Sometimes too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm'd.
-William Shakespeare
She doesn't sleep much anymore.
Even as a child, she couldn't sleep in August. She'd wake up at two in the morning, sheets twisted around her legs and all of her pillows on the floor. Her mother always thought she was nervous about school starting.
But now it was simply too hot.
In a way she supposes it's silly. The danger is past.
Except it's not gone. Not really.
Most nights, now, she gets up. Walks around the kitchen. Gets a glass of water and stares out the back window. She always used to envision a swing set in the backyard. And children. She never wanted a white picket fence, oh no, but she thought a swing set might be nice. And little red-haired children with blazing green eyes.
But she can't see it. Not anymore.
All she can see is the parched grass.
And so she just sits there, hands wrapped tightly around her glass, berating herself for being childish. This is what she wanted. The boy with the crooked grin and black hair always in his eyes.
She'd seen a picture of his father, once. In a leather-bound book, full of his parents waving and smiling. Dancing. He had his father's hair, she told him. And his mother's eyes.
He'd slammed the book shut then, and she didn't quite understand why.
Sometimes she wonders if she's losing him. She'll come back to bed and he won't have noticed that she was gone. Or he'll be lying there, eyes wide and staring at the ceiling.
But tonight, this stifling August night when the heat seems baked into the very air, he comes into the kitchen. She notices that he's not rubbing the sleep from his eyes. She guesses he doesn't sleep much, either.
He sits down, wordless, and studies her across the table.
I can't sleep, she tells him, avoiding his eyes, because she's terrified of what she sees. And of what she doesn't. She knows what he's lost. The same things she has. And she wants to say something, wants to tell him, but she knows that if she opens her mouth the words will get tangled up and nothing will come out right.
This was supposed to be right. To be heaven. But she supposes it's a little too hot to be heaven.
She didn't think they'd be able to go on. Too many dead. Too many lives ripped apart. But somehow they blindly made their way through each day. And tried to survive.
It's ruined him, she knows. She can see it in his eyes.
They had won. But she wonders why it seems like they're still losing, every day.
He led her back to bed then. They both knew they wouldn't sleep. Couldn't. There was nothing to do after war but to lie awake and try to make sense of it all.
Except they couldn't.
Not ever.
And so she lies there in perfect silence. In a place she'd imagined with burning cheeks. And she wonders why nothing is the way it should have been. Why heaven feels remarkably like hell.