You watch as your candlestick shrinks. You sit huddled in a corner of a muddy hole your superiors call a trench and clasp your hands over the finger-sized fire. It only heats the front of your hands, but you still savor every second of its warmth. After a short while, you feel the biting cold return, as a thin coil of smoke rises from your candlestick. Images of your late friend return as fast as the light had extinguished. The noise that smashed your eardrums. The chunk of your friend’s head that blew off by the shrapnel. You wish it happened to you instead. You wish they were the ones sitting in the trench. To your left, a glow appears that makes you turn. A silhouette of your friend sits next to you. Blood streams from the side of their head but they do not look at you. Instead, they are pointing to a wall at the end of the trench, eyes not blinking. What do you do?
