It was a week after our wedding when Michelle disappeared out in the field. I lead the backup team sent in.
She was dead when I found her. Lying in a pool of blood.
They like to say that a lot: "pool of blood." But it wasn't just a pool. That was my wife, there, where the life had drained out of her onto the hard concrete floor, in the form of red liquid.
When I knelt down beside her, she was still warm. Her cheeks were still wet with fresh tears. But when I felt for a pulse, there was none.
Mouth to mouth. As I tried to force the life back into Michelle, I was helpless to fend off the thoughts flooding my mind. I thought of all the times our mouths had been fused together like that, while the physical act of sex made one the two beings already joined.
She breathed. Medics took over, brought her bleeding, dying body to the hospital. She lived.
In the days that followed, I learned how she had been tortured for information, information she refused to the death to give. I learned how she had been beaten. How she had been cut. How she had been shot. How she had been burned. How she had been raped.
But she recovered, and she lived. My Michelle always lives. Never breaks. I have never met anything so terrible, so horrible that my Michelle could not survive it. Not the bomb, not the virus, not all the times she's been a hostage, not the guns, not the knives, not even me. I killed her, during that year that now seems so long ago, but I could not break her.
She is mine again, now. And I am hers, for I am always hers, even when she is not and cannot be mine. We are tethered together, she and I.
I know that my Michelle will always be all right. She cannot always protect all of those around her, although she does everything she can. But Michelle always survives.
Now, she is only a few weeks pregnant with the child that we never thought we would be in a position to have. I wonder if, now that she is two, she will be able to survive as she always has, when her body is no longer her own.
The flames are my answer.