A Regret by Evelyn Shults

They say dead people do not come back.

But here she was, looking with disbelief and uncertainty at the unconscious young woman, as if a ghost was sent to haunt Non until the day of her doom. 

The unconscious, but not dead yet, woman looked exactly like the one she knew a few months ago. She could be considered her twin if it wasn't for the slightly darker shade of skin and smoother and silkier, but still the same raven-like colour of hair. She didn't notice the eye colour of said female, and possibly couldn't have, being busy holding her in a headlock under the stream of shallow river.

Only after making sure the nameless one wasn't one of them, Non stopped in her tracks of trying to get rid of the nameless one. The cloudy weather did no better for Non, making her spiral into deep thoughts and unwanted memories from a couple of months ago.

She was only 15, helping as a nurse in one of the few hospitals in a city near the battle line. It's wasn't her responsibility to care about anything other than treating soldiers and whoever else was being send to them, but the naivety inside her heart gripped it so tightly it ached. 

One look at this orphaned little child made her choose once again one of those decisions she would regret for the rest of her life. Caring about someone you can't protect. How can a child care about another child?

Although, she still did. For the span of next 4 months, Non took her under her wing, even when other nurse sisters told her to abandon it and leave her at the first orphanage or farm for others to take her.

She didn't, and the front line got closer. The artillery's aim got even clearer, and on one of those nights when Non thought the hospital would be avoided again, the shell landed right on top of the hospital corpus, staking slabs of concrete and bricks like a card house. The fire was massive and couldn't be put out until the sunrise. And with the first rays of sun, she was faced with piles of rubble, tattered bodies, and later, severed under one of the fallen walls, head of this young little girl.

Now, coming back to the present evening, Non was sitting above the woman, still numb from today's eventful day. At the back of her mind, Non enjoyed this silence, because very soon, before the other woke up, she would once again have to take the lead, choose what to do with her, send her off somewhere or leave to die, and how to make it till she can come back to her homeland.