74. Great Distance
Dear Mother, Riza writes on the plain, military-issue paper (which is thin and flat like a sheaf of pressed tobacco), I hope that this letter finds you well.
She stops to lick her lips and ponder her next sentence. She makes an odd image, sitting there. For one thing, her hair is newly and boyishly cut and she is dressed in plain, drab clothes. Her formal writing seems, somehow, foreign when paired with her still-androgynous figure; Riza is, after all, still very young.
I am learning patience here, she finally adds. It is the epitome of the art of war. I have found someone that I wish to protect.
She stares at what she has written for a moment before shredding the paper and swallowing each dry scrap, small paper angels and ink-sins in her mouth. She puts away her pen and leaves for the shooting range.
Several years later, Riza's mother will receive this in the mail:
-eleven inches of blonde hair, braided and split at the ends,
- a regulation pistol and three spare clips of ammunition,
- an old chemistry text, and
- forty-eight unfinished letters, all of them addressed nebulously to home.
Also: a photograph of a dark-haired man with narrow, knowing eyes. Riza herself is in the picture, although her mother only notices her daughter after careful scrutiny. Riza is behind the man and to the left, quiet and stone-faced. On the back, there is a blurred date and a caption: The Flame Alchemist.
There is no mention of Riza, not on the back of the picture, and no explanation in the box of possessions. Riza's mother boxes these things up carefully.
She ponders blowing her brains out with Riza's old pistol, to keep Riza set firmly on her course. She dismisses this idea, however; Riza has no life left to come back to anyway. Any sort of physical death between the two of them is redundant.
Her mother puts the box away, out of sight, and rewrites the date on the back of the photo before tucking it in between the pages of her dream journal. That night she dreams of death on the battlefield and, instead of recording it faithfully within the book she makes herself a cup of tea and drinks it slowly, staring at the photograph.
My daughter is dead, she thinks to herself, not daring to say the words out loud. The she washes out her teacup and says nothing at all.