“And why do you enjoy art?” War asks.

I lift a shoulder. “It’s cathartic for me. I don’t know.”

“Tell me something else,” War says.

“I miss the taste of my mother’s Shakshuka,” I admit. I never learned how to cook her exact version of the spicy breakfast dish. There are so many small, simple things like that, that I lost when I lost her.

“What else?”

“My sister Lia wanted to be a singer.” I know War is asking me about myself, but this is who I am—a lonely girl carrying around the ghosts of her family. “I don’t know where she even got her voice from,” I continue. “The rest of us couldn’t carry a tune, but she could. She used to sing when she couldn’t fall asleep at night, and I used to hate it—we shared a room,” I add. “But then at some point, it became soothing, and I’d often drift off to her songs.”

That might’ve been the worst part of all of it when I came back. The silence. There were so many nights where I’d lay there, on my old mattress, my sister’s bed across from mine, and I’d wait for the song that never came.

After a while, I started sleeping in her bed, like I could somehow suck out the marrow of her from her old sheets. It never worked. Not even when I then moved to my mother’s bed to try to draw some small comfort there.

“Sometimes I carve music notes into my bows and arrows,” I admit to War. “I don’t even know what the notes stand for, or if they’re even accurately drawn, but they remind me of Lia.”

The horseman runs an idle hand down my arm, and I’m reminded about how intimate this whole situation is.

“Do you carve anything else onto your weapons?” he asks.

I glance at him again. “Why do you want to know?” I ask.

“I want to know everything about you, wife,” he says, just as he did earlier.

I take a deep breath. “I draw hamsas for my father.” I can’t even say how many weapons I’ve decorated with the image of an evil eye fitted into the palm of a hand.

“Why hamsas?” War asks.

Unconsciously, I reach for my bracelet, fingering the small metal charm as I focus back up at the sky.

“Hamsas are known among Jews as the ‘Hand of Miriam,’” I explain. “Any time my father would see a piece of jewelry with a hamsa on it, he’d buy it for me—because it was my namesake.” The hamsa I wear is the last bit of jewelry I have from him. Everything else I’ve lost over the last decade. I’m petrified of the day I’ll lose this, too.

“And in honor of my mother,” I continue, “I’d sometimes carve a sword—or sometimes a sword piercing a heart—into my bows. The sword is in honor of what I learned from her books on weaponry, and the heart … well, that one’s for self-explanatory reasons.” My own heart aches now, revisiting all the reasons why I so fondly cherished my family and why I so desperately missed them.

The horseman is quiet. He doesn’t do very well, I’ve come to find, with difficult emotions like grief and sadness.

“It’s strange being a human,” War finally says. “For the longest time, I watched what it was like to be a human, but I never felt it. I didn’t understand the true bliss of touching a woman or tasting food or feeling the sun on my skin. I knew of it, but I didn’t understand it until I became a man.

“There are things I still don’t understand,” he says, almost to himself.

War might not know it, but he’s captivating when he talks like this, as though he has one foot in this world and one foot in another.

“What sorts of things?” I ask.

“Loss,” he says. He’s quiet for a moment. “It’s one of the most common aspects of war, and yet I’ve never experienced it.”

“You better hope you never do,” I say, thinking of my family all over again.

Loss is a wound that never heals. Never never never. It scabs over, and for a time you can almost forget it’s there, but then something—a smell, a sound, a memory—will split that wound right open, and you’ll be reminded again that you’re not whole. That you’ll never fully be whole again.

“Tell me more about them,” War says. “Your family.”

My throat works. I don’t know if I have it in me to keep talking about them. But then my lips part and the words come pouring out.

“My father was the wisest man I knew,” I say. “But to be fair, I only knew him as a child, and when you’re a kid, adults in general seem very wise.” I search the sky, trying to remember more. “My dad was funny—really, really funny.” I smile as I say it. “He could make you laugh, usually at your own expense. It was okay, though, because he made fun of himself all the time too. He was good at celebrating everyone’s rough edges.

“And he was so … real.” There were many times when he’d talk to me as though I were an equal. “With some people, you can never get beneath the surface, you know?” I say, even though the horseman probably doesn’t know. “With my father, you always could.”

I try to hold onto his memory.

“I’ve forgotten his voice,” I admit. “That’s the most terrifying part of it all. I can’t remember the way he sounded. I can remember things he’s said, but not that.”

It’s quiet for several seconds. The horseman doesn’t say anything, he just strokes my hair.

“My mother was quiet but strong. I learned that after my father died when she suddenly had to singlehandedly take care of me and my sister. Her love was a fierce thing.”

I fall to silence.

“What happened to them?” War says.

I’ve already told him about how my father died. As for my mother and sister …

“There was an accident.”

The water rushes in—

I touch my throat. “That’s where I got this scar.” I can’t bring myself to share the rest of the story.

War’s hand stops stroking my hair. After a moment, his fingers move down the column of my throat. They pause when they get to the scar. His thumb smooths over the raised skin between my collarbones.

My own hand falls away from my throat, and I close my eyes against the feel of his fingertip.

“I’m sorry, wife,” the horseman says. “Your misfortune is my gain.”

My brows knit. That’s such an odd thing to say.

“What do you mean?” I ask, opening my eyes.

War’s lips brush my skin as he pulls me in close. “The day you received this scar is the day you became mine.”

Not all places look like they’ve been touched by the apocalypse.

There are the remote villages like the one we enter two days later that the modern world clearly swept past. These are the places where farmers still herd their livestock through the streets and the dogs are wild and the buildings use the same mudbrick architecture they have for the last thousand years.

These towns seem to have hardly felt the hit of the apocalypse, and they weathered it much more gracefully than my city did.

War and I enter the fishing village, which is hardly more than a few streets perched next to the Mediterranean Sea. As we pass through, a couple men sit outside of their homes, sipping Turkish coffee and smoking hand-rolled cigarettes.