For a day, they pack up their tired bones and leave the death, the chaos, and the terrible, pressing danger behind them.

She slips feet that only remember practical boots and walking over fresh graves and scorched earth into flirty, carefree sandals, and it is surreal and freeing in the most dislocated way. She wears a pretty sun dress, paints lip gloss on her mouth, and pretends as she packs their picnic that she is a real girl, like she used to be.

He dons comfy Converse, their faded red canvas feeling thin and unprotected around arches, heels and toes that just want to stop running (and don’t know how). His jeans are old and worn, like his soul, and his T-shirt hints at muscles that could only be shaped by fighting tooth and nail. It almost hides all the scars.

They climb into his car and tell the long shadows behind them to wait. Wait just 24 hours. They’ll be back, then, and can be swallowed whole in darkness more than lack of light once again.

The road rolls out beneath the tires, minutes stretching in the quiet of the wind and the pavement, until she remembers that there is music that doesn’t sound like war drums, or harmonies of scream-and-cry. The radio fills something empty and forgotten, and they say nothing, all the words of Other Things carved out of them by the place they have put temporarily behind them.

They run away to the beach.

(One of them thinks maybe they have come to let the waves wash them clean again. The other wonders if they should just walk into the sea, say to hell with duty and loyalty and direst need, and never, ever come out again.)

They sit on rough-sanded rocks, avoiding the jagged, cutting edges with an unconscious, practiced grace, and eat sandwiches which have no flavor, rinse them down with drinks they cannot taste (and which quench none of their many, ferocious thirsts.)

For minutes at a time, they are young again, silly and laughing; faded old Polaroids of happiness dancing in the surf, making shapes of wet sand. She reaches into the brine and pulls out a fistful of seaweed. While he strips off his shirt, much too warm and forgetting to be self-conscious, she slaps the slimy wet plants against his chest and stomach, her aim too accurate and quick, her furtive goal less of fun and more of hiding that pale mark under his sternum. (She hates it; she put it there. They had stood on different sides of a bloody line, then. It is too late for sides, now.)

He crows in indignation, retaliates swiftly. His shoulder catches against her ribs, and she tumbles back into the waves. Never able to take a fall alone, she holds tight to his belt loops and brings him down into the salt and the grit with her.

When they struggle free from the rolling wavelets, his skin is slick and shining; her dress clings, filmy and half-transparent, all suggestion accented by shadow and sand. They come together naturally, like magnet and iron. Their lips meet, wet and languidly pressing, move together familiarly, simulating in half time all the more violent dances they have sketched before with knife and bullet and force.

It isn’t sweet; it is slow. This is not a kiss of desperation, or even passion. It is inevitability finally acknowledged, and conquered in the surrender.

When they break apart, brittle and sticky and drying, they say nothing. They retrieve their shoes, painted rich, fantastic colors by the lowering sun, and collect the detritus of their delusional escape.

They get back in the car, and begin the backward route. Along the way, they pick up their fear, their exhaustion and determination; they brace back up their spines with fight and preemptive revenge. The weight is more than the sea dragging on their clothes, the pull of their home-front war far stronger than any tide.

For a day they had warm sun, a rolling road, clinging grains between their toes, and a kiss.

It is something to hold onto, when the blood and the dying comes.