The ashes are warm as spilt blood between Helga’s toes, pale as searchlight beams striping the sky, soft as the bed she fled. It’s too late, the local bomb shelter already buried beneath the wall of a blazing building, the horror of the moment hiccuping in her chest. She stumbles towards it anyway, into warm ashes fallen over cold ashes fallen over cobbles scarred by months of terror. Then she sees the footsteps in those ashes. Then she sees him.

Fritz in his fine uniform, the day before he left, stumbling as slowly as she does. She presses a hand to her mouth and follows, as desperate for his company as for a guide through the inferno her city has become.

Do her eyes hurt from the heat of the burning winter air, or from the memory of the way he lost himself when overcome by emotion? This slab of a man who endured years on the factory floor, survived an accident that shattered Sebastian’s skull, saved two colleagues from a burning store, would tremble over words like “Would you like to dance?” or “Could I take you to a movie?” or “I love you.” The night of this memory, the words had been “Marry me,” but it was her response that had broken him, that she can hear thundering through his mind as she walks beside the air-thin imitation of a man. “I can’t.”

Ghostly Fritz looks so fine in his uniform, and that’s half of what breaks her heart. The cut of the jacket clings to the beauty of his body; but so does the blood that stains its every inch, and that he refuses to see. How could she love him when she couldn’t even trust him with the reason why she was weeping? The whispered stories of cousins in Warsaw and Berlin, and the silence that followed those stories. One final note from Aunt Esther, hurried hand across a ragged scrap of paper, explaining that tomorrow she would be put on a train.

Fritz didn’t know because she didn’t tell him, because he loved his country and was too simple to question what that meant. Perhaps you could love someone when you couldn’t trust them, perhaps you couldn’t stop yourself, but you couldn’t marry them.

He’s weeping as he walks around the corner. She has never seen him do that in life. And though she has seen fragments of the past walk beside her—old neighbours, younger selves, ghostly visions from centuries before—she has never seen one leave footprints as it passed. Yet there they are, laid out in the ashes, their edges shifting as a hot wind billows down the street. Sirens scream, bombs crash, a chorus of engines roars across the sky, and she keeps walking, clutching her coat across her nightdress, because if he could touch the world then perhaps she can touch him one last time, can hold him close and mumble into the scent of his chest, can tell him how sorry she is.

Another crash, closer than the rest. The blast hurls her down in a spray of ashes, the taste of ruin on her tongue. She pushes herself upright, stares around, but he’s gone. The ghosts only walk with her as long as she walks with them.

Gone again. In the shelter of her pocket, her fingers tighten around the other letter, the one from his mother, a woman who couldn’t look Helga in the eye. Eastern front. Partisans. Saving his comrades. No body to send home, but a medal to hang on his mother’s wall.

No medals for any of the people Helga has lost. But if the government knew where to send them then she wouldn’t be here anymore.

She prays out loud for the first time in years. It can’t matter who hears her. Fritz is gone. Her family is gone. The city will soon follow. She runs a trembling finger around a footprint he left, one last moment of connection while she waits for the bombs and the fire to find her.

More footprints follow, on through the ash and across ruins. How can his ghost have left footprints where it hadn’t even walked? She looks more closely. These prints are smaller than his feet. Were the others too? Has she been fooling herself again?

Still she follows, because he led her to this and because she needs something to cling to amid the roaring of the engines, the bombs, the wind, amid silhouettes of broken walls backlit by the inferno. The footsteps lead her onto the ruins of a factory that was built on the ruins of a synagogue.

A body lies slumped across the rubble, an old woman with her clothes half burned off, hand and cheek blistered, hair scorched away. Helga has seen her passing in the street, but had no idea that they would mumble the same prayers as their end approached.

She thinks of Fritz carrying her giggling down a street. What terrible things did those arms do that were once her sanctuary? Still, she mimics that strength, scoops up the old woman and holds her close. Past their footsteps, she sees a single line of darkness through the blazing night. Perhaps there is a path out of all of this, perhaps there isn’t, but she will walk it either way.

***

This story uses similar themes and fantastical elements to my new novella, Walking a Wounded Land, which was published last weekend. I hadn’t expected to do any more with that story’s magic, but then I sat down to write and discovered I wasn’t done with it yet. So if you enjoyed this story, then you might also want to check out Walking a Wounded Land.

And if you’d like more short fiction from me, you can sign up to my mailing list to get a flash story straight to your inbox every month as well as updates on my books.

The post Footsteps Written in Ash – a fantasy short story appeared first on Andrew Knighton Writes.