Ashes Between Us

Gabriel Jeroschewitz, November 26th^, 2025,

Ashes Between Us

I have watched cities burn twice in my lifetime, though one was slower, quieter, and far more complete than the other. The first was when the bombs fell on my youth; the second, when words sharper than shrapnel hollowed out whatever spirit humanity had left. Between those fires, I met her.

Her name was Selene, and she spoke like no one I’d ever known — deliberate, careful, like she was soldering each phrase together, learning the wrong word could kill. In this world, it often did. She was not beautiful in the shabby idol way people crowded their screens for. Instead, she carried an elegance carved from endurance, the kind only those who had stood in ash and kept walking could possess.

I first saw her in the marketplace, though ‘marketplace’ is generous. It was a line of ragged sheets tied between walls, separating sellers from the wind and sand. People exchanged not coins but rumours, jars of clean water, batteries that still held a charge. She was trading information — not news, but truth. A dangerous profession. In this place, truth was hunted.

I learned later that she had once been a painter. Then she had been a teacher. Then, after the second war began, she had hidden families in cellars and smuggled them along forgotten roads. But all of that was before the screens took over. Before the lies grew so vast and braided that reality itself was impossible to grip.

She looked me in the eye when I greeted her. Most people didn’t, these days. Eye contact was a gamble — it could be an invitation, a challenge, or a mark for the wrong sort of attention. I asked her what she was selling. She told me, “I sell something you cannot afford — certainty.”

I became a regular at her ragged curtain stall, though I bought nothing. Perhaps that was my mistake — or my salvation. We spoke of little things: the taste of boiled dandelion roots, the way the desert wind shifted just before rain, what it meant to remember a childhood without screens buzzing in your skull. But every so often, she’d let something else slip: a name of someone hiding; a shipment of medicine diverted to someone’s private estate; a village erased from maps.

The city was suffocating long before the soldiers came. Vanity had replaced virtue. Injustice was lauded in eloquent speeches. Celebrities preached morality while sipping wine paid for by conglomerates stripping the oceans bare. And outside, far from the cameras, bodies piled like misfiled paperwork — not worth remembering.

It was in that suffocating twilight that our lives tangled. She didn’t smile often, but once, when we found a surviving fig tree blooming in a courtyard of cracked stone, she touched my hand without meaning to. Her palm was a warmth I didn’t know I’d been seeking.

I became her shadow after that.

The leaders’ speeches had already shifted from We must protect our future to They are the enemy, and they must be erased. The “They” changed weekly. Sometimes it was a neighbouring state. Sometimes it was a religion. Sometimes it was people who thought differently about how to grow crops. The lies adapted — they were endlessly fertile.

Selene refused to adapt. That was her flaw and her beauty. She copied down fragments of banned texts by hand, sealing them in jars buried outside the city, as though truths were seeds waiting for a gentler century. She whispered to the children that their parents had not been traitors, no matter what the broadcasts said. She painted again, but now her canvases were hidden under a floorboard — visions of forests she’d never walked in, oceans she’d never touched.

The danger was inevitable.

The night before they came for her, she told me about her first love. Not me — someone long before I existed in her orbit. He had been a soldier, one she’d met when she was nineteen. He believed in the war then. He believed in everything the leaders said, until the day he saw a school collapse under his own artillery fire. After that, he was never the same. One morning, he lay down on a minefield and didn’t rise again.

“I think I’ve been mourning him ever since,” Selene said, without looking at me. “And now you. You remind me that I can love something still alive.”

It was a dangerous confession, because here, love was leverage. Attachments could be used to break you open. I told her that if she stayed silent, if she stopped trading in dangerous truths, maybe we could survive. She shook her head.

“If I stay silent, maybe we don’t deserve to.”

They came at dawn. Not soldiers, but men in clean suits, the kind sent when the charge is already decided. They took her without a struggle. Someone had already erased her stall before midday, as though she had never existed. I don’t know where they took her. In this world, absence is a sentence in itself.

The city kept breathing, but it was a corpse’s breath — mechanical, shallow. The broadcasts spun their newest narratives. The war expanded. The oceans retreated. The air tasted of burnt copper. Somewhere, the bombs fell again. Somewhere, the markets traded lies for bread.

I walk the streets now as an older man. I’ve survived wars, shortages, and the collapse of the idea of truth itself. But I am always looking for her, in the corner of my vision, veiled in dust. I imagine her in another city, warning others, planting seeds in buried jars. Or perhaps she is gone entirely, her truths decomposing in soil no one will dare dig.

Either way, her absence is the most honest thing left in this world.