Your whole life, you had to fit it onto one sheet of paper. There was a black line around the edge of the sheet, a border, and if you wrote outside the line then your application would not be valid. They only gave you enough space to write down the very saddest things that had happened to you. That was the worst part. Because if you cannot read the beautiful things that have happened in someone’s life, why should you care about their sadness?

He stepped on the unexploded artillery shell, and it tore him apart.

How could he even attempt it, after eight days and nights of bombing? And yet this is when he must write: now, in the lull between attacks... War made one do everything when one wasn’t at all ready. Dying, yes, but also living.

From my country you have taken its future, and to my country you have sent the objects from your past. We do not have the seed, we have the husk.

He thought of Tom dancing with the girl, and he was happy. Sleep came, finally, with the music swelling into the vacuum in his mind where there had been only that high, thin whining. The gramophone spun and he slept, with the letter still in his hand. He had kissed Duggan as he was dying. It had seemed the only thing to do.

Who knows which takes more courage – to die in battle, or to live in vain? It cuts all of us in two, I suppose.” Hamilton.

Women fall differently, that’s all. We die by the stopping of our hearts, they by the insistence of theirs.

What he had not understood, before battle, was that time could become a ribbon to be looped and pinned back to its center, the petals of a black rosette. I.

I was hoping my life might make more sense from a great height.

Yes but he is a man though, don’t you see? You could knit one quicker than you can make one fit off-the-shelf.