I’m late. I’m really late.

It isn’t even 10am in the morning, the air is suffocating and the sun is scorching, as if nothing was allowed under its unforgiving stare.

And sand everywhere. The goddamn, omnipresent sand.

That’s an average day in the desert, but to him that is no average day, despite how many he has already spent under that sky who doesn’t remember a cloud’s shape.

The equipment is pressing down on his shoulders, his legs are heavier than he could ever imagine bearing, but the worst part are the short sprints he attempts to perform as soon as he can catch a breath, squeezing his legs like a hand of pain would do with a wet sponge.

But I need to endure it, or I will miss it. And I will miss her.

War didn’t go well.

Actually, war never goes well, it’s just who decides to start it in the first place who claims it has gone well. But for them specifically, it went even worse: less than a hundred soldiers endured the large-scale conflict, and were now running away in despair.

A quite unexpected turn of events for someone who wasn’t even involved in war, I shouldn’t be here now, I should be at home, planting that beautiful tree and the poppies… which won’t grow here. They simply won’t. So I can’t stay here.

The only cargo plane sent by the Head Unit should leave from Dropoff Zero, a telling name for a place where the operation are planned to start. And it should leave in less than twenty minutes; a reasonable time if I wasn’t roughly half an hour away, by feet.

I can do it, they won’t let me here, right? The ceasefire was announced yesterday, everything should be-

A loud blast shattered his thought.

What!?

It’s less than a hundred meters to his southwest, a cloud of sand and dust rapidly rises and engulfs his figure. Are they firing? I can’t look back now, whatever it was. They can bomb the ground all they want, as long as they don’t bomb me. No, I can’t die here.

Another sprint, another fit of pain in his knees, it will all be over soon, just get to that plain without adding any of my own limbs to this heavy load. Part of it is secret weaponry, part of it is food stocks, but on top of everything is that colorful embroidered cloth, the only thing I am willing to die for, except that I can’t, because I have to bring it back home.

A hammock, that is, maybe the culprit of that last explosion. Of course they will try to bomb a colorful man running through the sand, I am so desperate that I didn’t realize this before, idiots like me deserve to be bombed after all. It’s too late now, I can’t stop and hide it, I can only run. Or die.