There has been a girl with grease on her hands and the scorch of hot steel in her throat and a voice that can rise above the shriek of gears. She's always smelled more like oil than like flowers, and when the tall coffins of her parents swing deep into the earth, she stays up all night in the workshop. She cried when they left, and she cried when they came back, but now that they will not return she cannot cry. Her tears are held in reserve for others: for them she cries, but for herself there is nothing but vacancy. Tearless, endless.
There has been a girl with an itch under her fingernails and eyes the color of a burning field and a monster living in the ink underneath her skin. She has smelled the reek of insanity on her father's breath as he carved into her his legacy, and she breaks only once. One whimper escapes as she becomes more than, less than, as the names of all the victims who will die in the years coming appear invisibly in her flesh. There have been a lot of things her father has done to her that she tries not to remember. This is, by far, the worst.
There has been a girl who thinks miracles live in the hands of the boy who lives only to discover, create, obliterate. She had to watch as he and his brother ripped themselves open on the edges of a universe that betrayed them. She had to watch as the two of them bent before the wind: an armored silhouette with the kindness of a child, and a small, broken figure with the responsibility of a man. She refuses to just watch. So she forgets what sleep means, she becomes a stranger to her own ambitions. She makes their affliction her calling, and under her fingers she creates something from nothing—something alchemy cannot do.
There has been a girl who never forgot what the young soldier told her at her father's grave. She has not forgotten that even though she reaps souls from the earth like a scythe, that he has the words and the spirit to give the nation back its soul. She has not forgotten the waterless hell of the desert, where she and her weapon plucked life after life after life. She has not forgotten the graves, unmarked even by bloodstains. The sand leaves no trace—not even of blood. She remembers the young soldier's words, and she braces for impact. If the world he's described comes to reality, executioners such as she have no place in it.
There has been a girl who allows herself to finally, finally weep her own tears when the brothers came back. She reacquaints herself with them, the two to whom she has been for so many years a pillar of support. She hints at none of the pain they gave her, though it is written in every line of her forehead, in every sentence that leaves her mouth half-broken. The brother with the miraculous hands—the one she built for him replaced by one of bone and sinew—looks at her like she is the terrifying heaven he's been running from his whole life. The girl who stitched the bleeding pieces of him together, the girl who can kick him in the neck as quickly as she can kiss him there. He marries that girl.
There has been a girl who is not so lucky. The only marriage she knows is the bitter coffee of early mornings, the rough heft of a uniform jacket over scarred shoulders, the wound of a trigger catching that she reopens every time she sets foot on the firing range. The young soldier has asked her to follow him, and she thinks that if there is a hell, she's already descended into it, and come back from the darkness at his side. This is not hell, this distance across the room from his desk. This is not hell, to be able to watch him make strides toward a country he saw in his dreams. And when his hand brushes hers as though by accident, even though her skin ignites, no, this is not hell.
The girl with the work-hardened palms hears an orchestra in the singing of a drill. The girl with the predator's eyes hears it in the silence after a gunshot. The first builds, the second kills. They both have people for whom they build, for whom they kill. They both have people they need to protect. There have been two girls, and from them are born two women: the women who hold on their shoulders the world and all its death, the women who tighten the screws, who focus the crosshairs, the women whose lives are measured in the breaths taken by those they have saved. And when they meet again, a cup of tea the only visible similarity between the two of them, they exchange a smile, and a wordless recognition of kinship.
The sun would tumble from the sky without women like us.