White Walls (Part I)

I suffocate in my sleep sometimes, and when I do, I am always transported back to that whitewashed room from my childhood. It keeps the foul humours out, the doctors said. She'll find the strength to fight the contagion in her lungs if you would only keep her safe until then.

White is a safe colour. Miasma doesn't cling to white walls. A white shirt keeps me from overheating in summer. My favourite blanket is white too, although my grandfather buys me a lighter one each year. Every blanket has to be my favourite blanket now and this newest one is so light, it is barely the weight of air… but even then it continues to crush my lungs like water and suffocate me in my dreams. I reach out and my hands are bony-white, like the branches of a winter oak, grasping weakly at my throat.

Just outside my bedroom window the colours of Artigny seem to shout back at me. A pair of woodpeckers, green and red, drum away at my window frame in search of grubs, while boys and girls in colourful shirts sing along to an upbeat national tune. I cannot sing along with them however much I try — but I do try. When my grandfather catches me it is never an easy conversation. Sometimes it feels as though he would fight the whole world just to keep me in my bed.

"Rue," he asked me once, "is there really nothing more interesting to you than the guns I bring back home from work? It is such a hassle to clean them, you know. Our factories have a lot of dust — it is bad for the lungs."

I managed to smile back at him as I fidgeted with the hammer and trigger. "I must learn about the family business sooner or later, Papy. Why should I not start now, when my days are so empty?"

The summer rays warmed the skin of my legs through my flimsy white sheets, and the faint sheen of the window almost made them look green. I kicked my feet in the way I often saw the girls in picture books doing, but my grandfather saw me trying and, with a disapproving click of his tongue, he pressed them back onto the bed.

"You are too spry by half for such a small girl," he grumbled. "It will be your brother Pierre to inherit the business, don't you worry. For now your duty is simply to breathe as normal again." He took the framed photograph of my late mother from my bedstand, never removing his hand from my legs as he blew a stray hair from its sterile glass frame. "You remind me so much of her in these moments."

"I look nothing like her," I huffed, trying in vain to free my legs.

"Yes, you are as ugly as me!" my grandfather guffawed. "But like me and like her you are so serious all the time — always thinking about the family even in sickness. It sometimes hurts me, Rue. It hurts me that you are like this but your brothers cannot be. It hurts me to think of how they might treat you when I am gone."

"They would treat me nicer if you didn't always compare them to me," I muttered, unscrewing the pistol barrel and tossing it aside, lifting the leather grip just to appreciate how the sunlight brought out its earthy colours. "Even today I heard your voice through the walls, shouting at them for whatever, like Papa used to."

"I hope that I was not so soft on them as your father, Rue."

"I think that you can be kinder to them, like how Maman was."

"Those boys need more discipline before they go on to embarrass us in front of the whole country. I can be kind to them, but what good will that do when the world is not kind to soft men?"

"I wish that it didn't work that way." A frown tugs at my lips as new clouds pass overhead, eclipsing the sun. Colour returns to my body — regimental colours, blue and silver, tight around my waist but firm rather than crushing. "Can you not lead the men of the world to be kinder by example?" I say. "You always talk about leading by example — with the factory, too."

The shadows stretching my grandfather's face become deeper and darker than the ones over my skeletal, prosthetic legs, peeking out from beneath my linens. He doesn't quite manage to dispel those shadows with his smile. "You don't have to worry about that, Rue. Anyone would be lucky to bag a comely girl such as yourself."

My frown only grows heavier. The sky darkens — white to red to brown. The barrel bleeds powder and ichor from where I dropped it on the pristine floorboards. "Did you not hear me?" I snap.

"Of course. I'll make sure whoever you end up marrying—"

"Papy…!"

"— the world may not make kind men anymore, but I'll make sure to find one for you—"

"I don't want that. Let go of my legs— Let go of my legs, please—!"

"— you just have to get better. Just get better and all will be well again, Rue."

And then everything goes white all at once, and the breath is knocked out of my lungs. I am lifted from my bed by an unseen hand, then suspended by unseen strings over a dinner table with my family, five chairs pulled back while only four are occupied, because my mother never liked anyone else sitting at her spot. My middle brother Emil is cradling a wound across his jaw from where a broken plate had cut it, as my eldest brother Pierre rises to meet my grandfather in his fury. They are screaming. They will not stop screaming.

"… Stop," I whisper to nobody. "Stop pretending that things are fine. It wasn't mother's sickness or mine that made you like this. Stop making me your excuse. Stop making excuses."

I haul myself up by my unsteady prosthetic knees, only to be crushed again by an overwelming wave of weakness that arrives from behind me. I turn to look at the source and force myself to breathe in the white smoke of cannon fire, the blood of fallen men and women soaking the frills of my dress and matting them like hair on a pierced skull. The shouts grow louder and the light more blinding.

"You keep telling me about how hard it is to be so cruel to my brothers all the time," I whisper again. "Stop telling me about it if you're going to keep doing it. The cruelty finds its way to me eventually. You must know it, so why do you keep doing it?"

Blood begins to bloom on the backs of my hands, flowering into bone-deep bruises that pin them to my sides. Air freezes in my windpipe and refuses to clear out. I attempt to grasp at my throat but my body refuses to move.

"Stop making more guns," I gasp. "Stop insisting that I'm not yet better when I show you I can run. Stop locking me up in those white walls and telling me it's for my own good, stop shouting over me when I tell you I can't take it anymore, just stop, just stop, let me go already—!"

My mouth fills with solid smoke as I take one last sluggish look around. My grandfather has vanished from the table, and at my feet lies his casket, inscribed by my acid tears — and no one else's but mine. My brothers loom taller and taller against the blinding white, their voices growing deeper and more distant.

And I am still there. Alone. Unable to move.

I twitch a finger in the direction of the cannon fire.

I twitch a hand, an arm, a shoulder and grasp at it.

Drag myself by useless legs across the bloody mud.

Towards the cannons. Towards death.

And before long I am consumed by their smoke.

I wake up to a snowstorm pounding outside my windows, screaming as my blanket strangles my legs and mucous chokes my lungs. I grasp at my throat and scream and cry and beg for mercy.

It doesn't come until Anneliese barges through the door with a sawed-off rifle slung over her shoulders, racing to my side with a plate of salts and a warm, wet towel bundled in her callused fists. I take a deep breath as she slides the salts beneath my nose, tears and mucous dribbling across their surface and causing them to hiss and pop like miniature fuses.

"You're alright," my friend says. "You'll be alright, Rue. Just have to breathe in slow and deep for now."

For now your duty is simply to breathe as normal again, the voice of my grandfather echoes, and I have been nothing, nothing if not dutiful.