He had fallen into a quagmire. A quagmire of brackish water saturated with weeds, which entangled themselves with his legs and clothing. It had reached the point where he no longer tried to fight the downward pull. It was futile. With no tangible hope, all motivation for self help had failed him. 

And yet there he was, a solitary sign of life in an otherwise desolate wasteland. The only noise that permeated the black night was the low, hum-like sound of rain beating on the pavement. The man walked on in a perfunctory motion, catching rain. The drops fell upon him, first making little wet spots on the his shoulders and hat, soon soaking through his jacket and shirt and onto his skin. He had no umbrella, but he made no effort to shield himself from the falling water. It had been raining for as long as he could remember. The sun, by now, seemed to him something foreign, and somehow unwelcome. An abstract idea that had no place in the realm of reality. 

The rain pleased him. He liked to imagine himself as the lead in a dramatic film, with the heavens reflecting his state of mind. Six months had past since the end of the war, and London still laid in pieces, much like the fragments of his life. He was a bicycle repairman--as was his father, and his father before him. Until recently, they’d owned a thriving repair business--the entirety of which was currently enclosed in his small, battered, rain-soaked briefcase. The decline began when people realized they did not care to be repairing their bicycles while their sons were dying in muddy trenches somewhere in Belgium, their homes were at risk of detonation in their sleep, and the daily question was whether or not they’d go to sleep hungry. But the lack of business wasn’t the most pressing problem. A few months into the fighting, his brother was drafted and sent to France. There were a few letters, then a gap--then came the neat little white envelope informing the family that he was dead, by infection following major injury. His cousin, his uncle’s orphan, was called upon next. The news came just two months later that he had disappeared, and, a tactless relative added, was most likely rotting somewhere above ground. With two of the four supporting pillars of the repair shop snapped, the family business was no longer functional. Not that there was much business anyways. Constant news of more deaths, more tragedies, became the quotidien. On the rare days that there was no news of a food shortage, a bombing, a battle lost or won… those days, the newspapers seemed strangely thin.  Those were the less bloody days. The days of peace. The odd days, the ones out of place. Everyone prayed for an end to the bloodshed, but with no real, tangible hope. And so it came as no surprise when, in January,  his time had come. He bid his old mother and father goodbye, and headed to the continent. 

His days in the trenches melded together, a frozen mass of hoarse bellowing, sharing liquor, the squeal of bullets, and cracked, bloody hands. Frostbite found the tips of his ears, leaving a third of his left ear missing. He could never see if his bullets found their targets through the smoke and dust and chaos, which gave him a distinct feeling of insignificance, of uselessness. Whether or not he was there seemed to make no difference in the battle, in the war, in the grand scheme of things. This, coupled with the meager progress the entire army made each day--a few dozen feet forward or backwards, at the cost of a few hundred men and countless bullets--gave the whole idea a distinct feeling of insignificance. Most of the men shared the disgruntlement that only a few were willing to voice: “why are we fighting?” and “what would winning--or losing, for that matter--resolve?” It became more and more clear that their performance simply did not matter, no more than did his human existence. 

He was shot in the shoulder. It was the first and last time he was injured. It came almost as a relief, for he escaped the deadlocked western front, and his existential crisis. The wound kept reopening, and the slow trickle of blood couldn’t be stifled; he was eventually shipped to France to be healed. He was sent back to the front as soon as he recovered, but by then the fighting was winding down. Two weeks later, the armistice was signed, and he was discharged. But his high spirits where short-lived.The euphoria of going home evaporated when he returned to a London he could barely recognise.  His home was equally foreign to him… Familiarity had been covered by dust, grime, debris, and pain. He arrived back to the repair shop to find his father vegetating in the corner of the shadowy, dusty room, perched on a stool. He looked to have aged ten years in a few months. His father’s white hair, which in his memory had always been finely groomed, was a wispy cloud of fly-aways. His rheumatoid had gotten worse, and he shook from hunger and old age. At the sight of his son, the old man produced a skull-sized jar from where he’d held it in his lap, and placed a shaky, wet kiss on its side. “Our little boy is back,” he whispered into the chipped porcelain. Tears inundated the deep valleys in the folds of his skin. The jar shook in his hands. She missed our boys too much, she told me she’d wait for me on the other side. But I didn’t have money to give her a proper burial, this was the best I could do. She deserves more… I’ve failed her, I’ve failed our family.

And that was how he fell into the quagmire. With everyone dead except his increasingly senile and rheumatoid-ridden father, the survival of his wife and child, as well as the children of his brother and cousin, had fallen upon him. At times--and these times were occurring increasingly frequently--he envied his brother and cousin. True, they were dead… but they did not have the responsibility of the essentially three families resting upon their shoulders. They did not have to pick up the pieces of this goddamn useless, anachronistic piece of garbage that was called a bicycle repair shop. They did not have eight hungry mouths to feed and essentially no income. No, they had escaped this world and dumped all their problems on him. 

The rain persisted as the man walked on, monotonous, detached from reality, consumed in his bitter recollections. Suddenly he found himself bathed in dim red light. He had reached his destination for that night: a modest inn. At the door, he looked up at the flickering neon sign, which illuminated the raindrops that seemed to fall from an empty void of darkness. The rain closest to the red light resembled blood, falling from the sky. 

Inside the inn, a middle-aged man--probably the owner--with a tweed jacket and a balding dome sat behind the counter. The room was small, claustrophobic, with peeling floral wallpaper and a threadbare rug. 

“Room for one?” the sodden man asked. 

“That’ll be two pounds, my friend,” replied the owner. Two pounds a night! the man thought, sourly. For this bloody, run-down establishment. He was being cheated, victimized. The innkeeper actually had the audacity to overcharge him. The portly owner was clearly the better off--at least he still owned his inn, a functional, money reaping establishment. He wasn’t the one who’d be selling a family business of five generations the following morning, in attempt to feed eight mouths. It wasn’t his tie fraying at the knot. And yet, he had the audacity to asked for two pounds a night. The man’s hand hesitated as he reached for the buckles of his briefcase. He glanced behind him, into the downpour. Already soaked, he wouldn’t have minded returning to the welcoming arms of the rain. But there were no other hotels in sight, and it was this inn where he had agreed to meet a potential buyer early the next day. Reluctantly, he fished out two pounds from his wallet. 

Upstairs in his room, the man thrust the battered briefcase in the rickety chair by the bed, peeled off his wet jacket, and produced a small flask from his pocket. He shook it for the sound, then weighed it in his hand. There was perhaps a third of the flask left, he judged. He popped the flask open with a practiced deft. A halfhearted apology to his liver flickered through the back of his mind, but there was too much to deal with to worry about that. Anything to keep his mind off the stresses that were drowning him like tangled weeds pulling him under.

He emptied the flask down his throat, tasting nothing and enjoying the burning sensation in his stomach. In a few moments it had gone, and he undressed himself and prepared for bed. A small plaque nailed to the headboard of the bed caught the man’s eye. It was attached to the time-smoothened wood  with rusty nails, and the metal showed tell-tale signs of age. Decades of fingers, backs of heads, and pillows had long rubbed off the shine, leaving the metal tired and worn. There were words engraved in a baroque font, barely legible. 

To every man, his private trials reign,

In detail disparate yet all the same.

Be not blinded, for those who suffer are not few,

Here lies of each the fallen, here rises the new. 

 What a load of rubbish. He turned his attention to the threadbare blanket folded at the foot of the bed, and shook it out. There better not be bedbugs, he thought sourly, for two pounds a night. He climbed into the narrow bed and threw the covers over himself. Sleep consumed him almost at once. 

Yellow powder floating and fear seizing up every nerve in your body because you know exactly what this is and you are hoping that this isn’t it but a at the same time you know it has to be. Your bones stop moving it feels like you are made of brittle stone but you try to run and you can’t because you feel it already in your chest and tears start to well up and you can feel the blisters forming in the inside of your lungs and they start popping and you can’t breathe and then there is nothing. Something deafening loud and you open your eyes to see the walls around you collapse and plaster and smoke saturates the air and all you can think of is where is your child. You call for her through the thick air and you strain to hear crying through the deafening noise but you can’t. The whole ship jolts and a white flower forms in the water it’s getting bigger and you think this can’t be because this is a passenger ship--then another and this time you’re falling among pieces of debris and you see a something huge closing in from above and before you can take a breath the water punches you. Where is up and where is down you can’t tell only it’s getting darker. Pain in your nasal cavity because you tried to breathe, popping in your ears. Angry men yelling waving weapons in your face, breaking everything in your own home because you are a German, a beast, a traitor. Windows shattered by rocks you try to shield your son and daughter who is crying. Pain searing in your leg then blackness next thing you know you don’t feel any more pain it smells of putrid flesh you look at the lump under the blanket that should be your leg it’s there but you can’t feel it. Your stomach turns because you know what has happened but you don't want it to be true and now you realized your head is throbbing you pull away the covers and you wish you hadn’t. There it is, black and brown with little white wiggling specks and somehow this used to be your leg. Walking down the aisle of chaos the smells of rotting flesh and antiseptic in the tent moans of agony everywhere limbs missing redness soaking the white linens shining, wet, crusty spheres or half-spheres that you know used to be faces. Horrifying how unrecognizable people become with half their faces blown off skulls cracked innards peeping through under bandages. Children should never look like this like an old man sunken faces cheek bones jutting out. Throngs of people outside the bakery before the sun is up because if you come later you won’t have the money to buy any bread and your children are waiting at home and your baby needs nourishment and every night you’re afraid the angels will visit. All this happening and you can’t do anything about it because the countries around you all hate you hate you hate you. 

When the man awoke, dawn had barely broke. There was no sunlight yet, but the sky was slowly turning from black to grey. He was still sunk into the cloud-like bed, warm under the covers. His body was relaxed, his muscles unknotted, but his in his chest was the feeling that he couldn’t breathe, even though he was getting enough air. There was something heavy on top of him, a hole in his heart, something that filled him from inside out with cold numbness. It was a feeling he could never forget. 

He sat up, and climbed out of bed. As he stood up the sorrow seemed to trickle away, slowly. Warmth re-entered his body and the all-consuming empty hole seemed to close up. He looked back at the bed. He saw them now, all the people who had slept in this bed in the past years, all the torment and grief they had been through. The woman who’d lost her children in Lusitania, the soldier who’d been defaced and blinded, the man who’d been tortured and now suffered shell shock, and so many more. In one night he had felt the grief of each man and woman and child, seen their misery through their own eyes. To every man, his private trials reign, In detail disparate yet all the same. Where had he heard those words before? Suddenly remembering the plaque, the man looked back to the worn wooden headboard--but it was plain and unornamented. The plaque had gone. He brushed his hands frantically over the wooden headboard, like a blind man. But the wood was smooth, evenly worn, as if it had been all along. Had he imagined it? 

It was odd, but he wasn’t bothered. He reached for his clothes; they’d dried completely overnight, retaining no trace of dampness. As he dressed himself, he realized that it did not matter where the plaque had gone, or whether it had ever existed at all. What was important was that everything had changed. He took one last look at the bed--the tangled white linens of which were, by now, bathed in golden sunlight shining in through the open window. For the first time in what seemed like an eternity, it had stopped raining.

The man groomed himself, collected his briefcase and stepped out of the room and into a new day.