That summer I ate all the strawberries. Because the war had been ongoing for many years, because the earth was angry to be filled with so many dead men, because the clouds we watched never brought rain, there weren’t many strawberries. Most of the plants spilled over the small mounds I’d buried their roots in, and they stayed firm and green even without the rain, even despite the sun, but when it came time to offer me something for all my patting and digging and carrying buckets of water up from the creek to the small plot behind our house where the strawberry plants slept, they refused to yield. Death filled the air and it curled the strawberry plants’ vines inward so that instead of dripping large berries into my hands, they clenched the life they’d salvaged.

After the harvest, I’d picked only one bucket of berries—full and red.

Grandmother scolded me for eating all of the strawberries, you are a greedy child.

I am not a child, I said.

Men huddle together under blankets of old leaves to keep from freezing; women suckle babies on damp rags after their breasts have gone dry. You eat all the strawberries. You are a child.

My stomach hurt, but I didn’t tell Grandmother. I walked up the hill into the woods to the shed where after hunting the men would skin their game and hang the furs to dry. There had not been a hunt in many years and the abandoned furs were brittle like the bark of a tree which has soured from the inside. I piled the furs into a mound on the floor and fell asleep.

When I woke my stomach hurt worse than before. Joseph, who had been already too old for a soldier when the war began, squatted against the far wall of the shed and stared at me. The light from the evening sun was a veil between us, but it couldn’t hide the wrinkles sunk deep in his forehead.

You are too old, I told him.

When a man is too old for war which is death and too old for love which is also death, what good is he? He asked.

The greatest fiddler in the world is useless if there is no one to hear him, I replied.

Joseph stood and his shadow loomed over me. He bent down and touched my thigh.

Please don’t; I am tired, my stomach hurts.

I have been tired since the war began; my knees hurt, my shoulders hurt, my neck hurts, he said.

My stomach hurts, I said again. He moved his hand up my leg and laid his palm across my belly. He watched his hand rise and fall with my breaths.  He laid down on top of me so that my belly could not rise and fall; it spread thin under his weight.

You are young, you are healthy, he said.

I am not young. Soon I too will go to war, I said. Joseph placed his cheek against mine and whispered,

Then who will eat all the strawberries?

# # #

Harris Stevens is a New York City-based writer who recently completed his MFA in Creative Writing at the College of New Rochelle. His poetry has been published in Straylight, and he’s presented critical work at the Southeast Regional Meeting of the Conference on Christianity and Literature, and the Language and Linguistics Student Conference at the University of Central Oklahoma. Harris currently works at The New York Review of Books.

Photo: Lewis Fagg