I wake up in the mud at the base of a flooded trench. Water up to my waist, brackish blood pouring out from what used to be my stomach. I hear screaming. Not my own.

I wake up again and Mätr is pressing a balled-up scarf against the gushing wound in my shoulder, swearing. Certainty is crying in a corner of the church.

The stained glass windows are blown out and only gray light slips through, like a vandal. I stare up at white ceilings and grit my teeth when Mätr extracts a pocket knife to start digging the bullet out.

‘You were very good,’ he pants, holding me down with a knee. ‘Very good.’

And then it’s nothing but white noise.

It hurts less the next time I wake up. Certainty has stopped crying, because she’s asleep.

Mätr sits leaning against the near wall. He’s down to jeans and an undershirt, the rest too bloody or dressing my wound. He just has scratches. Lanced across his skin, and the skin maps over shuddering muscle, more there than you’d expect. Old dogtags hanging from his neck. Glasses just two circles of white light slipped down to the edge of his nose.

He lights my cigarette for me, then one for himself.

‘Where did you serve?’ I ask, because it’s rare to commune, and my head hurts too much to ask anything else.

Mätr blows a narrow sheet of white smoke and answers a different question. ‘You killed two up there. Another three I’m not sure.’

I roll with it. I can’t move, so it’s not like I’ve got much choice.

‘And you?’

‘I didn’t shoot.’

You came across these, back in the war. The ones that saw the guys that already had their hands dirty and hid behind them instead.

Deal with it, I guess.

‘I’m starving,’ I say.

‘There’s nothing,’ Mätr says.

It’s been bugging me for a while so I say it. ‘But something smells sweet.’

Mätr looks at the ash on the end of his cigarette, as though debating something. He decides, taps the ash off and gets up onto his knees and crawls over to me. Holds the cigarette up between our faces as he climbs over my body, dirty jeans straddling my waist.

With the other hand, he plucks my cigarette out between my lips and takes one last drag on it before scratching it out by my ear. Then he kisses me as I start to breathe in.

I’m back in the alley with a needle in my vein. I’m back in Hope’s bed with her wet hair falling around us like a curtain. Adrenal rush and the sweet crash after. Ethanol. Morphine. Hot summer grass and sprinkler sets. Red and gold and violet and sharp lime green.

Dream. He’s a dream.

He parts our lips breathless and shakes the ash off his cigarette again before speaking, glasses like silvery little windows to his odd-colored eyes. One brown and one green.

‘Drink until you’re full,’ he murmurs, and we kiss again.

He says he’s wanted for murder for things he did in the war.

I don’t understand. He sighs and refuses to go into it.

Mätr explains he’s a student professor. A researcher with the university. The girl is one of the test subjects from their labs.

He says their study was to determine where the dreams went.

I don’t understand. Isn’t he a dream?

‘You’ve been so long without one, how would you even tell?’

You never forget something like that. The mind, maybe. The body doesn’t forget.

Mätr asks me how many I killed in the war.

‘I don’t remember.’

He smirks at the brick and mortar.

‘Doesn’t matter, I guess. We lost anyway.’

No one talks about it in the city. I never heard for sure.

‘Did we?’

‘We didn’t win.’

I guess that narrows it.

‘Lughnasadh,’ says Mätr. ‘Want to be a revolutionary?’

The girl, he wants to take her out of the city. He wants to take her back where she belongs. Because he thinks that’s where the dreams are.

‘That’s what you aren’t getting. You flatter me, but she’s the real dream.’ He starts to pull his coat back on, bloody though it is. ‘Every inch of her. A block of pure.’

‘That?’ I croak.

‘See? You did forget. Or you’re starting to overthink things. It’s a simple thing, a dream. She is what isn’t elsewhere.’

‘That’s metaphor. This isn’t poetry.’

‘No,’ he says distantly, as the thin drum line starts outside. ‘It’s just the rain.’