Copper Soldiers
By Shane Alexander Greenhough
Smashwords Edition
Copyright 2012 Shane Alexander Greenhough


It had been close to a decade and still he hadn't come back. It had taken that long for Jennifer to even begin doubting that he ever would.
It could take them years more to fix what took him, she thought, if they ever do at all.
Bradley was gone and he might never come home. The "might", the uncertainty of it, was the real killer though.
Jennifer had had her husband frozen. Cryonics, or cryogenics, or whatever it was they'd called it - he was, for all intents and purposes, suspended on ice. The scene of his freezing had played a thousand times in Jennifer's mind. Though she had not been permitted to witness the procedure itself, her thoughts wouldn't stop from playing back to her what it must have been like. The imagination, after all, can only toy with what the eyes cannot see. 
There had to have been a vat, she believed, a giant test tube filled with some quick-freezing liquid of scientific nomenclature, his nakedness (could they freeze you with your clothes on?) swathed in swirls of icy air - very Demolition Man.  science's promise of a better tomorrow. 
Or maybe just a modern sacrifice to that contemporary, if jaded, god?
Who's jaded now? She asked herself.

The sales guy she'd spoken to all those years ago had told her that Bradley wasn't really dead, he was simply beyond the reach of modern medical technology. The opportunity afforded by his company (Cryotek, or something equally clichéd, she couldn't recall off-hand) was simply to make him available to the touch of tomorrow's technology. 
She'd liked that.
At the time. 
Bradley wasn't dead, he was just? out of touch.

She sat at his old desk - a slim, modern design of plywood and plastic - in his old study which was just as modern with very little ornamentation and no time for frivolity. The only personal touch was a shelf of work-related textbooks that clung to the wall above his desk and the only sign of life was the fern she'd bought him an age before.  It wasn't the same fern, of course. That had been replaced numerous times, but the terracotta-coloured plastic pot, that was still the same.
She'd spent an hour every day exactingly keeping everything as it had been when he was still alive.

No, she shook her head, don't you think like that. He is still alive. He's just? out of touch.

The thick blue carpet was unblemished by fluff or lint and each rivet in the leather-back chair gleamed just as they had the day it had been bought.
The imitation wood surface of the desk shone with evidence of a recent polish and it was on one corner of this where the office fern sat; freshly watered and perfectly positioned, it was a bright, healthy green. 
His landline sat silently, opposite the plant. She'd unplugged the phone years ago - it had rung constantly for weeks after he left and she had quickly gotten tired of trying to explain to the rest of the world exactly what had happened to him - there hadn't been a funeral, he wasn't dead so why should there have been? She could still remember the pity in their voices, her and Bradley's friends and family, at what they must have assumed to be sad self-delusion.
There was little point that she had ever seen in plugging it back in again.
Not until he came back, of course.

On the table in front of her she'd lain the gun, his gun. That she'd never polished, but you wouldn't know it to look at it. Its silver skin sang.
Even the ivory handle mocked its neglect and stubbornly resisted the dulling wear of time. It was a smooth, clean alabaster carved with intricacies that hurt Jennifer's eyes to stare at too long.

Some days she had trouble remembering what it was that had taken her husband. She'd refused to talk about it for so long - irrationally fearing she might jinx the possibility of his return - that the details, big and small, had long since faded with disuse. The bare facts, aftermaths and consequences were all she had for memories.

An open box of ammunition sat on the table-top to her right - perfect ranks of shiny, copper soldiers.

Her only son was gone too, moved into a new home with his new wife. Though the circumstances of his absence were not as tragic, Jennifer felt the sting no less sharply, left alone as she was with incomplete memories and a desperate longing for Bradley's return. 
Raising Nathan had helped, for a time, to offset the loneliness, but as he'd gotten older and the routine of their lives began to tax less on her waking mind she'd begun to notice with unmistakable clarity that she was still unconsciously waiting for her husband to come back.

She wrapped her hand around the ornate haft of the revolver and hefted its weight. It dragged her hand awkwardly backward - it was heavier than it looked.

Of course, Bradley had not yet come home, and she was only now considering the wisdom of having had him preserved in the first place.
At the time, shaken by grief, it had seemed like a perfect idea but it was a desperate clinging to of hope. She'd needed something to light the end of what had suddenly become a very dark tunnel, and the idea that Bradley might somehow be able to come back had been ideally suited to the role.

A decade on, however, and that hope had become an unhealthy obsession. Every morning she woke up with the dimly optimistic thought that this would be the day she would get the call, that today Bradley would be coming home to her. Every afternoon she would end up back in his just-cleaned study, at his freshly-polished desk, contemplating that old gun, an inherited item of antiquity, in subdued silence.
Her hand shook as she tried to bring the barrel around level with her eye, tried to force herself to look down into its empty blackness - just another long, dark tunnel. Her grip tensed as it moved closer - as always she couldn't bring herself to force the barrel past her temple.
It made no sense. Why couldn't she commit to the simple act of looking down the barrel of the gun? 
She hadn't even loaded it. There was no danger involved.
Then why does it even matter?
She ignored her own question and laid the gun back down. 
Collecting the cardboard box of ammunition she bundled the two together and placed them, delicately, into their individual compartments in the carved wooden container that waited on the floor next to her.

Another day, perhaps.
 
*****

"It isn't healthy, Jen."
As always, Margaret's penchant for statement of the obvious was less than helpful. A non-committal rumble sounded from Jennifer's throat.
"I'm serious. I don't even know why you're telling me about this."
You should be talking to a professional.
Jennifer could hear the words Margaret had said in the wake of Bradley's death all those years ago echoing behind her response to this latest emotional confession.
"Why are you even still holding onto it? Hawk the damn thing off."
It was a part of Bradley, was Jennifer's internal reply while silence hung over the restaurant table between her and her friend, maybe more so than anything else he owns, that gun is a piece of Bradley.
Margaret daintily lifted her coffee mug to her lips and took a long sip. She mistook Jennifer's silence for consideration of the question, or maybe even a quiet concession to logic and allowed for the pause to let the imagined ramifications set in.
Jennifer Snowden found herself annoyed by her friend's certainty.
In her smartly-pressed jacket, perfectly straight hair, and pencil skirt Margaret was every inch the professional woman. She had a husband, yes, but theirs was more a business relationship, an arrangement of financial convenience, than a meeting of hearts. She'd always presumed herself to have the answers, but as far as Jennifer was concerned, when it came to matters of love and romance, Margaret didn't even understand the questions.
She thought back to the gun, to the feel of it in her grasp; its solid weight, it's sturdy yet tasteful design. Now there was certainty, assuredness - frosted faith with a clean metallic gleam.
She flexed her hand under the table.
No, it probably isn't healthy.
"It's all I have left of him."
"Bradley?" Margaret sighed, "Jen, he's gone. You need to let go."
Another throat-rumbling - this one of more obvious commitment.
"I'm serious. It's been almost ten years, you need to move on." 
The conversational tones from neighbouring tables were drowned out by the silence between them. Margaret took another sip before picking up where she'd left off.
"Arrange his funeral. Call that cryo-whatsit company and have him taken off ice. You need closure, Jen. You need to move forward without him."
Kill him, put him in the ground. Be a heartless bitch, like me. Jennifer could hear the words clearly, the ones Margaret would never really say. 
She thought back, again, to the gun, to the hand-carved wooden box in which it rested. The copper-headed rank-and-file.
The promise of science, that cynical god.
The light at the end of the tunnel.
She said nothing.
"I know how it sounds, hon, but you can't carry on living like this. I can't imagine how you've managed so far, what with raising Nathan on your own and all, but there's always - always - a light at the end of the tunnel."
Something clicked into place, and realisation lit up in Jennifer's eyes. She looked at Margaret with frightening intensity.
"What did you say?"
"I said there's always a -"
"You're right, you're absolutely right."
Temporarily taken aback, Margaret gawked for a moment before reasserting her confidence with a shake of her head and a comforting smile.
"Of course I am. Trust me, it'll all be alright."
"I know. It will."

*****

There's always a light at the end of the tunnel.
That's what Margaret had said, and in her heart Jennifer knew her friend was right. She had to be. There was nothing to be scared of, there's always a light at the end.
With a held breath and a racing heart, Jennifer sat at her husband's study desk and clicked open the latch on the wooden box. She gingerly removed the little box of bullets, as had become tradition, and placed them to her right on the table top.
"I just need closure," she absently muttered to herself.
Grasping the handle of the gun, she lifted it from its place in the box.
It really did feel so right in her hand.
She laid it down in front of her.
"Just need to see the light."
She placed the wooden container on the floor next to her, then turned back to the revolver and closed her eyes for a moment, filling her lungs to capacity.
"Then I can move forward, carry on."
She didn't recognise the desperation in her own tone.
With her eyes still tightly shut, she released the breath she'd been holding and reached for the handle, slipping her finger around the trigger. It just felt right that way. It had never been loaded after all, so it had never mattered.
"I just need closure."
In one sweeping gesture, she snatched the gun up and brought it in an upward arc toward her face.
The weighty length of the barrel bent her wrist as it created a bridge between the body and her face.
She opened her eyes and a smile - one that twisted her face in ways she couldn't remember since Bradley had been alive - lit her features.
She could see it. 
The light at the end of the tunnel.
It flickered at the bottom of the barrel, a faint metallic-orange glare, like the tip of a smooth copper helmet.
She was so sure it wasn't loaded.
For reasons she hadn't the time to explain, she clenched her hand. Her finger tugged back on the trigger and a sharp bang filled the air. The heavy dragging sound of fabric over leather, and a weighted thump on the carpeted floor followed it.
You can't carry on living like this, Margaret had said at lunch.
As it turned out, she'd been right.