The Morning She Replied

Dedication: To all the veterans who never stop fighting. 

Disclaimer: this is a work of fiction, completely free of AI assistance. Any resemblance to real people, names, events, and places is totally accidental.

Glen glanced at the dusty grand-father clock standing in the dark corner of the room. Twenty-five past eight. Time to go. Yet, his finger hovered regretfully over the light switch. His eyes uncontrollably travelled to the PC on the work desk and lingered there. Maybe a quick check? Maybe there was already a mail for him? A shake of the head in his mind: no way, it was around two in the morning, her time. She must have been sleeping. Besides, his mail was sent no longer than two hours ago. He had to wait till tomorrow morning for her reply. Glen resolutely grasped the bundle of keys and stepped out into the hot night air.

He locked the front door, an unnecessary act given the remoteness of his residence, and walked across the grass-covered yard to his car. He’d been living in this summer house left behind by his grandfather for over four years and had come to like the quietness around it. Especially after the turbulence of the breakup with Gloria. Moving in here wasn’t easy at first. In fact, it took him around two months to get the place inhabitable: fixing the roof and insulation, connecting to the sewage system, making sure all the pipes were in good functioning. Glen had always been handy. Hardship never faltered him. In fact, he’d grown too used to it.

The Hanson & Bro Warehouse parking lot was almost empty as Glen turned in. A few lorries with the company’s cheerful logo slapped across the containers stood motionless like massive boulders in the yard. Their shadows cast long after the bright electric light shining from the security room window. Glen knew Harry must be sitting there, in front of the battery of inspection screens. The thought brought a smile to his face and his pace quickened.

Together they ran through the usual routine check. Smoothly, thoroughly, efficiently, but Glen knew the patrol would be the time for it. Harry didn’t need to ask what’d been going on with Glen. He just knew from the sixth sense of a man who’d been through life and death. 

“So, looks good, doesn’t it?” finally Harry probed, as they strode along the length of the gigantic shelves stacked to the ceiling with packages.

“Well, it’s not a dating portal after all,” Glen tried to contain his excitement, knowing the effort wasn’t very successful. “We’re just kind of getting to know each other.”

“That’s how it should start,” Harry smiled.

The whole idea was just a benign, friendly correspondence on the internet to draw Glen out of his shell. Yet, with her, the tell-tale was clear right off the bat. Everything just clicked. Amazingly. Glen couldn’t remember being so mesmerized. This woman went straight to his soul. No small talk, no artificial probing. By day three, he felt as if he’d known her, this beautiful stranger on the internet, all his life.

He pulled his phone out, tabbed in the passcode and passed the phone to Harry, failing to hide his proud beam. Harry took a glance, then whistled.

“What a girl! You lucky beast!” he said, giving Glen a joking punch on the chest. “How long have you been writing together?”

“About a month. And five days,” Glen answered, startled by how precisely he remembered the length of their acquaintance.

“Counting every day, huh?”

“We happened to start out at the beginning of the month and have written very often since then. That’s why I remember,” Glen gave an excuse.

And her reply was due this morning. He always wrote back within an hour of hearing from her. He wondered since when she’d become the main part of his day. Every incident recently triggered in him the automatic thought “I can’t wait to tell her this.” He found himself impatiently looking at his phone a couple of times per day to see if he got a new message, knowing he didn’t need to until he heard the happy “blink” sound. He checked, nevertheless.

“What’s her name?” asked Harry, who didn’t bother to hide his curiosity.

“The portal forces using nicknames instead of personal information. That kind of craze about privacy, you know.”

Harry nodded, knowing nothing.

“Her first name starts with an E,” Glen added.

“Emily? Evelyn? Any guesses?”

Eva, Glen thought. I’d call her Eva, the first woman on earth.

“Lovely eyes,” commented Harry generously, still looking at the phone.

Eyes and everything else, Glen thought. There was nothing that was not lovely about her. But yes, those smiling eyes were the things that caught his attention in the first place.

“Well, I just hope it’s not an AI generated photo. These days you never know,” Glen said, trying to act cool.

“C’mon Glen. Don’t be a tough egg. She looks pretty real to me,” Harry said, returning the phone. “So, whatcha gonna do?”

“What am I gonna do? It’s just a month, man. If it’s supposed to get anywhere, we’ve got to meet first. Those kinds of distant relationships are not for me.”

“Do something about it then,” Harry patted Glen’s shoulder. “Your break.”

Glen watched Harry’s broad back disappear behind the door of the security room. He knew Harry had been waiting for him to move on. It’d been years since his divorce with Gloria. Glen couldn’t imagine how his life would be if it wasn’t for Harry. He didn’t want to think back of those nights when Harry drove for hours, searching the streets for him, knowing he had nowhere to go after Gloria got the house. Then just by chance, Harry recalled the grandfather’s hut Glen mentioned in an accidental chat back when they were still in a Thai jungle. He found Glen in that abandoned shack, buried under a mountain of empty bottles, deeply depressed and broke. Glen didn’t want to remember how Harry had shaken him awake from the nightmare that haunted him almost every night, how Harry had answered his cries with an unwavering firmness. 

“It wasn’t your fault, Glen. That Arab woman should have stopped when you gave the warnings.”

“But, Harry, it was me who opened fire. I didn’t see the white flag until she fell.”

“Listen! No one was sure what she had in that bag. None of us knew! It could have been a bomb or anything. You warned her.”

“I killed her, Harry. A woman! A civilian! She was torn to pieces. By my gun! Oh God!”

No, Glen wouldn’t know what’d be of his life without Harry. Harry had been more than a comrade; he had been a brother, in Afghanistan and here. He made sure Glen stopped drinking. He put some clean shirts on Glen and put him in this job. Now that Glen was back on his own feet, Harry kept rooting for him to get a life again. But this hadn’t been easy. Glen felt by himself he was no longer the breezy high school sweetheart of Gloria he once was.

He stepped out into the bay area, planting a cigarette between his lips. His fingers fumbled in the hip pocket for the lighter and closed around his phone. Glen pulled it out, gazing at the sweet smiling eyes on the screen. Eyes that instilled hope in him again. Maybe she wouldn’t like him smoking; she’d mentioned something about healthy living. He threw the unlighted cigarette away, fighting a rising urge to log in and check the mailbox. No, Eva deserved more than a five-minute brief. She’d become the sacred ritual of his day. 

He was back to the security desk to see Harry poking his head out the window, scanning the starry sky. 

“They said tonight will be the Perseid meteor shower.”

“The what?”

“Lots of meteorites should be falling on Earth right now. I’ve seen just that one,” Harry said, pointing to a light streak crossing the dark sky.

Both men deliberately avoided the term “shooting stars”. They’d had more than enough shootings in the past to ever want to mention that word again.

“Could very well be just a hype,” Glen shrugged.

He had no interest in stars. He’d rather visualize that streak as the contrail behind an airplane. Not the one that transferred him to a world of hot sand, explosions and bloody bodies. No, this time it was going to take him to a faraway place, where there’d be a lot of cuteness, warmth and, who knew, a new beginning.

“Anyway, have a wish ready,” Harry said, winking mischievously. “It’s supposed to come true in such—”

A “blink” sound interrupted Harry. The two men looked at each other. Glen glanced at the clock on the monitoring screen. Four twenty-eight, her time. She must be having trouble sleeping. He noticed a twinge of uneasiness. Last time, Eva told him she was going through some sort of worries. One day, he hoped, he might be the one to kiss them away.

Glen turned into the driveway of his dark house when the night was drawing to an end. His wristwatch showed ten minutes after five. He had only a few hours rest before having to go on his second job. But before that, there was something he must do. He went to his PC, stabbed his thumb into the power button. He realized his palms got clammy and his heart beat faster. He sat waiting for the monitor to start up, suddenly became aware that during the last month, no flashback, no nightmare nor self-doubt once clouded his mind. That peace was so foreign he started to wonder how it had been missing from his life for such a long time. In the Marine Corps, he was trained to be unbreakable, through endurance of hunger, heavy load and environmental harshness. But nothing could prepare them for war. And when people did break, they had no idea how to pick themselves up from the ground. Until Eva came into his life. With her, there was no pressure to impress, no challenges to overcome. Just sharing, understanding and appreciation. Everything suddenly seemed so easy, so pleasant. The mutual trust was so unmistakable sometimes it felt like if he just reached out, he’d touch her warm and comforting hand behind the screen.

“You’ve got mail!” the account notification cheered. Glen clicked “Open”. It was from Eva! The mail was alarmingly short. It consisted of only two sentences. The first started with “I’m sorry…” The second line was only one word “Goodbye”. Glen leaned back in his chair. The silence that encompassed him was deafening like an exploding grenade. 

Was this all a joke?

Had she been playing games with him?

Slowly he rose to his feet and walked over to the window. The sky outside was ablaze with flying comets. Pieces of ice crashing through the atmosphere, burning themselves into nothingness. He didn't make a wish.

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