Nikos sat up from a long night of sleep, an impression of his head on the pillow. He threw back the sheets and rose, throwing the curtains aside letting a blinding sunlight burst into his cornea. He turned away and realized he had Eleni’s satchel held to his heart. Her fingers clung to it, in a dark night, with German soldiers just a foot away.
Nikos’s breath felt like smoke in his throat. He forced his hands to lift the cold iron of the rifle. The stock kicked hard against his shoulder, the report shattering the quiet of the moonlit woods. Next to where Eleni lay, the silhouette dropped from view.
They fled with only their lives, and nothing more. Branches whipped across their faces as they tore through the trees. Their legs burned and Eleni fell again and again, while the whizz of lead shattered the bark right at their heels.
A yell outside made him look out the window again, straight at the German Swastika flying in the square.
Uniformed Germans goose-stepped down the street, the exactness of each footfall culminating in human thunder echoing after them.
Nikos turned away to dress, his voice barely a whisper against the leather of the satchel on the bed.
“What a mystery life is,” he murmured. “The family we thought we had, the safety of our island, our friends, our enemies... peace and war, living and dying. Eleni, the world is so different now. I only wish you were here with me.”
He swallowed, his throat tightening.
“I—I need you. I never told you, but I need you. If I am to keep going. If I am to live.”
Once dressed, he took up the satchel again, the musty aroma of the cellar still lingering on the horse leather, and he pulled out the letters and read them both from beginning to end.
To the old lady and her even more ancient looking sister, he was like a ghost in human flesh, his movements closer to flitting, a bird stuck to the earth like a penguin.
He sat down to breakfast: toast, eggs and goat milk. He said nothing, the ladies asked nothing and troops of Germans passed by.
He ate like he did not know what he was doing, how to use utensils, a cloth napkin, or that the food even passed down his throat.
Memories tornadoed in his head and shot out on his plate, mixing with the food, tasting bitter and tasteless all at once.
The ladies watched side-eye. The bandages on his head, the scratches on his face and hands. They told his story and the way he kept the satchel on his person, more than any word he or the doctor had shared.
A hooded crow alighted on the windowsill, an ashen dishevel of feathers garbling out its song.
It meant nothing to Nikos, though it was an improvement to the sound of war.
“I’m sorry,” he said eventually, pushing away the plate and rising. The old ladies said nothing, but one nodded, and Nikos with the satchel at his heart walked out the front door, into the air that smelled like everything he remembered, but tainted by the leer of smoke and gunpowder.
“Eleni, do you remember what happiness is?” he asked out loud as he passed locals, and Germans, and a donkey tied to a post. “I feel it receding. Like low tide. But I am not guaranteed like the sea. Will happiness return?”
It was June now, and he shivered as with cold.
He saw her as he last saw her. Eyes wide, dogs snarling, biting, and mauling at her by the dozens. The cuts on her arms vomited blood red all over her, the dogs, and the rocks. Sudden jaws around his own legs caught him off balance. He lost sight of her as he hit the ground, fighting with desperation just to see her again, to know that she was still above it all.
His legs ached. His head throbbed like the blasts of German bombs, and he wished that if Eleni had to die, he could die too.
A German patrol came up the other end of the street. He knew what he should do.
He walked on with all his pain, straight at them.
His fingers clenched around the satchel, turning white as an egret. His heart drummed. His eyes widened and darkened. He knew what he had to do.
Then something grabbed him around the waist. Discombobulated, he struggled against the hands.
“Nikos, stop,” a voice he recognized hissed. “I have news you will want to hear. Thank God I came when I did.”
Nikos felt himself pulled into a house, and the voice continued without stopping.
“You were out of your mind, my friend, and if I hadn’t arrived when I did, I would have found that you had taken away from Eleni everything the Germans hadn’t.” The speaker grabbed Nikos by both shoulders.
“Eleni is alive. She tried to reach the king but she didn’t make it in time. She watched the ship of dreams fade into tomorrow with her information about her father and brother, possibly never to be seen again.”
Nikos was a blank slate. His eyes slowly widened, and his voice lisped,
“Eleni is alive?”
“Yes. And she wants you to know she is sorry for leaving without a word, and that she hopes you can forgive her, but she had to try and get that satchel back.”
“Eleni is alive?” Nikos whispered again, his weight slumping heavily against the news bearer.
“Yes.”
Nikos thrust the satchel into the other’s chest, and burst into the first real flood of tears he had shed since this nightmare began.
At last the sobbing stopped shaking him, and he lifted his eyes, glistening and running with tears.
“Where is she?”
“She is safe with my family in hiding,” the other replied. “I have come to take you to her.”

Thanks for reading. Chapter 18 will be out soon!

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I will not go to my funeral unless I am chained and fettered head to toe, a sack thrown over my head, and kidnapped there.

I have too much to write that I cannot die. Or, if I find myself lying there, I must believe it true and allow myself to be whisked away on the wings of angels to a world I have longed for, leaving behind a world I did not do enough for.

I want to tell people how I hear the thunder of the passing storm that dumped millions of gallons of rain on us last night. I want to tell people how the sound of the ceiling fan moves the air in my room, making me cool, making me stop and think of how I feel like that ceiling fan. So much movement and yet it’s in the same place no matter what it does. You don’t really care about that though, do you?

You just wonder what I want? What are you reading? Why you should keep reading when your inbox is so full you will never catch up and you will never get this moment back because there is no Time Machine or spell or portal to go back in search for your lost time.

I want to tell you how lonely it is to be a writer on Substack. A ghost town with only a few tumbleweeds bouncing down a dusty road like in an old movie Western.

We tell people how much we care. How much we love what they wrote. How their words moved us to action, to tears, to laughing out loud.

But it’s all a lie, a figment, a facade, a gesture of meaning in an internet that is meaningless.

Much like we assume that the bird call in westerns was a bald Eagle, is actually a red tailed hawk. Mind blown.

Somehow or somewhere along the path of human existence we have come to this point where we are the smartest, most technologically advanced humanity has ever been, and yet we are existentially the most lonely.

Writing has always been lonely. Always will be. But if you look over the landscape of entire cultures, loneliness is the most rampant emotion even though we are the most connected we have ever been.

Yes I sit here in the shadows, with one of the five lightbulbs out because I haven’t remembered to replace it and the shadows it casts over my room is a befitting mood for me.

I don’t use any other social media other than SubStack because I am not interested in the world of putting on a show and being something that I am not, something that is admirable but soulless. That’s what it feels like to me. SubStack is the same way. But at the same time it gives a measure more of value than other platforms because it is the modern paper where news and ideas, stupid ones and smart ones, flow forth like a flood, miring everything but not necessarily destroying anything.

Behind every row upon row of writing, every sentence of truth or dare sits a writer during their lunch break, or sitting up until 2 AM writing, mentally sweating, back aching, hoping to find meaning and connection for a single moment through those words to another person who might be worlds apart. So often clinging to that single like, that one comment “I loved this!” Or “you said out loud what I have felt!” like it’s a life-preserver to a drowning person out at sea. But it doesn’t help because we are all just black holes in the universe of humanity, sucking up planets and stars but never full. Never really given meaning. Always having but never holding because how do you hold a phantom?

We are but the dust remains after Thanos’ snapped his fingers. We know that time passes, that we are getting older, that the seasons change and that we are present, but we are like an old man that still thinks he has the body of a twenty year old so he climbs ladders he should not, and does otherwise risky things because he does not realize that he is not what he thinks.

But the people on the other side of the screen, are frozen in time, unchanged unless they change their profile picture to a raccoon, a dragon, a phoenix, and then we notice. We do not notice how they age, their struggles, their personality differences.

We only see them as they reveal themselves to us. And we to them. Meaning everything, meaning something, not necessarily nothing. But it is a writer’s lot to notice and go unnoticed.

At least that’s how it seems to me in the shadows of a dead light-bulb.

But it’s everything to a writer.

Loneliness is the birthplace of dreams. Much like the lack of something is the spawn of invention, like the ATM so you could get money outside of normal banking hours, or Uber as an app to connect you directly to your driver.

And loneliness is a writer’s greatest friend because from the need to fill the silence we tell stories first to ourselves and if we dare to write it down, eventually to the world.

We meet people that we create, in worlds we create for the purpose of storytelling, for ourselves at first, and maybe only. Like Henry Darger’s 9 million words found in his apartment after he died.

But loneliness is also strange. To us writing our hearts out it isn’t so lonely while it is the loneliest life simultaneously. It’s only bad when we allow ourselves to think of it. When we realize that we are missing out on the real life happening all around us, the children growing, your spouse growing older, the birthday candles mounting higher and higher until there is candles with a little cake. And you sit in a chair old and grey and going faster towards death than ever before. And you have to lean back and ask yourself was it worth it?

Some days it is, somedays it’s not. When you’re in the middle of a scene, yes. But you look up and you are walking your daughter down the aisle, and you wonder what happened to the little baby girl you held at the hospital, wrapped tight in a Kuddle-Up blanket.

I want to save my characters. I want to pull them back from the cliff, or from the blasts of bombs on the island of Crete. I want to stare at the sunset with them and laugh over the good times, shed tears over the bad times and know in my heart of hearts that I wrote those experiences and should be ashamed of what I put them through.

But I am not.

I look up. The sky is overcast, a light drizzle falling. I need to tell stories because they matter to me even if no one else cares. I don’t need applause, otherwise I would do something else. Writing is often a thankless job, a steady chiseling of the soul until we breathe out one final gasp at life and are thrust into the arms of God and eternity.

I don’t want to miss life, by trying to stare at people on the other side of a screen and spend my life wondering like Peeta "Real or not real?" Or watch my Dad one day walk my two younger sisters down the aisle and wonder why I don’t know them? How did they grow up so fast and I didn’t even notice?

I must write like the untamed animal within. But I will love life and my loved ones with greater zeal than ever my stories have known.

Do you ever feel that way? Pulled in two directions? Wondering if you stay too long you will lose the other? Sometimes I just need to write while I am with family, with my friends. Sometimes I have to rush away. Pour myself into a writing frenzy like pouring water on flames, only a curling smoke remains. Hey that rhymes.

I am not like the animals, I lack the instinct to know when not to write. I have been known to write in Walmart. In Hobby Lobby in the middle of scrapbook supplies that my sister is deciding to buy.

If I am writing make sure you have my attention. I don’t mean to be absent minded. But I am off in a world of my own, a Neverland that calls to me and I must go helplessly on in search for the words, though I know they will come to me. Not always when I want them, but when I need them most.

I will be asleep and wake up at 2 AM, mainly to check my blood sugar, but sometimes the urge to write is greatest then and I must not let it pass.

I write over my coffee while everyone else is on Facebook or WhatNot. And I wonder if they, who never read my writing, even know how much I love them? Mom, Dad, elder brother, sisters.

I don’t say it out loud enough. I don’t hug enough. I wonder if I am present enough.

I am just an amateur writer anyway. Maybe they know me well enough to know what I write whether they read it or not.

Maybe I am the only writer that’s lonely after all and I am just a fool in a five foot-two body that should have been a Hobbit but I lacked the big feet.

I don’t want to lie, to myself, my readers, my family and friends. So I will write what it feels to me. That’s what personal essays are right? Telling the world what a particular thing is in your head and opinion?

It is lonely. No doubt. But it is the writers life. Whether you write in your room, on a beach, on a park bench before the coming of the pouring rain. Loneliness is there and it is devastating and a loving companion.

The world that doesn’t write can never know how sweet this loneliness is.

The rain is falling heavier now. I stand up. I feel lighter than before I I began. I will swap out that light bulb.

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I’ve been thinking about something lately.

As a person with Type 1 diabetes, I know there is no shortage of information about what we’re supposed to do.

Check your blood sugar.
Take your insulin.
Watch what you eat.
Exercise.
Go to your appointments.
Keep your numbers in range.

And that information is important.

But I don’t think we talk nearly enough about what it actually feels like to live with diabetes 24/7.

The mental exhaustion. The constant decisions. The guilt. The frustration. The feeling that everyone around you thinks you’re fine because, from the outside, you look fine.

From the outside, diabetes can look like a few shots, a glucose check, and a doctor’s appointment. From the inside, it can feel like carrying an invisible weight that never gets put down.

I’ve lived with Type 1 diabetes burnout myself.

Diabetes burnout isn’t necessarily depression. Sometimes it’s something different: simply becoming exhausted by the relentless work of staying alive.

You know what you’re supposed to do.

You may even want to do it.

But eventually, you can become so tired of managing diabetes that you don’t want to take your medication, follow the protocol, or do the things you know you need to do to stay healthy. Because you’re on a hamster wheel that never stops spinning, even when you’re exhausted.

But the one thing that helped me most wasn’t another piece of medical advice.

It was meeting another diabetic who understood.

Someone who had been through it.

Someone who didn’t need me to explain why I was exhausted.

That got me thinking:

What if there were something specifically designed to help people through diabetes burnout—not by teaching them more about diabetes management, but by helping them deal with the psychological weight of living with it?

I’m calling the idea Diabetes Burnout Antidote for now, inspired by ’s Procrastination Antidote.

I’m not sure exactly what it would become.

Maybe a short guide. Maybe a collection of resources and stories. Maybe something involving peer support. Maybe something completely different.

I’m just exploring the idea.

But I’m curious:

Have you ever met someone with diabetes who simply understood?

And if you have experienced burnout, what has helped you through it?

Final Thought

I know that many people have tried to help diabetics over the years, but this particular struggle seems to be something that we are often left to figure out for themselves.

So I am taking the challenge.

I want to build something that can help diabetics who are struggling to keep going because they are simply too burned out to keep going.

This is just the beginning.

Let’s make it into something great.

Thank you for reading.

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Every day is a gift.

Yesterday, today, until days are no more.

Get off your phone, off your computer, and spend time with God, family, and friends.

Future me won’t look over my life and wish I had looked at social media more.

It will only wish that I had been a more present son, brother, and friend.

That I had spent more time letting people love me, and loving them back.

That I ultimately gave God more of my life than I gave to my phone.

That’s what I want for me.

And as we start a new week, I hope that’s what you want too.

Have a blessed Sunday, y’all. ❤️

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The next six or so days the Island of Crete hung in the balance, the German forces slowly gaining more and more each day.

Each day was the same for poor Nikos lying in the hospital, hearing the radio, hearing the nurses and doctors talk. But he did not care about Crete, or the Germans, the British mistakes, the British brilliance; he only wanted Eleni. News of her whereabouts. News that she was safe news that she was alive.

But every time a nurse came, every doctor’s visit, the news was always the same.

The world was crashing down, and no news came of Eleni.

Out the window, Nikos saw the sun rise, the sunset, the moonrise, the moon set, and they passed on like a dream.

His entire life seemed one long reel of plane engines, distant thunder of artillery, rifles, and bombs that threw lives into the air and threw them back down again so maimed, so dying, and so already dead. So unrecognizable except for the dog tags.

His mind wandered like in a dream he wanted to wake from. And when he did, there was still no Eleni, still no peace, and the room he was in began to fill up with makeshift beds with the wounded brought from the front. He begged to go back to sleep, to forget the nightmares of reality in the lesser nightmares of his dreams.

His head ached. His arms, and the dog bites and gashes, ached. But they were nothing to his heartache. Eleni! Eleni, come back to me!

A soldier with one arm left died in a bed next to his, no one but a doctor and nurse, the other sick and wounded there to see him go. And Nikos cried himself to sleep, thinking that in some far-off British home, a mother was waiting for a son who would never come home and be her joy in her old age.

The nurse looked weary and pale, and Nikos thought, as she laid her cool hand against his warm forehead, that she needed more rest than he did.

He took her hand. It was soft compared to his, used to farm tools and picking flowers with Eleni. He wanted to say something to her. Something encouraging. But he could not. He did not have any words of encouragement left in him. Not for her, not even for himself. And he knew only that death was preferable at that moment. If he could not have Eleni, then he failed his father, and his mother. He saw himself in a small mirror across from his bed.

He had failed Eleni. He had failed everyone. And as day turned into days of waiting and praying he knew it was true.

He did not deserve to live if Eleni was not there with him.

The doctor worried about him. He was making himself worse, even as the world outside became increasingly worse.

Then the worst thing happened.

The battle ended. No more man-made thunder, no more planes. Just the sound of birds, the sick and dying, mixed together in one voice.

Ten days of madness that seemed to be one hundred days. Or one thousand. Perhaps one thousand lifetimes dancing together, very short but ever so long to those who endured it.

Nikos thought he knew what it was to love, but Eleni was more than love. She was his life, his honor, his sacrifice, his everything.

His head dropped. He wondered how she had died. Had it been the Germans? Did they shoot her? Or worse? Would he never know? Would he never find her final resting place?

Another soldier died, and Nikos heard his last breath like it was his own. A last waft, a struggle to keep on living against an inevitable dead end, and the final squirm of the body as his eyes rolled back and shut. A death, a bullet wound that took a week to kill. Rigor mortis would come after a few hours, not before they carried the body out, out to a truck full of other dead and carried them away to the deep hole that yawned and had been dug in the dew, in the thunder of guns, by the sweat of the gravediggers who would bury together friends, family, and the British troops that were there to save them but had failed.

Just like he failed Eleni.

The thought came so quickly that he jumped, scaring the nurse helping a soldier with a head bandage with a big splotch of blood on it, who was moaning almost musically. It was the day before the doctor released him from their care, and he knew they had kept him longer than necessary so he would not do something stupid to hurt himself and make his injuries worse, because he talked out of his head. He talked about Eleni when she was on the beach, covered in her own blood, and she told him she had slipped and fallen hard against the rocks. Somehow, that was believable. But he sensed there was more to it. He could always tell when she was lying or trying to put him off. And she definitely was then.

He saw her with his mother. It was such a strange thing to think that the sister he loved was no sister at all. That the mother of them both was only his mother. He felt a tear stretching down his cheek, a mini rivulet that threatened to be a flood.

He saw her hair, brown and put up in the funny way she used to do it. Mostly loose, just a joke between siblings. No, close friends. Friends that loved like siblings. No, he thought, we are siblings. She was my sister, is my sister wherever she goes or is.

Her face in the sunlight, in the moonlight, the girl dancing down the path to the schoolhouse.

He was talking out of his head, though he was not sick. But the doctor just shook his head and went back to the other patients who were sick and dying, and already dead, to give their bodies to the truck and whisk them away.

The day the fighting stopped, the doctor released him. Not into a world full of happiness, but a world full of Germans, of curfews and surveillance. Paperwork for everything. Fear was fomented everywhere, with everything. Everything that mattered, everything that did not. There were coming days upon this island when the ramifications of hostile occupation would be so great that death was more desirable than living.

But all of that was not known to Nikos the day he left the hospital and took a room in an old lady’s house. She didn’t charge. He would help around the house in exchange for housing.

But he thought always of Eleni. Was she alive? Was she dead? He wanted to go find his sister. He needed to save her. To love her because he truly loved her and for nothing more.

He often opened her satchel just to read the letters, just to hold them in his hands against his heart.

He shook his head.

The father that saved her had lost her. And he, that is Nikos’s, had her his whole life and now lost her.

Which is worse?

A week in the hospital and no news. A week in the old lady’s house, still no news.

He didn’t want to give up and never did.

But he had the sinking, disturbing thought creeping into his mind, down his throat, into his chest and puncture his heart.

She’s dead.

The satchel lay on his bed, next to the pillow that was wet with his tears.

He knew what he had to do.

He would go to Italy to tell her father everything.

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So…

We begin:

1. I am the second child of four.

2. I was adopted around the age of 11.

3. When I was a baby the stage production The Toymaker’s Dream came in our area and I played Baby Jesus. ( you probably didn’t know that Jesus had blond hair, did you!🤣)

4. I am the regally trouble causing King of raccoons on Substack.

5. I luuuuuve coffee if you haven’t heard.

6. I am a Type 1 diabetic.

7. I read the original Hunger Games trilogy every year.

8. AND!!!! I think my all time favorite book is The Wide, Wide World by Susan Warner.

9. I play violin, started when I was nine.

10. My favorite violinist is Hilary Hahn or Elena Urioste.

11. I talk too much or too little.🤣

12. I write way more than I post… For example chapter 9 of A Brother’s Vow I wrote three times, three very different versions.

13. This sounds silly to write but food bores the soul out of me, ever since I was diagnosed with diabetes.

14. I eat mostly boiled eggs, cheese and when I go hypoglycemic… low blood sugar… I eat ice cream or a very sloppy peanut butter and jelly sandwich, or a few fig bars.

15. My handwriting looks like I am drunk.

16. I love the color blue, like the sky.

17. I have passed my life insurance license

18. Started working when I was 15-ish with my dad, doing lawn care, then handyman work.

19. We have 13 dogs, and like 10 cats…. I know.🫣

20. I love reading Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. Actually can I just say I love Russian lit!!

21. If I could’ve been born in anytime. I would like to have lived during the Napoleonic war.

22. Napoleonic Era is my favorite historical time period.

23. Don’t ever buy me a Lizard Spit snow cone. Pickle juice and sour apple can never taste good ever! That is an hill I will die on.

24. Gale could never be worthy of Katniss.

25. I love to play chess, still not very good at it, but love it nonetheless.

26. I broke my arm when I was seven, by attempting to jump off a beach ball and see how far I could fly! (Kids don’t try this at home…)

27. Give me all the black licorice. My favorite candy.

28. The Star Wars Prequels are the best. Full stop. I will die on that hill too.

29. I have never eaten sushi. I can’t… bring … myself to do …it.

30. I like going to Disney World, I don’t like roller coasters.

31. Eating avocados makes me pass out. I used to eat lots of them and one day I blacked out. To verify whether it was caused by the avocados I tried it again. Blacked out and busted my nose pretty bad. It was sore for about two weeks. No mo avocados for me!!😫😫😫

32. I love my church family. They are the best!!

33. We are going through the Book of Proverbs in our morning service, and the Book of Acts in the evening.

34. I am good at deapan jokes. No body laughs so they’re not that great apparently. But I try…

35. I am genuinely hard on socks…

36. I would like to be a airplane pilot.

37. I am 5 foot two. I feel like the little chef on Ratatouille carrying his stool around everywhere because everything is just out of reach.

38. I was homeschooled from beginning to end.

39. I have a shunt that keeps fluid from building up in my head and squishing my brain… It has failed twice, once when I was a baby and another time when I stupidly didn’t wear a helmet and fell off my bike. Don’t try that at home either…

40. I love peaches… they are the only fruit I can eat my weight in and it doesn’t mess up my blood sugar levels.

41. Oranges are the worst for blood sugar.

42. I love picking blueberries from our orchard. Blueberry patch? I don’t know what you call it.

43. A beaver once dammed up a low point of our land, and my older brother and I ingeniously turned the bottom half of a dog house into a raft. It sank and we… had fun.

44. I haven’t been eaten by an alligator.

45. I have had a shoulder surgery due to dislocating it about 18 times over a five year period. It’s no fun and it actually got harder to put back in over time rather than easier.

46. Watch your step when you go outside, chickens leave little gifts everywhere. A minefield for your shoes.

47. The Idiot by Dostoevsky should be required reading.

48. I learned that Suzanne Collins helped write the scripts for Little Bear before writing the Hunger Games and now I know why I loved that show so much.

49. I like watching lightning. God’s firework show.

50. Not only do I like coffee, I like it black as black can get.

51. I am actively serializing A Brother’s Vow on SubStack.

52. I have a French Revolution History I am writing. The details to come later when I actually know what it will be about… I have four different directions it may take.

53. I could weary you to death with story ideas but it will not be this day!

54. I was told to dream, so my dream library would be Admont Abbey Library.

55. I would like to own a coffee shop one day.

56. Help orphans.

57. I have Fetal Alcohol syndrome (FAS). It comes from a mother drinking alcohol beverages while pregnant. I have written about some before, will do more eventually.

58. Yes I have health based struggles but I am open about them so I can hopefully help someone else. It’s not about me, but what I can do to minimize or mitigate someone else’s problems through the experience I have.

59. Eat chocolate… lots and enjoy it.

60. I am probably just annoying as all-fire to everyone around me.

61. I have short temper that makes me like to quote Anne of Green Gables:

    if you only knew how many things I want to say and don't, you'd give me some credit for it."

62. Coffee makes me sneeze two or three times every morning then no more. It’s weird.

63. I must be anemic. I am cold and always freezing like it’s below zero even when it’s not.

64. If you are a Christian and are looking for a book on Christology, read Fountain of Life by John Flavel. It is a somewhat difficult read as it was written in the 1600s, but it is the best and deepest book on the subject I have ever read.

65. My older of my two younger sisters will drink my coffee if I leave the room.

66. Because of my diabetes I take an average of four shots a day. I know it sounds bad, but when it changes your life like it has mine to where you can live without feeling like you’re dying, then it’s worth it.

67. My other sister has fifty or so chickens, all sorts that escape their fencing and free range the yard at will.

68. We raise Karakachan doggies. So precious!!

69. I visited Mount Vernon and I didn’t want to leave.

70. I have to remember things I always forget.

71. Don’t feed me broccoli unless it is cooked in some way. I’m not into eating trees raw. Just like my sushi. Cook it and I will it… ok, rant over….

72. Our family loves to play Catan.

73. I rarely win.

74. I didn’t realize how hard writing a story was until I actually started A Brother’s Vow.

75. It’s not really the writing, but realizing that at each turn there is a myriad of stories to tell and one cannot possibly put them all in your story or it would never ever be done.😫😫😫😫

76. I like to ponder deep questions like “how would I react to the coffee pot never starting” or “are there plug- ins on stranded islands so the coffee pot I brought from the sinking ship will work?”

77. I am very loud. Exuberantly loud. You will hear me before you see me.

78. I can’t even draw a pretty stick person.

79. I hate Pictionary.

80. I love Scrabble.

81. I used to read the dictionary.

82. I thought that was how I was supposed to sound smart, FYI it’s not, though it helps something I am sure.

83. I LOVE cheese.

84. Any kind.

85. My middle name is Uriah.

86. I would like to tour Versailles and its corresponding gardens.

87. I want to see my own face with my own eyes. Not through a reflection.

88. I would fish rather than hunt.

89. I played basketball in church many moons ago.

90. I would rather garden than have livestock. At least I would know my plants might die, but otherwise they would be where I left them instead of jumping fences.

91. I am closer to the ground than most so I pick up everything people drop.

92. I was saved three years by faith in the redeeming blood of Christ. I am blessed beyond words!!

93. I cried reading, and watching The Book Thief. That’s all.

94. My favorite movie quote comes from Oliver and Company:

    “Dead men do not buy dog food!” Remember the 13 dogs I mentioned above? I tell each one that often!!😂

95. My birthday is May 3rd.

96. I have never had a pet elephant.

97. One of my best friends from church moved away as a missionary.

98. And one of the most influential Christian men I have been blessed to have in my life as a new Christian was a student from Portugal, that came to the states to get trained at a seminary. He has now gone back to Portugal, and I miss him, but I am grateful for the time we had, the blessing of his friendship in my life and always love when he comes back to visit.

99. I will listen to Emma Kok’s Voila on repeat.

100. I am God’s son and of all theses facts about me, you need to know that that is the only one that really matters to me.

Thank you for reading! And thank for being part of my journey. May you have a great day!

God bless you all in your corner of this beautiful pale blue dot!

I must always start where death and life held hands; at a grave in the shade of an old oak.

I see myself there, but I am not there.

What I want to do here perhaps cannot be done in the present. Perhaps it can only be done in retrospect. In the cycle of funerals, all the same, but the pain of loss is never quite the same. Act one, act two, act three. But some deaths hurt more than others. Some deaths linger long after the crowd disbands, and several hundred souls, brought together for a single millisecond by the loss of a single life, go back to their corner of the earth, trying to be better, trying to remember, and trying to forget the pain. A life summed up as father, mother, brother, sister, grandmother, grandfather, aunt, uncle, friend, boss, employee. And gone.

But words, ten million words, could not tell this as it ought to be told.

There must be a sort of melody to life. Like background music that, if we could but hear it, we would know when danger was coming, so we would not be surprised. We would have some foreboding sense that Katniss would do everything to protect Prim, but she was still going to die. I imagine the angels hear it, and God knows already, so the drama of our lives unfolds, sometimes beautiful, sometimes tragic.

I take a sip of my black coffee.

I am happy because I have been miserable. Or at least I have learned to be happy in spite of the misery.

I have stood at the foot of many yawning graves. Two grandparents, a police officer, a friend, a friend’s baby, born deceased, and three uncles. Many others, and if I live longer, many more.

Then I too will pass away, and people will cry, not believing I’m gone, while holding my books and putting them in boxes to be given away, another little death. Trying to remember while trying to forget.

There must be a sort of melody to life. Like background music that, if we could but hear it, would tell us when danger was coming, so we would not be surprised. We would have some foreboding sense that Katniss would do everything to protect Prim, but she was still going to die. I imagine the angels hear it, and God knows already, so the drama of our lives unfolds, sometimes beautiful, sometimes tragic.

And that’s what life seems to be about. Having things happen, but not staying there. Living the next breath like you are dying, but you keep on living.

I hear my sister shaking her thermos in the living room, the ice clanking against the sides. The long chirp of a grasshopper in our ninety-one-degree August sun reaches my ear. Once, in a world that had yet to fall, man and woman could live and never ponder death. Now we all hold this paradox in our hands. We are born to die. But the real question is, how did we live.

I swallow and feel the warmth of the coffee waterfall down my throat, the warmth seeping into my veins, chasing away the chill of the air conditioner.

I thought about my violin, and how I would like to go play Schindler’s List to go with my mood.

It sounds so beautiful. It is evil maybe, but it is beautiful because it is the spawn of an age where beauty was born from the womb of a cruel century.

But now my coffee is gone, the grasshopper song is gone, and I no longer hear my sister’s ice.

They are moments now dead, but not forgotten.

I am dying, but I am not yet dead.

I am going to go out and live, love and laugh.

I hope you do the same.

Thanks for reading!!

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You gave me life, the only life I have; so I lived while we never were.

Thinking of you now, my everything, my nothing, my body, my diabetes, my FAS, all from you. The ten thousand broken pieces of you that a mother passes on in the lives of their children.

You were drunk or drug-infused; you loved with what you thought love was.

If I spit up, you would stop nursing me, leave me in dirty diapers, among the needles strewn across the trailer. The cries of a baby in an adult world, where the radio was so loud neighbors called the police to have them turn it down. Not for the baby’s sake, but in the name of their own peace.

Perhaps, a beautiful woman in the eyes of her child, her only son. I see you only in pictures and dream of what is lost, what we might have had.

Is it evil to complain of things that were never meant to be? When I was saved from the death that so easily might have been mine because I wanted to save the pyromaniac, from the flames that had burned me, the flames of her own making, the flames that ultimately took her life.

I lived in someone else’s arms, someone else’s kisses, with siblings you could have never given and knew what happiness is for a child in stability.

I lived and learned that you died, a hope turned forlorn.

I have known what it is to be loved, I have felt what it is to be abandoned.

My idea of love found only in those that did not have to while those who were supposed to love me never ever did.

I hold out my heart to the sky, dripping red tears.

I see us like a mirage in my mind, kissing it and coming back empty-handed.

Does love always hurt like this?

Is this how lovers feel? Or is it just me?

Is trust always this untrustworthy?

Like a siren’s song to a sailor’s ears, love sings on and on until it draws blood and takes you into the depths of the blackest sea.

Is love always like the dog on the hunt, nipping at our retreating heels?

I know it is not. I have found love that was borne on the wings of breezes and angels to a sinner so undeserving and given God’s love instead of my mother’s.

And given a mother, an adoptive mother whose love has no end.

But the thought of a mother haunts me, but in a good way.

I strive to be a better son in spite of the pain, the absence and the longing to hold her in my arms and call her Mom and tell her across eight hundred million breaths, I love you.

Though I struggle, I am okay.

I do dream of what we might have had, what we might have hoped that things might be.

But I will strive to live so that I made you proud. That I turn and give my all to God. And know that my adoptive family is my true family for my life.

And that though you are my mom.

You will never be the mom that was meant for me.

The thoughts are there and I perhaps love you more in retrospect than I ever could have in reality.

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I know it’s hard to think that your writing is good.

Your finger hesitates over the Publish button.

You know there’s a misspelled word.
A clunky sentence.
Something you’ve missed in your 80 edits.

But it doesn’t have to be perfect.

Let it be rough.

Be as perfect as you can get it.

But don’t let it sit in your saved list.

Something I’ve learned from my own writing on here is that some of my posts and Notes were not as good as they could ultimately be. I knew there were things I didn’t know how to fix, things a professional editor might have caught.

But I decided to push Publish anyway, and to my surprise, the work I thought was my worst often performed the best.

What?!?!?!?

So take heart. Take that post that is ready enough, even if it isn’t completely ready, and publish it to the world.

This post is one of those posts that I have had sitting in my saved list.

I decided to take my own advice and publish it to the dragons and ravens and the remaining few raccoons that skitter around on Substack.

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Back in Chania, the doctor stood at the entrance of the hospital, looking out into the bustling crowd, the afternoon sun beating down on the open space around him.
In all of his years of medical service, he had never seen someone with so many wounds run away as he had seen Eleni do, and he waited there, baking in the Mediterranean sun for the hospital officials to return with her in their arms.
He himself would’ve gone after her, but he could not leave the hospital unattended.
Two hours had passed, and the sun was sinking out of sight when at last he saw them returning.
He turned away without waiting for them. She was not there. She had not been found.
His heart sank as he walked back for the eightieth time into the hospital.
He passed a man complaining about pain in his side, a woman in early labor pains and a little boy with a broken arm.
Nurses bustled about.
He saw and heard nothing as he passed down the long corridor Eleni had run through on her escape.
He had not seen it. He was with a patient who had been kicked in the head by a horse.
He had only learned of it as he heard all the yelling outside the room.
Yelling that would’ve awoken the dead.
For a moment he thought perhaps the Germans had somehow made it to Chania and were there to massacre everyone in the hospital.
A nurse stopped him, asking him a question about a woman in a room at the end of the corridor.
He moved on, his steps becoming heavier the closer he drew to the door.
He thought of his daughter, young, scared of the distant thunder of war, and the German planes. She had not seemed happy in what seemed like an eternity. But the war had only found them over the past three days.
As his hand rested on the door, he saw her clinging to her mother, tears coursing down her cheeks like the waterfall at Karanos.
He could only kiss her and murmur that everything would be ok. He had to say it, though in his heart he did not believe it himself. And the look that passed between him and his wife agreed.
And he felt that there were two versions of himself at that moment: the one that wanted to be at home with his wife and daughter and the son that lay in the grave behind their little countryside cottage, holding to his heart the only things he cared about. The other version needed to be here, among the sick, the maimed and the dying. Helping them, caring for them, loving them through their pain, or the close of their lives.
That’s why he had become a doctor. It was what he wanted from his earliest memory.
He pushed open the door and entered the room where Nikos lay.

No one knows exactly what was said over the next few minutes.
But a shout rang out that echoed down the corridor, making several of the nurses run to the room.
Inside, Nikos lay on the bed writhing in the doctor’s arms, yelling for Eleni, yelling against the Germans and calling for the mother who could come to him no more.

Nikos quickly became exhausted and sank back onto his pillow. He could see the King take Eleni’s satchel by accident, by the suddenness of the German attack. He said Eleni was his sister. He couldn’t let her go after the King alone.

The doctor stood over him sympathetically, muttering words the nurses did not hear.

Nikos looked surprisingly well after all. He had come out of the dog attack with only a few bites on the leg and a deep gash down his right arm.

He had not gone out of his head, and if the doctor was not scared that he would cause his injuries to break out into fresh bleeding, he would have let him go to Eleni long before, or at least move about.

It struck Nikos just then as absolutely futile that he and Eleni survived the German bombing, the escape, and the dogs, only to be separated because of the satchel.

If only he could know that she was safe.

He was too tired to move, though, and a nurse gave him something to help him sleep.

The door opened and a soldier entered.

“His Majesty, King George II, sends this with his regards to a patient named Eleni. He took it by mistake when the Germans attacked. I have traveled three hours back to you to give it to her.”

Nikos snatched it from his hand.

His eyes wide, he grabbed the doctor by the shirt and yelled in his face.

“Where is Eleni?”

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,

Go to your quiet place.

Spend time with God.

Then go out and love your family.

This is what Sundays were made for.

One must simply write as one has felt.

When does our real life begin?

At first we are plunged from the cradle of the womb into the harsh, bright world where humans breathe, build, learn, mothers and fathers, and becoming; then long cries, the nursing, the diaper changes, closeness, stability, blankets, songs, teething torture; then crawling, standing, first steps, bruises, and wonder; then stories, fairytales, kids’ books, then harder books, and times of adult reads.

The modern child has all of this, but in the shadows of their puerile existences.

The ruling force of their attention, and that of their parents, and the attention of the world is pulled away by the siren song of the screen.

At first a distraction while mommy shops, then a distraction while mommy detaches from reality, from work, the laundry, the pile of untamed dishes in the sink, the dusting, vacuuming, and adult life. Then mommy takes the phone, and it distracts from the wriggling babe.

TikTok videos telling her how bad her life is while showing how great theirs are.

At first a distraction, then a way of life.

We learn that life is a show of what I ate for breakfast, my boyfriend hurt my feelings so we’re breaking up, I saved a cat (that didn’t need saving), and the barrage of clips scrolls on in continuum, a death by a thousand videos.

What if there is more to live for than the doomscroll that we have come to accept as the norm of everyday living?

Our bloodstream is envy, the seeing and not having, but craving because someone else has it, coursing like an insipid poison, killing slowly.

Our parents taught us, like the screen taught them, that life was out there for the taking, that there was nothing you could not do, that you could not be.

While true, we are consumed by dreams of greatness, ease over effort, holding our lives against the reflection of the internet gurus.

We are all men and women wearing masks in the eternal masquerade of life.

Life stands before us like an unending corridor, doors of opportunity, doors of disaster, love, hate, hope, and despair.

I love people I have never known, I miss people I have never met, and the world spins on, sucked into a black hole, joining all the dead planets and stars in the unfathomable graveyards in the heavens.

I am burdened by the lives I have dreamed, the expectations of those around me. My parents, my elders, my siblings, my friends, and the way strangers look at me as I walk the street.

I am a muddle of the hopes and dreams of those who have gone before, and I feel like I stand in the shade of the greats who I love, admire, and whose good opinion I desire.

I stare out the window into the night, the silhouette of the pool and the cottage where my grandfather lived out his final days, the only things visible in the dancing moonlight.

The call of freedom looks like ever so many opportunities and choices, a buffet of lives to live and try in order to find happiness, and ultimately yourself.

These choices, these endless choices and possibilities, lay out before us like a field of dandelions that we can wish and blow on and watch everything come to us.

Freedom like this is the sick addiction that goes on, day after day, draining us like so many leeches, dying long before we are dead.

Perhaps we suffer not from dreaming too much, but from not having committed at all.

Perhaps life is not about trying to open all the doors in the corridor. Maybe not every job, entrepreneurial enterprise, marriage, children, cars, and houses has a brighter version we need to try like ever so many ice creams.

I don’t want to love things loosely, but love them long and deeply, and be loved long and deeply back.

Believe me, I want to have better and become better, but I want to stay long enough to spread my roots, to bud, to blossom and grow, even if it is not perfect, always happy, or always feels worth it.

I am my father and mother’s son, my adopted family’s child. I am a brother, a friend, someone’s nephew, one of the millions of random souls that live on this earth.

I am everything that they have put into me, the good and the bad.

But I wonder, am I myself?

Are we ever ourselves?

I stare hard at my reflection in the window, and it stares back.

Are my dreams and goals and aspirations really mine? Or are they the fructification of the hopes and dreams of the people that poured into me?

Where did the root of my desires come from? I don’t recognize myself in the tangle of life. I see a human, getting up, going about his life, but ultimately unfulfilled.

The distortion of life has found him even on the farm, in the middle of nowhere, where happiness surrounds him but leaves a bitter aftertaste.

Perhaps the hunt for more, for the next best thing, is hunting us, and we never realize it.

I see my past, a cemetery of burning ships that I jumped overboard for a brighter, shinier one.

Three decades have passed, and I have seen pain, and caused myself even more. I don’t want to keep seeking for the fantastical treasure beyond the rainbow’s end, or give way to the Substack scroll. Think how many little moments have been missed, how many little treasures are buried in the life we don’t see because we build castles over them that the next wave will wash away.

We all have planted gardens that bear fruit long after we left them behind. Fruit borne, that we will never see.

We peer over the wall and want the luxurious gardens of our neighbors, a literal grass is greener on the other side.

We have dug ourselves so deeply into the chasm of our lives needing to be the exception. Of being 1% better every day, that life must be this sprint rather than a marathon.

We have somehow swallowed the idea that we have to be seen. Admired. Getting likes and comments out the ears, or life, human life, our life is meaningless.

What if it was really about just coming home, loving your family, eating a home-cooked meal, and sleeping in a world of your own making?

All the things we pursue are castles of sand that the tide will wash away. If not in your time, at least in some future day.

Will all your careers, all your trophies ever be enough? No applause will thunder loud enough to fill the human void.

We all are seeking contentment, but discontented with what it means.

Perhaps we only find our life when we live what is ours, and not try to keep up with the Kardashians.

And perhaps when we are no longer striving and moving, we will hear ourselves most clearly.

Sobbing over the lives we have tried to be, a life of shallow graves, of empty promises, and forlorn hopes dashed like a ship on the rocks.

Perhaps the sand slips through your fingers. Not the money, not the cars, the houses, the fat bank accounts.

But your parents. Your siblings. Your spouse. Your children.

In your heart of hearts, you only want them. You only wanted them to be happy. You only wanted them to never want.

But you were too busy and missed the point.

They only wanted you.

Having you was enough.

Put down the shovel. You have dug a chasm of regrets deep enough for the next thousand generations.

Look about you before it’s too late.

Sit still and find solace in being still.

The sands of time are falling, and God will not care if you didn’t get the life that was never yours.

I have written as I have felt.

What did you do with the life that was yours?

Thank you for reading.

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But at that moment three Germans appeared. Or three silhouettes did. Beams of moonlight fell all around them, but they stood only in the shadows and Eleni could not see their faces.

She felt warmth running from a thousand cuts. If they did not kill her, she knew she would most certainly bleed to death. They stood around her in a perfect triangle, the silhouettes of their rifle barrels visible in the moonlight. She wanted to run, but the bullets would cut her down in an instant.

She could die standing here, left for the crows and vultures to pick her bones clean.

She could not die here, she thought. Nikos would never know what had become of her.

Her head was spinning from the fall, but the sound of the planes was gone, replaced by the ringing in her ears, the tz tz tz tz of the cicadas, and the heavy breathing of the Germans.

All her life she had lived a lie about who she was, yet she had been happy in the simple life she believed was her own. She believed Nikos's father and mother were her own, Nikos her brother, her friend, her confidant. But the Germans had ruined all of that. These three Germans and their fellow brutes had destroyed everything she had known and loved. Now they were about to end it once and for all. She prayed it would be fast.

One soldier grabbed her by the shoulder and barked something in German. He shook her violently, and she fell to the ground with a scream, pleading for mercy. A boot pressed against her chest, pinning her to the ground. She sobbed out desperate entreaties. Yet somehow she just wanted it to end. The barrel of a rifle was thrust into her face. She sobbed as she counted down the seconds in her mind.

It touched her cheek, warm to the touch from the shots it had fired at her without success. Now she thought, he won’t miss.

She closed her eyes. The night was even darker in her mind, and she braced for the shot.

Then it came, making her jump as it blew her apart.

Or so she thought.

She slowly opened her eyes, staring straight up at the moon through the branches. The soldier with the gun was gone. Another shot rang out right beside her, and the second German dropped.

The third said something, then knelt down beside her.

Was she dreaming?

His hand lowered a canteen to her lips. It had been several hours since she had last had a drink. She wanted it badly. But when his hand brushed against her lips, she pulled away, struggling into a sitting position.

In the darkness around them, she looked around desperately. She was alive. She needed to get away, but he extended the canteen again. Germans, as she knew them, were nothing but butchers. She was sure this was some sick game before he did his worst.

He drew close again, holding out the canteen. She backed away, her body aching and her throat dry as the Sahara Desert.

He was speaking gently, but even that, to someone who didn't speak German, sounded harsh.

She cried out as pain shot through her body, moving farther away. He spoke gently, a gentleness she would remember for the rest of her life, whether it lasted only a few more moments or, by some miracle, many years. German soldier and Cretan islander, caught in a dance of trust and distrust, backing deeper into the woods, away from the dead Germans.

Her mind still spun. It was like she had been swallowed up in the arms of a tornado, everything swirling around her: the moon, the stars, the trees, the rocks, the soldier with the canteen, the dead Germans, and herself.

She inhaled it all, and held it in her lungs, like the last breath of a drowning woman.

She felt her legs lift her and felt them begin to run beneath her. She exhaled, dodging branches, and threw herself behind a rock.

The German followed after her, but passed her in the darkness. He stopped some yards away, muttering something she couldn’t understand.

He disappeared behind a tree, into the night. Eleni lay still. Not because she wanted to, but because she could not do anything else. Her body, battered and bruised, could do no more. So she stayed there, lying in the shadows, hurting, maybe dying, and still living on.

Then she woke up. She didn’t know she had fallen asleep. How long had she slept? Her body still hurt, and the blood from her nose was crusty. She rose slowly. It was still dark, but maybe a little brighter.

After a moment of hesitation, she started walking, even though she believed she was dying. She needed only to find a house or a village. She needed her satchel most, but she knew that she could not go after it in her condition. But the darkness and shadows were all she could see.

Here and there she heard things moving around her, leaves crunching and cicadas buzzing. She had to be careful. There were Germans nearby, and she knew she would not survive another encounter.

Who would have thought a satchel would mean so much?

She brushed her hair out of her eyes, matted with sticks, leaves, and blood. Darkness everywhere.

She trudged on. Hungry, thirsty, bleeding, maybe dying, maybe her whole life hanging by a thread worn thin.

Time always passes, and she did not know how much had.

But finally, she saw a light in the distance. Beaming through the darkness, almost like it was opening its arms for her to run, stumble, and fall into.

Thanks for reading.

Chapter 15 will be available soon!

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The sun looked beautiful to Eleni, a bonfire in the sky, against a purple backdrop.

For the first time since she escaped the hospital, she let out a deep sigh. Every step of the horse jarred her injuries, and her head throbbed.

There was greater beauty than her eyes could take in, something to behold in awe, yet unworthy of seeing it. She felt that it needed her to clasp it tightly in her hands, and preserve it somehow. But what could she do with it in all this violence and confusion and blood?

It seemed to her that normalcy died the moment the first bomb fell on her beloved island, that there was no longer the sound of songbirds, and the scent of wildflowers filling the air.

Only smoke, the thuds of explosions, and the whir of German planes filled her memories of the last few days.

Days?

Years.

Every moment lingering on like a day, one long daymare that she could not awake from.

She trembled on the horse’s back, fearing this was her new life forever.

What struck her most was the incessant whir of the German planes. All day long, and often at night, the sound of oversized mosquitoes buzzing on and on.

Even now they could be heard all around her.

A plane flew overhead, so low she could make out the Balkenkreuz painted on the underbelly. She stopped the horse in the middle of the road. Why is there a German plane there?

Have they already advanced so far?

It disappeared from sight, though its buzzing never stopped.

In that moment, Eleni felt the same lump in her throat she had felt on the beach when Dimitrios pushed her into the rocks. A lump she couldn’t clear, a fear that she might die alone on the road with a stolen horse and Germans nearby. That she wished to see her mother. Nikos’s mother. And that the war had not come to Crete, that the murdering, blood-thirsty Germans could be decimated or that they had been destroyed on the mainland.

There was a terrible feeling of inadequacy in being a child without parents in a war-consumed world that threatened to stamp her out. That was how she felt, she thought as she turned the horse down the road, and the dust rose with its steps.

She had Nikos still to think about.

If the world disintegrated and only Nikos remained, she would be happy. But no. That wasn’t true. She needed the satchel. The story of herself that she didn’t know but wanted to know. Yes, Nikos and the satchel would make her happy. If she could survive this war, if there was anything left of life and the world, she would go find her father. Find her brother. The brother with no name.

Something moved between her feet.

A Cretan Festoon butterfly rested on the horse’s leg. Beauty in the throes of war. The war was miles away. Or maybe already here. Eleni bent down and lifted the butterfly on her fingers, thinking that she would save it. But a noise in the trees made her look up. She felt the butterfly flap and leave her hand. The noise was close.

Then she saw him.

In terror she drove her knees into the horse’s ribs, and together they bolted down the road as a gunshot rang through the air.

The bullet whizzed past her ear, and she was still alive.

The horse became frenzied by the blast, running faster than Eleni had ever thought possible. Before, she had merely swayed with the horse’s movement, but now she felt as though she were out at sea in a raging storm.

Her head flew forward while her body went the other way, then her head snapped back as her body lurched forward. She was dizzy from her injuries, and here and there the wounds had opened afresh, blots of fresh red spreading across her bandages.

Another shot followed, then three more in quick succession.

She leaned into the horse’s neck the way Father had taught her. Nikos’s father. The only father her life had known. But the Germans had taken him away too.

Poor Nikos.

“Feuer! Feuer!” she heard over the thunder of the hooves.

Three more shots rang out in quick succession, but they missed.

The horse turned abruptly off the road and ran into the woods and rocky countryside. Branches tangled in her hair, nearly dragging her from the saddle, while brush lashed her face and arms into a bloody mess.

Her fingers turned white as she struggled to hold the reins, keep her seat, wondering if the blows would ever stop.

The sun dropped below the horizon. Once again she was in the dark, in danger. But this time, Nikos wasn’t there to protect her. And that was what frightened her.

Her father was dead. Nikos’s father that is. Nikos’s mother. Dead. But Nikos’s mother didn’t just die. She died horribly. She died in Florence. Her father’s home city. Her father’s, not Nikos’s.

Was she about to die?

The branches were still beating her. Her grasp on the reins weakened. Her nose was bleeding. Her hands and arms were covered in cuts.

“Nikos!” she screamed desperately. A large branch struck her in the face. The horse was gone, and she could feel her body falling through the dancing shadows and silver moonlight. She needed her satchel. She wanted Nikos. She landed on the ground with a thud. For the second time in the past few days, her breath was knocked out of her. She lay there gasping and choking, knowing she was dying or that she would be found by the Germans and killed.

She lay still for a moment before she staggered to her feet.

She looked around her, meaning to keep going.

Thanks for reading!

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As I have been serializing my story A Brother’s Vow, the fictional aspects have been easy and fun to write. But navigating the historical context and facts of a tumultuous time period, one I know only through books, articles, memoirs, letters, and speeches, has not been so easy.

It is an epoch that reads almost like a fairytale. A dragon sweeping across the world with fire and brutality, grinding everything underfoot.

Then, from the ashes, a white knight rises to save the village from utter ruin.

The struggle seems hopeless. More loss than victory.

Only at the very end does the knight, bathed in blood, sweat, and tears, drive his javelin through the heart of the monster.

But to the people of Europe, it was anything but a fairytale. It was a six-year-and-one-day nightmare that no one could wake from or escape.

Aerial bombing and the incessant Blitzkrieg forced places like London to utilize Anderson shelters and blackout windows so landmarks and targets would be harder to see. In areas controlled by Nazi Germany, civilians endured extreme oppression, forced labor, and the looting of food and resources.

But that is only the obvious suffering.

Then we read of labor and execution camps filled with every imaginable horror. People starved and tortured. Families separated, never to find one another again. Men, women, and children gassed to death without hope or help.

And I pull myself out of my research of all this darkness and look at my serial.

I lean back in my chair.

As a writer, how do I take a reader into this madness?

How do I show it without turning the story into a horror novel? How do I portray it without becoming grisly for the sake of being grisly?

Where is the line between what I include and what I withhold?

And if I draw that line, am I still being honest to what violence actually is—especially wartime violence?

These are the questions I am wrestling with as I continue writing my story, and as I try to understand how history and storytelling can exist together.

Like flies to honey, I have always been drawn to history. I do not remember exactly how it started, but I have vague memories of reading Davy Crockett’s and Daniel Boone’s journals at a very young age.

I remember reading Robinson Crusoe and being confused because it was written in first person. At the time, I did not yet understand that fiction could be written that way.

While most kids wanted to be outside or visiting friends, I was the child reading encyclopedias and dictionaries in my room or sprawled across a couch, trying to better understand how to communicate and learn facts about the world around me.

I remember hearing my mother tell a friend, “Give him a book and he’s happy.”

She was right when she said it, and it remains true to this day.

The words of Thomas Babington Macaulay often come to mind:

“Books are becoming everything to me. If I had at this moment any choice in life, I would bury myself in one of those immense libraries...and never pass a waking hour without a book before me.”

Long before I ever published the first chapter of A Brother’s Vow, I had already been living on Crete in my mind, learning its geography, music, food, and cultural traditions so I could understand, as best I could, what life looked like before war parachuted from the sky and shattered peace and tranquility in the name of conquest.

The fictional heart of A Brother’s Vow was born from two questions:

What if everything a character knew about herself was false?

Is love truly stronger than blood?

And once I began writing, the fiction flowed easily.

But as a first-time writer of historical fiction, I found that all my research had ultimately left me unprepared.

I do not know how much time I have spent researching and studying everything related to the Battle of Crete, but it has been several years at the very least.

And whatever people say, research is fun when it is something you are passionate about.

Just me?

Oh. Okay.

But dear reader, you have no idea how difficult it is to stay on track and not wander into hours’ worth of historical context and rabbit holes that will probably never see the light of day.

When it has no real weight on the story, do readers need to know that King George II of Greece was restored to power twice during his lifetime? That his first reign lasted just over a year following a failed royalist coup, and that the Republican-led military exiled him to Romania in 1923, only for him to return to power after another political shift in 1935?

Or do readers need to know that King Alexander of Greece died from sepsis in 1920, three weeks after a pet Barbary macaque attacked his dog and then bit him on the leg and torso when he tried to intervene?

The dog, a German Shepherd named Fritz, appears to have survived, though there is little information beyond that.

I was honestly more upset about the dog…

But dear reader, you do not know how difficult it is to stay on track and resist writing hours’ worth of historical context and rabbit holes I have gone down that will likely never see the light of day.

I often think about John Keegan’s opening line in his book The Face of Battle. It is a wonderful book that analyzes warfare from the perspective of the common soldier, focusing on the human experience of combat rather than grand strategy.

You might expect, with a title like that, to be plunged straight into a scene of battle. But it simply begins:

“I have never been in a battle.”

And I never have either.

I do not know what it is like to be shot at, to have grenades tear people apart, or to be struck by a bullet. I have never heard a bullet whistle past my ears. I have never watched friends die at the hands of an enemy. I have never smelled blood, gunpowder, and sweat mixing together in that strange, unbearable atmosphere.

But I have known men who have.

My great-uncle Russell served our nation during the Second World War, and like so many of his generation, he rarely spoke of it—though in his later years he did.

On June 6, 1944, he was one of the frogmen in the water, tasked with blowing up underwater defenses so the landing craft could reach the beaches of Normandy safely.

On another occasion, he described how so many bullets were flying that he was left with barely any clothing intact.

And in a third account, a piece of shrapnel pierced his helmet and lodged in his skull. With nothing else available as a bandage, he scooped up dirt and pressed it into the wound.

So when I write battles or scenes of a violent nature, I knew from the beginning that I did not want to write ‘gore,’ but instead to work in a style closer to Tolstoy’s psychological realism. This meant focusing on character-driven moral dilemmas, precise physical detail, and sweeping epic themes.

And I am happy with that choice.

I wonder, though, are you happy with A Brother’s Vow as it is right now?

I know this piece is a bit of a muddled mess of thoughts. But I think I may write more specifically in the future about my writing process, rabbit holes, and the things that have shaped the way I write A Brother’s Vow over time.

In the end, I am trying to write a historically accurate story about the Second World War.

She is a girl with a family she would do anything to find again.

He is a boy too afraid to lose her.

What does the future hold for them both?

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A British soldier on horseback nearly trampled Eleni as she ran down the street.

At least she was no longer in the hospital, smelling medicine and listening to the endless noise of patients and grieving families. The fresh Mediterranean air seemed to fill her with life as she fled from the shouting orderlies chasing after her.

Pain shot from her injured legs through her entire body each time her feet struck the cobblestone streets.

A sign read Chania, and she realized she did not know where she was going.

Dampness spread beneath her bandages as she pushed herself farther from the people trying to stop her from reaching the King before he left Crete with her satchel.

The doctor had turned away to measure out a dosage after saying the King had taken it away with him. She knew only that she had to get it back. So after the initial burst of tears, she realized she had to take things into her own hands. For herself. For the father she needed to meet. And the brother that was her twin.

No medicine could help her as much as getting the satchel back.

She would not hesitate.

She would not waste the rest of her life stagnating in pools of regret.

She would have her satchel and the life it held out before her.

She pulled the sheets away and looked toward the door. Her feet touched the floor, weak and wobbly. It felt hard and cold beneath them.

She did not know it, but she was saying goodbye.

Her hand turned the knob, and she burst into the corridor like a German fighter plane diving toward Maleme.

The doctor was yelling. The nurses were grabbing. Eleni felt the white gown pulling against her, and she thought the dogs were going to get her for good.

A voice inside her told her to keep going. It sounded like Nikos’s mother encouraging her as she struggled with her needlework.

Gasping for air, she overturned a small table covered in medicine bottles and heard them shatter like bombs.

Then she was outside. The horseman barely missed her. The hot, humid air felt thin in her lungs. She knew her wounds were bleeding badly. The dampness beneath her bandages kept spreading.

Now she was down the street, lost to the sight of the orderlies and the medicine and the smell of medicine and sickness.

She should have been happy. She knew she should have been happy. She was not.

Why not?

Before Nikos’s mother died, before Nikos’s father died, before the Germans came, she used to be happy. She used to know happiness.

But happiness dies suddenly. Before Nikos’s mother died, before Nikos’s father died, before the Germans came, it had already died, though she never told anyone.

His name was Dimitrios. He was two years older than her, with light olive skin and a head full of dark unruly hair. His eyes were dark brown, but there was something about their hue she found more attractive than the eyes of the other boys.

His father had moved to Maleme to be near his aging mother in her final years. His own mother had died of pneumonia a few years earlier. He had a sister a year younger than Eleni whom she hated.

Okay, hate was maybe too strong. Loathe was probably better.

She was such a…

What? What exactly was she?

Always whining. Complaining about the heat. The bugs. The boy who snorted when he laughed and chewed with his mouth open. Eleni agreed with that one. Then came the complaints about her studies. Her room was too small. These cottages in Crete were filthy little shacks compared to life on the mainland.

Eleni wished she would go back there. Go. Be annoying to somebody else.

Her breath caught.

She could go.

But Dimitrios could stay.

He could live with them. Then she would be the envy of all the girls in school. No, in all of Maleme.

She thought how wonderful that would be. He could walk her to school, go with her to the market, buy cheese, and help her make deliveries for Nikos’s mother.

He was always so smart. He could talk about anything. That alone would have made the walk to school more bearable.

Nikos never cared about bugs or trees. All he talked about was fishing, helping Uncle Andreas with this or that, and how much money he had been paid.

What is money to bugs and trees?

The only trouble was that Eleni had always been too shy around him. She had never spoken more than a word or two to him. If he said hello or bumped into her, she would only stammer, shrug, and fall into silence.

Nikos joked that she was in love. She never let on that he was right. But love wasn’t a word big enough for what she felt about Dimitrios.

Infatuation.

How many times had the teacher scolded her? Had she not risked the ruler on his account several times? How often did she sneak glances back at him, or bring a small pocket mirror to class so she could watch him during her lessons?

She lost count.

And then she lost him.

She lied to Nikos’s parents about the day on the beach when someone pushed her headfirst into the rocks.

When she came up, dripping with blood and saltwater, she saw a figure duck behind a rock. His head peered out just barely.

It was Dimitrios.

She never snitched. Her heart was too broken and in love with him to wish him harm. But that was not totally true either. She thought that she could still love him, in some little way, and by showing him mercy, win his heart. Of course, a child forgives before, during, and after an injury has been inflicted. She had not been so scathed by the world that she knew how the world beyond her was cold, senseless to those kinds of things.

She did not let on that she saw him where he hid. She did not tell Nikos.

She told no one.

And holding such a secret in her tiny breast was where everything began to fall apart around her.

Dimitrios, Nikos’s mother, Nikos’s father, the Germans coming, and Andreas dying.

While running through the streets of Chania, her heart throbbed with a thousand stabs.

She could never bring herself to tell the truth about that day. She wanted to tell Nikos’s mother. She really struggled to not tell her in the beginning and felt so disturbingly disgusted with herself for lying in the first place.

She always meant to. But they were never alone long enough. Or they were alone long enough, but Eleni never could bring herself to mention it.

There wasn’t a day in her life that she did not think about it and almost say it.

Then an accident occurred. The day had been as clear as possible, and the old fishermen said it was safe to go out for the day. Dimitrios and three other boys took a boat out, not very far. But all of a sudden, the sky darkened out of nowhere. One of the old fishermen saw the little boat rising and falling in the teeth of white-foamed waves. It fell out of sight in the deep of a wave and never rose again. Only one of the four boys’ bodies washed ashore over the following week.

It was not Dimitrios.

Running through the streets still dressed in her hospital gown and bloody bandages, Eleni’s heart sank. Her legs were giving out, and the image of Dimitrios drowning came to her. Maybe clinging desperately to the boat or a box to stay afloat. The other boys slowly sinking one by one until it was only Dimitrios.

Then no one.

She stopped in the street. No one was chasing her anymore. There was no more yelling. And no one in the crowd took notice of her.

Dizzy, she staggered down the cobblestones, wondering what she should do.

At last she came upon a horse whose owner was inside the tavern.

Without much thought, she struggled to mount it and ride off toward Agia Roumeli, into the dimming light of the fading sun.

As she left Chania behind, she could not help but be afraid. It would be dark soon, and she was all alone.

She drew the reins. The horse stood still.

She wondered about Nikos. She had not seen him in several days. Should she go back and find him? Return to the hospital?

She knew she was bleeding profusely, and her mind ached with every throb of her heart.

But…

The satchel. It was leaving Crete. There was no telling when she could get it back. No telling if she would ever get it back.

She turned the horse away from Chania.

“Don’t worry, Nikos. I will come back. But I must have my satchel.”

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“Can this be?”

Eleni stared at the wall, blank and plastered over stone.

She turned back to the doctor.

He was gone. The door was closed.

Alone again, she thought.

Alone with Maria. Eleni and Maria.

“Hello, Maria.”

“Hi.”

Eleni stared.

Maria was so like her.
She was her.

Even the white scar on her forehead.

“We have so much to talk about.”

“Where do we begin?”

“Tell me how you got your scar. It is just like mine.”

Maria was about to speak when Eleni broke in.

“A brother, Maria… we have a brother. I haven’t had much time to think about it. I wonder…”

Eleni and Maria, without a word, began searching the room frantically. It was not there.

“My letters… where is my satchel? What was his name? Where is my satchel?”

Still nothing, and Eleni asked Maria to look under the bed.

Nothing, Maria said still down on her knees.

“It has to be,” Eleni whispered. “It has to be… where else would it be?”

The door opened, and the doctor had come back.

Eleni realized she was on the floor, looking under the bed for her lost satchel.

“Maria? Where’s Maria? She was here… where is my satchel?”

She felt strong hands lift her and set her back in bed. She thought she heard the doctor grumble something about “an intolerably difficult patient,” but she was not sure if he meant her.

“My… satchel? Where is it, Maria? Did brother take it? Maybe he kept it… maybe it’s with him in Italy…”

She felt dampness growing on her legs and looked down.

Her bandages were soaked with blood. The doctor was calling for a nurse.

“Why did brother take it?” she asked him. “Why would he take it… why must everything be taken? I was taken away from my own life… my brother was kidnapped… Nikos’s father is dead, Nikos’s mother too… Uncle Andreas, where is he? Gone… all gone. And I can’t see Nikos. He isn’t anywhere. And…”

She paused.

“Do you hear that bird? Make it stop. Its children don’t need her… they don’t have to learn how to fly from her… or learn her song…”

Exhausted, she fell back onto her pillow, her tears soaking it.

The doctor and nurse changed her bandages again and gave her something to make her sleep.

“She has a terrible fever,” he said, shaking his head. “Stay with her. She can’t be left alone. She may do herself harm. She doesn’t know what she is doing.”

“It’s the Germans!” Eleni screamed.

“Everything… everything…”

The medicine began to take effect. Her speech slurred, then stopped altogether. Only her breathing remained.

It was late afternoon when she woke, though she was too disoriented to know it.

Her body no longer hurt, but the bandages still covered her injuries.

For a moment she did not remember where she was or what had happened.

Then…

“My satchel…” Again it was not there.

Her eyes scanned the room.

A nurse was there. A different one from earlier.

She had come to the bedside when Eleni spoke.

“My satchel…”

“What satchel, love?”

“My satchel.”

The nurse laid her hand against Eleni’s forehead, taking silent note of something.

“Let me ask the doctor about it, dear.”

She stepped to the door, spoke quietly to someone in the hall, and returned to the bedside.

“He is coming. Please stay quiet, you are not well.”

Eleni took a deep breath and tried impatiently to wait. Her mind was so groggy the interim felt extremely long.

At last she heard steps in the hall, and the doctor entered her room.

“Where’s my satchel?” she asked.

The doctor blinked twice.

“My satchel… where is it?”

Her eyes searched his face. His beard twitched, and he cleared his throat.

“When the King brought you in his arms to the hospital, he kept your satchel to see if he could learn anything about you,” he said.

He glanced around the room.

“It doesn’t appear he has returned it yet.”

“I need it back. Can you ask for it?” Eleni’s voice trembled.

“Yes.”

“Sir,” the nurse said hesitantly, “he has already left. It’s been several hours…”

Eleni burst into tears.

The doctor scowled at the nurse and motioned for her to leave the room.

Eleni’s eyes followed her, wide like a deer in headlights. Her head ached terribly, and the songbirds outside the window only made it worse.

Alone with the doctor, she looked desperately into his face, hungry for him to tell her he could reach the King before it was too late.

He stood looking back at her, seeming to weigh his words and what effect they might have once spoken.

The pause lasted too long. Perhaps the doctor was not good with words in situations like this. Or perhaps he had a daughter somewhere, safe from the cruelty of the world. From the Germans. Perhaps as he looked at Eleni, he saw his own little girl and felt inadequate.

“Child.”

Eleni jumped at the sound of his voice. She leaned toward him frantically, not wanting to miss a word, already knowing she might have lost everything she had learned about herself.

His lips moved before any sound came out.

“I can… cannot reach him. At least not now. When he arrives at Agia Roumeli, perhaps. They are traveling in secret, so there is no way to contact them. The only reason I know this is because the King told me himself. We are old friends.”

He swallowed.

“But I will send a message asking him to leave it behind. He may have left it here already. I will send someone to where he was staying.”

Before she could say anything, he was gone.

Just like Nikos’s mother. Nikos’s father. Uncle Andreas.

There is never enough time to say what should have been said, because there always seems to be more time until suddenly there is none.

The doctor returned as quickly as he had left. At least, she thought.

“I sent word. It’s not far, my child, so I will have news for you soon.”

She whimpered her thanks.

Soon she would have her satchel again. She would hold in her hands the letters that had changed her life so drastically. Here. Against her heart. In her heart.

The minutes passed slowly as she lay there waiting. The soft bed felt hard against her back. The fever burned through her, and she drank the water ravenously when a nurse lifted it to her lips, making her choke.

The footfalls up and down the hallway made her jump with hope each time, but they never entered her room.

Room? Prison cell seemed more appropriate to her.

She only waited twenty minutes for news, but the interim was excruciating. Waiting for answers. Waiting like she had in the cellar for the German bombs to stop ruining her little life. Her little home. Her safe haven.

A nurse tried to give her something, but Eleni shook her head and waved it away.

“I am waiting for my satchel. I will be clear-headed when the doctor comes.”

She tried to make the minutes pass by thinking about her brother, and her father—her father, not Nikos’s—and what they might be doing. Were they together again? Were they thinking of her, missing her?

Time passed. The songbirds sang, and there was no sound of the doctor’s footsteps in the corridor, only the bustle of nurses and people talking and crying over their loved ones.

The sheets over her felt unbearably hot, though perhaps it was only the fever and the warm air drifting from the Aegean Sea.

The waiting was the very worst for her. Worse than the bombing, worse than the dog attack.

She could think only of having the satchel again. The thought blocked out the pain from her injuries and made her miss what the nurse was saying. Until she held it again in her fevered hands, she was not going to think about anything else.

The pain, however, was excruciating. She wished the doctor would come with the satchel so she could finally take the medicine and drift back into delirium.

The nurse offered her medicine again as Eleni groaned, but she waved it away. The pain in her legs was nothing compared to the mental agony of the doctor not returning with her satchel. She resisted and found herself surprised by her own endurance.

Still no doctor.

There was a bustle in the corridor. A woman crying hysterically. A deep man’s voice breaking between sobs. A nurse speaking over them both.

“We are doing everything we can.”

We are doing everything we can, Eleni echoed softly to herself.

The doorknob turned, and the doctor appeared there, his face flushed and eyes thoughtful as he told someone outside to handle the distraught couple.

Eleni sat up abruptly, her head swimming immediately.

“My satchel! Ah, at last!” she cried out, stretching her arms to him.

His hands took hold of hers.

He did not have the satchel.

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Eleni opened her eyes and felt the softness of a bed beneath her. A sheet lay over her and she felt cocooned under it.

Sunset glowed beyond the window, past a tree and a tiny statue of Medusa.

Far beyond, she could see the mountains. She imagined standing on one of the peaks and looking out across Crete.

Could she see Maleme from there?

Could she see her home?

She remembered the many sunsets she had watched from the yard above the village, where so much of the landscape could be seen at once. Flowers grew around the house in beds of rock and here and there in pots.

She remembered leaning against the plaster-covered stone walls, shifting her back against them to find a comfortable position.

She used to watch the sun sinking into the hills and wonder why it did not burn up everything it touched.

How could something give out such heat and not consume?

She heard footsteps behind her and Mother stood in the doorway holding a bowl of kolokithokeftedes.

She took one. The smell of zucchini, dill, mint, onion, and egg mixed with flour and feta cheese filled her nose. Dipped in tzatziki, they were one of her favorite little dishes.

Nikos’s mother stood in the doorway. Her face was flushed and her hair stirred in the gentle wind.

Nikos.

Nikos.

Where is he?

She saw him as she last saw him, standing, swinging his knife wildly, desperately, hopelessly.

The dogs overwhelmed him. She saw him fall.

To the ground. Beneath claws, tearing teeth, and innumerable dogs.

She prayed he was safe.

She hoped the ground would open and let him fall into a cavern beneath Crete, beneath the sea, somewhere far enough that he could be safe and returned to her.

What would life be like without Nikos?

Where is Nikos?

She sat up in bed and fell back heavily against the pillow. Her head was spinning. Only then did she notice a terrible pain in her legs.

“Nikos! Nikos!”

Her screams filled the air, and she could hear running in the hallway outside her room.

The door opened and a man in a suit entered, carrying a black bag.

He laid the back of his hand against her forehead.

“You are showing signs of an oncoming fever,” he said.

“Where is Nikos?” she screamed again.

Before he could answer, the doorway darkened with the presence of another man.

Eleni gasped.

“Your Majesty,” she said, bowing her head, though it ached with the motion.

“My child. No formalities here.”

King George II came to the bedside and took her small hand in his.

“Please, where is Nikos?”

The King and the doctor looked at each other in silence.

The King leaned closer.

“My child, who is Nikos?”

“My brother.”

The words came out without hesitation. She knew it was the truth, whether they were actually siblings or not.

“He is alive, but he is badly hurt,” the doctor said.

Eleni exhaled.

He’s alive.

“Can I see him?”

“My child, you are badly hurt. The bites on your arms and legs will bleed again if you move. I must insist you stay where you are for now. You will need to regain some strength first.”

“What were you all doing where we found you?” the King asked.

“She doesn’t need to talk, Your Majesty. She needs to rest,” the doctor said.

But Eleni spoke up.

“We live near Maleme. We had to leave because of the Germans.”

“Uncle Andreas!” She screamed abruptly.“Where is Uncle Andreas?”

“I’m sorry. He didn’t make it,” the doctor said quietly.

He looked away. The King tightened his grip on her hand.

A punch to the stomach would have hurt less.

Her eyes filled with tears. Her head sank, though the movement hurt.

The two men stood watching as her body shook with sobs.

All the past few days had been pent up inside her: the Germans bombing Crete, the letters, the German soldiers kicking her, Andreas’s wounded arm, the dogs attacking them, the terrible feeling of hopelessness closing over her.

She felt as though life was slowly crushing her, an intricate web spun in every direction, pulling her thinner and thinner.

Why was all of this happening? Why did everything she loved end up maimed or dead?

Why could Eleni not live out her life as herself? Why could Maria not have lived out her own happy life?

Why did they have to share the same body?

She needed Uncle Andreas.

He could not replace her father. Nikos’s father. But for the past seven months, since Nikos’s father died fighting the Italians on the mainland, he had been the only father figure she had left.

She raised her head.

What if her biological father had been part of the invasion of Greece? What if her father had killed Nikos’s father?

Her head spun. Round and round. Blank space, the King, the doctor, the door, over and over.

Then Andreas stood over her.

“I love you, Eleni.”

The bandage on his arm seemed to grow larger as she looked at him.

“Uncle… what happened?”

A loaf of bread fell to the floor. A loaf pan shattered across the tiles.

Eleni felt a scream rise in her lungs. German planes tore through the sky in her mind, shattering the earth.

Then she blacked out.

When she wakes it is the next morning. She is alone in the bed.

She calls out. Steps come in the hallway again. A nurse appears at the door and looks in. She looks young, but older than Eleni.

“Good morning, dear,” she says. “How are you feeling?”

“Awful,” came the groggy reply. “I hurt all over. Please… how is Nikos?”

“I’ve just come in, and you’re the first patient I’ve seen. I’m sorry, love, but I don’t know.”

As she spoke, she gave Eleni something for the pain. After a few minutes, she left.

Alone again, she stared at the wall, wondering how Nikos was, where he was, and how long she would have to stay in this bed.

The quiet of the place, and the need to see Nikos, gave her an idea.

Steps were heard in the hall. Why are they always going up and down? Can’t they leave?

She pulled the sheet back.

Her left leg was wrapped in bandages, and her right ankle in a single strip. Both were soaked through with fresh blood beneath them. She thought they would need to be changed.

She shifted and a spasm of pain shot through her body. She needed to see Nikos.

Her feet touched the floor and she hesitated.

The hallway was silent, but she was afraid someone might come as she stepped into it, unsure which room he was in.

She stood.

Everything spun again. Walls, the door, the bed, the ceiling, over and over.

Her hand caught the edge of the bed.

The floor felt like sinking sand, pulling her away.

She heard a crash.

The doorknob turned.

Everything went black.

She awoke that afternoon.

The doctor was there.

He scolded her gently, if such a thing was possible, and gave her medicine. He had changed her bandages while she was unconscious.

She needed Nikos. She needed Andreas.

“What is happening with the Germans?” she asked.

The doctor grimaced.

“Nothing good. They have gained a solid footing and the British say everything is falling apart. His Majesty has been advised—” He stopped.

“What?”

“He is leaving Crete.”

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This chapter contains violence that may be disturbing to some readers.

Reader discretion is advised.

As the dogs snarled around them, Eleni felt the same cold fear she had known on the beach the day she was attacked. The sun had been blinding just before midday. Nikos’s mother had packed them a picnic in a wicker basket with a curled handle. She had given them the day as a holiday, and they did not have to return until late.

Eleni had wished Nikos’s mother was coming with them. But she said she was busy that day and would not be able to go.

“But we will miss you,” Eleni pouted in her ten-year-old voice.

Nikos’s mother’s hands rested on the pile of laundry. Outside, a chukar sang its own name while a warm breeze moved through the house.

Nikos’s mother’s face scrunched, as was its way when she was conflicted.

“Not today, love,” she said at last. “I have a lot of things to catch up on. You and Nikos go, have fun, pick up shells, play in the sea, and come home worn out from it all. Then you can tell me everything.”

Nikos’s mother bent down, kissed her, and ushered both children out of the house with a basket full of goodies before sending them down the path.

Eleni remembered her standing there in the morning sun, the house and barn behind her and the blue sky overhead.

Mother is awesome, she thought.

Nikos’s mother is awesome.

Nikos and Eleni ran down the path, hitched a ride on a donkey-pulled cart on its way to Maleme, and at the fork hiked the craggy path down to the beach.

They played all day, building a massive sandcastle, splashing in the sea, picking up shells, and saw a ship with an Italian flag sail by, not close enough to make out anything on board.

They sang and laughed and grew very hungry. They rolled out the blanket and ate so much that Nikos thought he might sink to the bottom of the sea if he tried to swim again.

Eleni laughed the way she used to before Nikos’s mother died, before Nikos’s father died, before Germans dropped from the sky onto their island.

Nikos rose and pointed across the water.

“I say we swim out to that rock way out there!”

“What? That group of rocks? The ones where the waves foam up? That’s a long swim.”

“Come on, it will be fun.”

“But Mother wouldn’t like it. I—I don’t think she would let us.”

Nikos waved it off.

“She wouldn’t mind. She’d just say to be careful. Now come on.”

He pulled her with him waist-deep into the sea.

“No, Nikos!” she exclaimed, breaking free. “You go if you like. I will stay here.”

Without another word, Nikos swam toward the rocks as Eleni walked back onto the beach and watched him shrinking into the distance.

She climbed onto a rock, still watching. In the water, she could only see Nikos’s head and the flailing of his arms, his feet visible only in flashes like an eye blink.

She wondered why Nikos always tested Mother’s orders.

Nikos’s mother’s orders.

Boys never listened when parents were not around. Nikos was always chasing some new idea, no matter how dangerous. He had hurt himself before because of it. Sometimes Father corrected him for it. Sometimes Mother cried afterward.

Nikos’s father.

Nikos’s mother.

The beach around her was empty. The wind and the crash of the surf were the only sounds as the sun glinted off a small pool of water gathered in the rock between her feet.

She knelt with her knees on either side of the puddle. Her reflection stared back at her while the algae drifted slightly beneath the water.

At the bottom were tiny little fish. Maybe tadpoles. But not quite.

She put her hands into the water to scoop them out.

They escaped.

In the little waves of the puddle her reflection seemed to laugh at her. She reached down to try again.

She felt herself plunge forward, and severe pain shot through the back of her head.

Her face struck the shallow puddle and crashed against the rocks.

Her eyes were still open. The clear water began to turn red.

She pushed herself up, blood and water running down her face, blinding her.

“Who’s there?” she gasped, staggering to her feet, but she slipped from the rocks onto the sand, a seashell cutting her arm.

No answer but the waves and the wind.

When she finally got to her feet again, she saw no one. She looked dazedly around the beach.

No one.

But now there was someone.

Several.

The dogs snarled as they circled them, moving tighter and tighter around Andreas, Nikos, and Eleni.

“Don’t make any sudden moves,” Andreas said, his voice nervous. “I only have three shots left.”

Nikos was still pale. “I only have three shots left too.”

But the seconds passed.

More dogs came.

The air filled with growls, and Eleni could feel the heat of their breath.

She recoiled.

The dogs lunged forward.

Gunshots filled the air.

Six dogs dropped one after the other, but the gaps were filled instantly.

Andreas struck one dog with his rifle butt, then another.

Nikos moved to do the same, but the rush of dogs broke between them.

Claws slashed open Nikos’s sleeve. Andreas struck another.

Eleni jumped onto a rock with difficulty, using a stick to strike at the dogs snapping at her.

A dog sprang on Andreas, sending them rolling out of sight.

Nikos struck again and again.

Eleni poked and struck heads as hard as her arms could.

Andreas yelled somewhere.

Nikos lost balance but caught himself on a rock.

Eleni screamed. A dog bit hold of her dress, nearly pulling her down.

Growls and barks.

Nikos tried to move towards Eleni.

Eleni’s arms were growing heavy.

Andreas yelled again.

Nikos was attacked by four or six or ten dogs.

Eleni could not tell which as the number around her rock grew.

Everything seemed to be dogs.

The rocks. The tiny tree standing alone. Even the grass.

Andreas had not been seen or heard.

Nikos’s eyes were wide, his arm bleeding.

He plunged to the foot of Eleni’s rock, but the odds were too great. He struck ferociously. The pistol fell apart in pieces.

He pulled his knife and used it wildly. Why had he not used it before?

But the numbers told against him, pressing him against the rock. He felt his pant legs ripping away.

Eleni saw him struggling below. He was right there, but she could not help him. Dogs attacked from every side.

“Eleni! Eleni!”

She heard him scream her name. For a moment he rose above the dogs, and she saw a gaping wound along the side of his head.

Eleni felt miles away from him. She wondered if this was how Nikos had felt that day on the beach, with her bleeding and screaming for help.

He disappeared beneath a mass of dogs.

Eleni’s strength was failing. She knew the end was coming.

She saw Nikos’s mother tucking her into bed, the Greek flag, Nikos fishing, the dead British soldier smiling, Nikos’s mother’s funeral, her favorite pink dress, her collection of seashells.

She struck a dog that dropped away with a yelp.

She struck out again. Her stick broke over a dog’s head. Her breath stopped in her throat.

She kicked at them wildly.

It seemed to her unbearably sad.

To learn the truth of her life only to die carrying it in her satchel, and have no one ever know what became of her.

She kicked again and again.

Her strength was gone, but she still fought.

Still screamed.

Still wanted to live another day.

Another dog bit into her dress and pulled her backward off the rock.

It was over.

Half a dozen dogs broke her fall.

She did not know what she was doing. She felt teeth and claws against her flesh and only knew that she was still moving.

Still.

Then another sound rose above the snarling and barking.

Gunshots rang out.

Eleni saw dogs fall dead.

More shots.

A man appeared over the rocks with a rifle in his hands. Others followed behind him.

Pain exploded through Eleni’s leg and she screamed.

The air filled with gunfire. Dogs dropped at her feet.

She saw Nikos beneath a dead dog.

The ground was strewn with bodies.

Voices surrounded her. Men crowded around her, some dressed like villagers, others British soldiers.

A man with a thin mustache dropped to one knee and caught her in his arms.

Everything spun around her, but she knew him. She felt recognition, though she could not place it.

The sky was the bluest she had ever seen. The rocks, the tiny tree, the dead dogs scattered here and there blurred together and spun.

Her eyes locked on his for a moment before she fainted.

Ah, she remembered.

It was King George.

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They walked on in silence.

Andreas walked with his thoughts fixed on his wife and children, and on the sharp, constant pain in his hand where the bandages had begun to stiffen with use.

Nikos followed a few steps behind him, pale, sick with what he had seen, and with what he had been made to do in order to carry Eleni out of it.

She brought up the rear. She watched them both, and was grateful that the noise around them made conversation impossible. Everything she loved was ahead of her, moving through dust and sound; everything she wanted to know of herself was somewhere across the sea.

What was across the sea? The life of a stranger—a man she could walk up to and call father. He might smile back. He might put his arm around her waist and squeeze her.

He might kiss her.

What would it feel like then, to be kissed by someone who was a stranger and was not?

Her mother kissed her, and it was always soft and ended with a little sound. The damp stayed on her forehead, and the air felt cool against it. Nikos’s mother used to kiss her. Not her mother. Nikos’s mother. Not hers.

Mother. What is a mother?

Nikos’s mother used to help her study and make bread to sell at the market. She loved to let her prattle in her childish voice, talking about the sky, the flowers, the bees that make honey, and the point where the blue sky and the Mediterranean meet, far off where no one she knew had ever been.

She was everywhere and involved with everything that matters to a young girl. Braids and dresses, and though money seemed tight, there were pink dresses on pink dresses. Did other colors exist? The dress she had on now was pink, dirty with tree sap and grime and dust.

Nikos’s mother would have cleaned it.

Back behind the house where she did the washing, there was the tub, the bubbles, and her humming.

Nikos’s mother used to hold her at night and read drab history aloud, to a six year old and a three year old, because she loved it more than any other subject.

Long, boring sections of Herodotus and whatever else there was. She would read so much that she lost her voice and would put them to bed with a cracking sound every time she spoke.

Nikos’s mother had a laugh like music. Funny, melodious. She had never heard an orchestra but she heard a four part street band play once and her laugh was all the parts together.

Nikos’s mother was good at making people smile. She made Father—Nikos’s father—smile all the time. Nikos would smile. The neighbors would smile. The fishermen selling the day’s catch smiled. The lady with the eggs at the market would smile. The boys from school would smile.

She made Eleni smile.

Nikos’s mother. Not Eleni’s mother. Not Eleni either. Not Maria’s mother. Only Nikos’s mother.

Who is Maria anyway? Who is Eleni? Twins, in the same body? Maybe. Two girls meant for two different lives. Maybe. Maybe they would never change places. Eleni’s world was burned down and bombed out. Maria’s life somewhere could probably be no better.

She looked down into the stream as they crossed it. The face trembling there did not look entirely like hers.

Maybe that was Maria.

Several years back, as Eleni—Maria—had been picking up seashells, she saw her face in a puddle gathered in the hollow of a rock. She had not heard someone approaching. Fixated on her reflection, she suddenly felt a hand strike the back of her head and her face hit hard against the stone.

The scar on her forehead was a constant reminder to pay better attention to her surroundings.

A stream of blood ran down her face, gathered on her chin, and fell onto her dress. It blinded one eye, and as she struggled to her feet she never saw who had struck her.

Nikos’s mother cleaned her face and pressed cayenne pepper powder into the cut until the blood stopped running.

Nikos’s mother came when she was scared of the night. Or when an older girl had teased her or hurt her. She read the Bible before bed. Prayed with her. Taught her to pray.

Nikos’s mother. Not her mother. Still.

“Eleni. We will stop for a little while.”

She looked up. The almost almond-brown eyes of Nikos met hers and she took the flask of water from his hand.

The sound of battle, hours behind them now, could still be heard. Deep, constant thuds. They felt like extra heartbeats.

The water soothed her lips and eased the ache in her throat. As she drank, she knew Nikos loved her fiercely, with the unquestioning love he had always given her, the love a brother gives a little sister.

The little sister that was not. Still.

Together they had taken on everything that made up a child’s world, and Eleni could not remember anything important that Nikos had not been beside her for.

The day on the beach he had swum out into the Aegean farther than Mother would have liked, had she known. So when Eleni was struck he saw it only from far off, and it took him nearly five minutes to reach her as she waved wildly for help.

She returned the flask to his hand and sat on a rock to rest her legs before they carried on.

She really loved Nikos. That much had not changed. Perhaps love did not belong to blood at all. Perhaps it lived somewhere outside the body, caught between people like the fireflies she had once read about.

Maybe that was silly. Maybe love—

Andreas waved and started walking again.

Nikos rose from his rock with a grunt and followed.

Eleni lingered where she was, thinking, and remembered what Nikos’s mother had written in her letter.

That she had been her own mother’s double as a baby.

The stream they had been following ran beside her. Her reflection stared back as it had on that day at the beach. The scar, white with age, was barely visible to anyone else, but Eleni saw it plainly.

She turned and followed Andreas and Nikos farther away from the battle. The noise behind them faded with each step, and she carried with her a sinking feeling that she was losing Eleni and finding more of Maria.

She had once read about metamorphosis in school, in the same classrooms where older girls teased her and older boys pulled her braids.

She wondered if this was what it meant.

To become something different and still remain the same.

She thought it was strange that she felt more lost now that she had found the truth.

Frustration with what she had known. Against the mystery she still needed to know.

Needed to know.

She shook her head.

Everything felt wrong. Too heavy. Too uncertain. She was always outgrowing the things she loved. Was she going to outgrow her love for Nikos?

Her heart stopped, then hit hard against her ribs.

Andreas said something she did not hear.

A blur came out from behind a large rock. Eleni heard it growl.

Then, to her left, another shape moved.

Her breath caught in her throat.

They were surrounded by snarling dogs.

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Chapter 9 is coming soon.

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