The girl pulled his pants down around his knees.

The trenches were only four days away. He took a deep drag on the cigarette and stubbed it out in the grass. He let the smoke out with a sigh.

The girl kissed him hard and wet and pulled him down on her.

A shadow appeared on the distant hill, black and sharply defined. He watched the shadow undulate across the hills. It can’t be, he thought. They never fly under a full moon. But the cloud cover?

He looked in the sky for the airship but could see nothing. It was silent except for the crickets singing sex songs. The countryside was still but for the shadow. He lost the vision of the girl. Everything was the huge, cigar-shaped shadow moving toward him, silent as death.

He knew he should run, sound the alarm, warn his friends, but he just sat, watching. The shadow eclipsed the moonlight and he shivered, the airship was directly over him. He could just hear the engines as it passed. Then he was bathed in moonlight, the shadow behind him. He had survived. The airship had held its bellyful of death. Then he heard the explosions begin behind him. He turned and watched the flashes and fires in the distance, listened to the screams, as his friends at the base woke to find themselves on fire. He moaned and curled into a ball, flinching each time a bomb exploded.

Then he woke up.

There was no justice; Effrom was sure of it. Not an iota, not one scintilla, not a molecule of justice in the world. If there was justice, would he be plagued by nightmares from the war? If there was any justice would he be losing sleep over something that had happened over seventy years ago? No, justice was a myth, and it had died like all myths, strangled by the overwhelming reality of experience.

Effrom was too uncomfortable to mourn the passing of justice. The wife had put the flannel sheets on the bed to keep him cozy and warm in her absence. (They still slept together after all those years; it never occurred to them to do any different.) Now the sheets were heavy and cold with sweat. Effrom’s pajamas clung to him like a rain-blown shroud.

After missing his nap, he had gone to bed early to try to recapture his dreams of spandex-clad young women, but his subconscious had conspired with his stomach to send him a nightmare instead. Sitting on the edge of the bed, he could feel his stomach bubbling away like a cannibal’s caldron, trying to digest him from the inside out.