060/100 aka 200/365

SCARS
Word Count: 270

I traced the scars down your back, long paths deepened by the dim streetlights that sieved through the curtains. You shivered away from my fingertips but said nothing. I thought I knew enough not to ask you about them. About your time in Iraq and your best bud you watched explode into pieces. Sometimes you screamed in your sleep.

That was the last night we made love, the last time I touched you before you died.

It was something someone had said to you at the bar. I didn’t go and I should have. Maybe I could have stopped you but I didn’t know. Flashes of silver cut through the night air cramped in an alley. Three against one. The one filled with anger that had simmered for decades and I didn’t know.

Beatings, they told me. The scars were almost as old as you. A belt buckle, a coat hanger maybe, the man didn’t know. Your back streaked with a past you never told me about. I thought it was from the war and I suppose in a way I was right. Your mother and father were dead, you said, and I didn’t know that you meant it was only to you.

The quiet of evening settles into our room. It’s real then; I know you are gone. I sit undressed on our bed, too weary to even lay down. I reach for your tee-shirt, the one you last wore, wanting to sleep in your scent. And I touch my chest where your life bled out. My heart beats against my fingertips. I imagine it weaving a scar.