There Won't Be War

He thought of his brothers and the times they’d had growing up. The days seemed bathed in the warm glow of summer sunshine. They were precious days, gone forever. He knew that every person who had died in any war on any side for any cause had been grieved for just as he was grieving now. It tore at his heart. All that pain, all that suffering.

“WOULD YOU LIKE ME TO RUN THE SCREEN AGAIN?”

“No,” he said softly.

“WOULD YOU LIKE TO ADD AN ADDITIONAL CATEGORY?”

“Yes.” It was barely a whisper.

“READY. ENTER NEW CATEGORY.”

“Peace,” he said and his single word floated in the quiet apartment.

“COULD YOU PLEASE BE MORE SPECIFIC, MARK?”

“I said peace, damn it,” he shouted. “Everlasting, fucking peace!”

The cat jumped from his lap at the outburst and Mark pushed his chair back, leaving the desk. His eyes were still full of tears and he felt like a fool.

If he was a fool, though, he wasn’t alone. On that particular April 15 over two hundred million taxpayers added their voices to his.

By Christmas it was an accomplished fact.

Wartorn, Lovelorn Marc Laidlaw

It was summer in the wine country, in the cleft of a hilly vale steeped in green heat. I had a noseful of dust, pollen and sex. Our sticky bodies separated slowly as we sat back in the remains of our picnic, the white cloth dirty and disheveled. Carcasses of roast game hens and rinds of soft cheeses were strewn about. The dry, greedy earth had drunk most of the vintage from a toppled bottle, and what remained we quickly swallowed.

My companion rose, gathered her cast-off skirt and blouse, and went into the trees while running a hand through her blonde locks and smiling back at me. As I twisted the corkscrew into the mouth of the last bottle, I heard a muted whine, a soft explosion, the beginnings of a scream—all in the shady confidence of the forest.

I called to her without remembering her name. She did not answer.

I started to rise, then remembered my own nakedness. My gun lay out in the dust, tangled in my trousers. As I scrambled over the tablecloth, twigs broke and leaf-mould crackled in the woods. I claimed the gun and turned to face the forest. Where were my guardians?

A shadow moved between the trees in hazy webs of light. I saw a glint of red-gold, like the heart of a forest fire. No one had hair like that except my hosts, the royal family.

“Prince?” I called, thinking that somehow he had discovered my indiscretions with his sister last night; and now, in retaliation, he had murdered the innocent I’d picked up at the edge of the woods.

The figure with the flaming hair stopped behind the tree where my friend had fallen. I heard a low chuckle, and despite the heat I felt a chill. That was not the Prince’s laughter.

“Don’t move!” I cried, my finger less than steady on the trigger.

Out of the shadows she came, still laughing. The rifle strap cut between her breasts, her weapon holstered so that I knew she did not intend to fire on me. Even so, her eyes were a fury.

“Princess,” I said.

She mocked me with a shake of her head. “Dear Prince, whatever will I do with you? Was it only last night you filled my ears with promises of fidelity? This is a poor start.”

“You’ve gone too far,” I said. “That girl—”

The Princess took a step into the sunlight and her hair turned molten. “Was she important to you?”

“She was innocent,” I said, momentarily blinded by her hair but pretending otherwise, not trusting her for even a moment with the knowledge of my vulnerability.

“Should that have saved her?” she asked, her voice tiptoeing around me through spots of glare. I tried to follow her with my gun; she was toying with me.

“If you’ve a fight to pick with me—”

“Oh, come now. If my father insulted your mother, would she go out of her way to slap him in the face? Don’t be ridiculous. She’d pay her soldiers to fight, and plenty of innocents would die. This little ‘love’ of yours was in my way.”

“I didn’t love her,” I said. “You needn’t have bothered.”

As the glare receded, and her face went into shadow, I saw the Princess stoop to snatch a pear from our picnic and take a bite. I lowered my gun and began to dress. She stared at me with a curious smile while the juice ran down her chin, her throat. She was dressed like a huntress, in soft brown leather and tall boots. As I began lacing up my shirt, she stopped me with a touch. “Don’t,” she said.

“Are you mad?”

Her grip tightened on my wrist. She clenched her teeth behind her smile. “Will you tell on me? Why not carry on as before? Only I will ever know that once you broke your promise.”

I tore my arm away from her. “What do you want? We’ve had our pleasure but it can never happen again. What if we had been discovered last night?”

She took a step closer, pressing against me, her smell an aphrodisiac. “It would have simplified everything. We would be planning a spectacular wedding now. It’s what our parents want: the children of both countries formally wed.”