The Second Horizon

The young man entered Kateryna Moroz’s scope at 05:17, moving from left to right beyond the ruined school playground.

At nine hundred metres he was only a disturbance among pale weeds. Closer, he acquired a damaged uniform, an awkward covering on one foot and a dark stain around his shoulder. Rain moved across the ground between them in bands too slight to see without watching the grass. The scope gave her each detail and withheld the explanation.

Kateryna lay behind the playground wall, her rifle wrapped against the weather. Beyond her elbow, a schoolbook had swollen until its pages resembled a grey flower. She had turned its cheerful cover towards the earth. The rifle was steady. Only the pulse at the hinge of her jaw betrayed how long she had been alone.

Her spotter, Denys, had left two nights earlier to seek radio contact and had not returned. The unit had withdrawn without reaching her position. She possessed a map of a front that no longer existed and enough ammunition to make several irreversible mistakes.

At 01:40 she had heard two bursts of automatic fire from the direction of the river. At 02:12 a vehicle without lights had crossed the northern track, then fallen silent beyond the poplars. She had written the times inside her wrist because paper rustled and memory changed shape under fear. Now the figures had blurred beneath her glove.

When Kateryna was nine, she had lain beneath Olha’s kitchen table during a thunderstorm while hail struck the blue window frames like thrown seed. In the dark, every branch scraping the roof became a footstep. Olha had placed Kateryna’s palm flat against the floorboards.

‘What do you feel?’

‘The house shaking.’

‘What else?’

Beneath the thunder she had found water moving through the gutter, the refrigerator ticking as its metal cooled, Olha’s breath beside her. The house had not become safe. It had become legible.

Now she spread her gloved fingers against the broken masonry and waited for the last vibration of a distant impact to leave it. She was twenty-two. There were mornings when the distance between that number and the work before her felt greater than the distance inside the scope.

The young man stopped. He carried no visible rifle. His hands were open, although hands could close. Ukrainian clothing could belong to a Ukrainian soldier, a deserter, a prisoner, or someone who had found a body the right size.