Corporal Glen Taggart plodded along a dirt road carved into the Apennine mountainside. Ahead
of him walked fellow soldiers in single file or side by side as far as he could see. The rugged
mountains were scarred with outcroppings of rock and clusters of evergreens. The deciduous trees
had only begun to bud, their naked limbs rising stark and barren against the sky. To his left mounted
several stone houses, centuries old, built staggered up the incline. To his right a broken cart lay
abandoned alongside the road, one of its wheels missing. Two Italian men stood on top of a rock
fence, watching passively as the American soldiers tromped through their tiny village.
Glen’s feet felt numb after miles of walking, yet they continued to carry him forward. A heavy
pack weighed against his back, and he shifted his rifle to the other shoulder to relieve his tired arm.
He was filthy and exhausted after the month-long advance into northern Italy. His regiment had
breached the Gothic line once again after an earlier attack in the autumn of 1944.As they marched
toward Bologna, the Germans were in retreat.
Glen ached for rest, his body drained almost beyond endurance. But as long as the men in front
of him continued to move, so would he. Up the sloping road he pushed himself onward, praying
they would soon stop for the night. He focused on the dull throb in his head, the one he felt so
often now, right behind his eyes. He wondered if it would ever go away, waking with it every
morning as if it were his parasitic twin.
His throat was desert dry, his canteen nearly empty after the last time he’d sipped from it. He
yearned for a shower and a clean change of clothes, for a real bed and a decent hot meal. But all the
yearning in the world wouldn’t make it so. Glen pushed those thoughts aside and kept his eyes
focused on the line ahead, charting the slow progress it made.
He heard a scuffle of boots behind him and then his name. Recognizing the voice, he turned and
looked back at his friend, Charlie Larkin. “Hey, buddy,” he croaked, his throat too parched to sound
normal.
“I’ve been tryin’ to catch up,” Charlie wheezed, coming in step with Glen. “I got behind on
account of my blisters. I had to stop and change into some dry socks.” Charlie glanced up at the
cloudless sky.