I am still no doctor, the characters still belong to L. M. Montgomery. The anecdote about the Christmas sermon, however, owes entirely to a minister of my acquaintance. It really did happen and it's hardly the weirdest sermon I've had cause to hear. Really. And as ever, love and gratitude to all of you reading and/or reviewing this oddity of a story.


Once, in a world without a war, the Rev. Meredith had preached a Christmas sermon that began with a warning about what would happen if flies were allowed to breed continuously for six months, unchecked by nature. It had been inspired by something Carl had said in the heyday of his fixation on the devilish menaces, and had been, Faith now suspected, designed to illustrate a point about the commercial teeth the Christmas Story had acquired. It wasn't Christmas, and God knew the last time there had been ways and means of exchanging the glittering gifts of her childhood Christmases but all the same, Faith thought of her father and his sermon, and the mountain of flies he had described now. She couldn't be sure, of course, but she thought this must be something like the way that would look. Nothing though, no Christmas sermon in the world could have prepared her for the sound of a million flies buzzing. It was like nothing on earth.

At first, before Faith could see them, she had taken it for the low drone of a bagpipe because it jarred her bones in the same way. It wasn't keening though, there was no waiting for that kick like a mule's that sent the pipes out-of-tune and into full-throttled wailing that came with bagpipes. Then she had thought it might be the ambulance's engine, preparing to betray her in the worst way possible, leave them stranded with the dead and the dying, half-drowning in the mud. Only then did she see them, a black haze like a raincloud –at first she thought it was a raincloud – low and lowering. It wasn't until Faith was in the thick of it, felt them crawling over her skin, the pinch of their bite on her neck, that she made sense of them for what they were, the flies her father had once anticipated, an apocalyptic warning no one had thought to look for.

In the beginning she couldn't move for them. No one could. They flew at all orifices, getting into eyes, nostrils, ears. She opened her mouth in denunciation of them, swallowed one and, her efforts failing to dislodge it, kept her mouth pressed tight closed after that. There were worse things in the world though than flies, hurts worse than the sting of their teeth, and after that first moment she came unstuck, they all did, and began to press forward.

It took another moment to realise they flies couldn't be relied upon to tell the dead from the living. The blood had drawn them, the smell of it hot on the air, cloying in its coppery richness, and it was everywhere. Lili had once likened it to licking a penny, but deep in the heart of the battle line, amid the wash of mud and blood it struck Faith as more like blood pudding before it had been fried. Another thing she was never going to eat as and when the war came to an end, she supposed.

She found Cecil because she quite literally tripped over him. She had been squinting against the flies when her foot connected with his sternum. Afterwards Faith would say that even had she not been squinting she would have missed him but for her feet because he was half-submerged in the mud and the half that wasn't was so bloodied and grimed as to all but blend into the landscape. When she did see him, Faith supposed him dead. She knelt down thinking to close his eyes, maybe chase the worst of the flies from his face, and had she never done it she would never have heard the wet whistle of his breathing over those thousand thousand flies. It too sounded like nothing on earth; not quite the last gasp of a dying thing nor the reedy whisper of the wind in autumn, but fragile and laboured at once, and nothing like the sound that came of a punctured lung. Stifling her distaste for insects, Faith edged a hand towards his throat, wanting to make sure the damage wasn't there. That startled the flies and they flew up in a hoard, which was how she came to see the ruin of his face. Her first thought was he has no nose, which made no sense because everyone was born with a nose. Her second thought was He's broken his nose, because that took account of its shapelessness and the blood both. It wasn't until she moved her hand across his face that she thought septal hematoma, and by then the list of injuries had mounted so high that Faith barely took it into account. By this time one of the flies had regained its nerve and alighted on her hand. She felt the prickle of its feet dancing across her fingers and her spine went cold in response but that too scarcely registered. She was busy tallying the injuries to Cecil's face; jaw shattered, teeth loose –five, one broken –bloodshot eyes –lacrimal bone probably fractured, facial trauma –severe… and of course, the broken nose, septal hematoma, and God only knew what else. It was like looking at the Punch of a Punch and Judy performance, except that even Punch had a nose and was designed to effect laughter; Faith looked at Cecil and thought she was holding the world together with both hands. She thought Cecil probably knew the feeling.

Needing to start somewhere, Faith rootled among her things, found carbolic lotion and, because she was reluctant to waste time on cutting bandages, a handkerchief Una had embossed for her back in the years when bizarre Christmas sermons were their chiefest anxieties and began to sponge the blood away from his eyes.

'This will sting a little,' she said as she worked, though it hardly seemed necessary. After the hell he must have gone through carbolic lotion was surely the least of his problems. Even so it elicited something that Faith thought was trying to be a smile. His mouth couldn't quite manage it –she blamed the broken maxilla – but his eyes crinkled involuntarily and then spasmed like trembling aspens in a gale when this proved painful.

'Lie still,' said Faith, then carefully spat a fly out of her mouth over the shoulder furthest from him. 'It'll go easier all round that way.'

The handkerchief, never designed with efficacy in mind, was sopping. Faith stuffed it back into her sleeve and dug into her bag for bandages. Her instruction had been to use them sparingly, to do what she could to ready patients for transportation away from the battlefield and the men could be treated properly. No one appeared to have taken injuries this extensive into consideration. This was beyond choice. Faith folded a wadge of bandage into a sizeable square and uncorked the carbolic lotion again. At least the alcohol smell of it cut the richness of the blood a little. It was beginning, in conjunction with the sun, to give her a headache. Such a little thing, thought Faith, as she pressed the bandage to his face and began to sponge the blood away. A headache she could bear. What she couldn't see her way to was mending the damage of his face. Whole swathes of skin seemed to have come away leaving it pulpy and raw to the touch, which didn't help at all with the butcher-shop impression of their surroundings. And then there was the nose –surely beyond reconstruction. Even if it could be done –a sizeable if in Faith's book –the odds were his family wouldn't know him to look at him. Not at first anyway. Perhaps after those eyes, no longer red with blood, crinkled at the corners…but why not, Faith thought suddenly as she tested the edge of his loose teeth with an index finger. Was anyone going to be recognisable to family when they finally came home? Would she be? Somehow, Faith rather suspected not, and with new resolve began to fish the shards of broken tooth out of his mouth. No point on him choking on them before he could be seen to and treated properly. He must be having trouble enough breathing as it was.

She found his name engraved on a medallion as she did her best to reset his jaw. She had thought at first it was only severed from his hard palate, and blamed it for the damage to his nose and eyes. But her probing found part of the bone snagged behind his left ear and she knew at once it was worse than that. With effort she shifted what bone hadn't shattered into realignment, the gritting and grinding of it of it competing contrapuntally with the drone of the flies and setting her teeth on edge. It was made all the harder by his wakefulness, the look on his face that said he might have tried to scream if he could have made his mouth cooperate. The work needed doing though and as Faith fought with the intractability of bone her efforts turned up his collar. That was how she found the medallion, and she would have overlooked it save as a conversation point if she hadn't by then learned to see with her fingers. As it was the pad of her thumb felt the depression of that first letter soft in the metal, round and curved, C. She needed a fresh bandage by then anyway, so while one hand unravelled a new swatch of cotton the other traced the shape of the letters and for a moment her heart misgave her because it was her mother's name, Faith was sure of it…only that made no sense. She paused, cut the bandage and as she soaked it in lotion retraced the inscription; Cecil. Not Cecilia then, of course not. It was the heat and her head and her wishful thinking, not to mention the bloody flies. Another one had found its nerve and now circled her head droning mindlessly as it weighed up the best place to bight her.

She had to do something about his nose, Faith thought, one hand still holding his jaw in place. If she didn't the bone would likely die and much good that would do him. She also needed a third hand. Possibly a fourth. Ideally another person entirely but that wasn't how excursions like this went. They had to scatter, the better to salvage as many of the wounded as possible, and oh but the wounded were legion. She needed to set his jaw. And see to his nose. And somehow get him out of the mud and back to the ambulance, please Go let her be able to find it through the haze of heat and flies and the dizzying smell of blood.

The fly that had been circling her found the sweet spot behind her ear and nipped. Unaccountably that decided Faith and having already given up on sparing bandages she cradled Cecil's head awkwardly in one arm and bound it as tight as she could manage in a roll of bandage. It wasn't much, but away from the flies and the blood she could worry about knitting the bones back together. Now she needed to do something about his nose while she still could.

The bore needle was elusive in and among her things, the book it lived in having slipped into the furthermost corner of the case.

'My sister,' she said to Cecil by way of apology, 'is the one with a taste for sewing.' But then she smiled and said, 'You're in luck though; that's not what needs doing.' Quick as a flash she had pierced the septum, and just like that there was more blood spurting its way across his face.

'That's good though,' she told him as she dabbed at it, 'that's much better.'

His eyes crinkled again, and then replicated the storm-rattled aspens again for good measure.

It was all she could do from the field. They mended him later, sat close under a pool of kerosene lamps and candlelight and put him to rights, beginning with the jaw. There was ether, sweet-smelling and treacherous, but no flies to assail the blood on his face.

'Can you do it,' asked Dr. Christohperson of Faith, and when her eyes rounded in incredulity, he added, 'your hands are right for it.'

So she took the splintered bones in hand and guided and coaxed them, and marvelled at how much easier this was on a patient asleep, when her vision wasn't clouded with flies and the mud slimy against her knees. It would never look right, of course, jaws rarely did after they had broken even once, Jem had told her that, eons ago. But to break repeatedly…it should have been unthinkable, the violence unimaginable. And yet. Faith splinted bones and where they had shattered irreparably did her best to knit what was left back together, Lili ever at her elbow with sutures, carbolic rinse, catgut.

It was Lili that swaddled his face in bandage, the best they could do against the trauma there, layers soaked in a healthy dose of alcohol against infection.

It took the three of them to reset Cecil's nose, to reassemble and bind the pieces of it until he had a hope of breathing some way other than through his mouth. Until it looked almost like a nose again. Blood made the cartilage slippery, even elusive, and its tendency towards repeated collapse made splinting the nostrils difficult. It took the web of their many fingers and what Faith privately suspected might be so much bloody-minded determination on their parts to make it happen. It was worth it though for the relief that struck her sharp between the ribs when that fraught, laboured whistle finally eased under their hands, his breathing quieted.

Later still, much later, when the trauma was less and the bones safely encased in plaster, Faith came to change the dressings on his face and found him awake, his hand tracing the contours of his face, from jawline to splinted nose.

'Jesus,' he said and grimaced, 'how bad is it?'

Not at all stuck somewhere between larynx and soft palate. She could never have said it convincingly in any case. There weren't words enough. Without thinking to do it, Faith's hand dipped into the recess of her apron pocket and came up with a compact Jem had given her back when the war was nothing more than a short-lived game of especially violent chess, due to end Christmas of 1914. Because, the note accompanying it had run, you should always be surrounded by niceties –especially now, darling. Faith had never thought to ask how he found it, hadn't wanted to. The thought that he had either seen it in some shop window either while training in England or later, away on leave for a spell and put it aside for her unsettled her stomach in a way not dissimilar to the smell of ether, because it was so unlike the impulsive Jem that had courted her in the days of The Harbour Light, when her latest grievance had been the indictment against minsters' children dancing. That Jem would have presented her with it at once, greedy to see the effect of his present, the look on her face as she traced the design of tiger lilies stamped over the gold plate.

Now she handed it over to Cecil, catch sprung to save him fumbling with it, helped him tilt it towards his face.

'Jesus,' he said again as he closed the compact. From the sound of his voice and the look in his eyes, Faith half expected tears as she closed her fingers once more over the weave of tiger lilies. But then he blinked once, twice, three times in rapid succession and said, 'Would you know? If you'd seen me before, would you know me?'

Faith, who hadn't seen him before the flies and the mud felt her words solidify in her throat. 'I don't think,' she said carefully, 'any of us would know ourselves now if we had run across them before. A lifetime seems to have passed since then.'

Cecil appeared to take this under consideration, one hand still compulsively relearning the map of his face.

'The thing is,' he said slowly, gingerly, 'if I'm not what I was when I was born, and I'm not the person I became…what does that make me?'

'Yourself,' said Faith, surprising herself as much as him in her promptness. She tapped a finger against the crossroad between his sternum and breastbone and said, 'That intractable spark, the thing that gives us all our hopes and frailties, that doesn't change, whatever else does.'

'Thought lots about it, have you?' said Cecil, and there was a smile in his voice if his mouth couldn't quite manage one yet.

'No,' said Faith. 'One of the hazards of growing up a minister's daughter; you hear a lot about what other people think about things. You sort of end up a magpie to thoughts, collecting all the best ones and sticking them together. But that one…that makes sense to me. If we were only blood and bone and flesh, I don't suppose it would matter so much what happened to it, to us. But we're more than that, people are finely wrought and haunting, complex things. We love and dream and bruise in places no doctor can do anything about…and yet somehow, those are the things we fight to preserve, I think. Do you see? Not the shape, but the core of a person, the tether that anchors body to soul, so that a person can go on loving and wanting and even grieving –so they can live, I suppose I mean.'

'I see,' said Cecil. Then, the smile warm in his voice again, he said, 'I dunno much about it, but I guess the world's cheated itself of a fine minister, keeping the women at arm's length and all that.'

That made Faith laugh. 'No,' she said, the laughter past, 'no, that I could never do. Nursing though...now I wonder how I ever did anything else.'