Compress bandages taped below his rib cage turned a darker pink with each heavy breath he took. He was a kid, pale as a ghost, put there to die while they worked on the ones they could save. He had sandy-colored hair and a few faint freckles around his eyes. He never opened them. I watched the final lift of his chest, heard a last gasp, a harsh sound as air escaped his dead lungs. I looked at him a long time, his mouth open, chin tipped up, one hand palm down in the dry dust, and I realized where I was. This was Sicily.

I was in Sicily, in a field hospital. And these stretchers bore casualties. I must be a casualty.

It all made sense, sort of. I still had a lot of questions. But the trouble was, I didn't know what they were. Maybe it was the fact that I wasn't dead like the kid on the stretcher, but my head didn't hurt as much as it had. Words began to come together, and as my confusion receded, the worst of the pain went with it. I tried to remember how I'd gotten here. I didn't know exactly where here was, just somewhere in Sicily. Which is an island shaped like a triangle getting kicked by the toe of Italy. Naturally, there were a lot of Italians who didn't want us here. And Germans. I felt a shiver of fear, a shudder, a trembling in my gut. Who was I afraid of? A little voice, a tinny, distant echo in my head, tried to tell me something, but I couldn't make it out.

I'm in Sicily. There's a war on. And I'm scared of something. I got that far.

My eyes scrunched as I tried to think harder, remember how I'd been hurt, where I'd been before I came here. Where had I been before Sicily?

The dull sound of thunder distracted me, but it wasn't really thunder, I knew that much. Artillery. I watched two doctors in stained white coats stop and look at each other with that worried look you get when you hear enemy artillery creeping closer and you know things aren't going well at all.