“Sorry. It just that… that I was in the war. I’m a lieutenant in the army. I lost a lot of friends; you know it’s hard to move on.” Abby was amazed. She wondered how old Gabriel really was; maybe he wasn’t as young as she thought. She looked at Gabriel’s face, it was cold and hard. The verity of Gabriel’s life hit her slowly. She didn’t know how she would have dealt with such a thing. Gabriel held his cigarette straight like a scepter, watching the smoke circling above it. He anon looked at Abby in the face.

“Abby if there’s one thing I learned from the war it was this: we’re all just smoke to the people on top. Here one day gone the next. The world’s a crazy place, people kill each other for something as simple as food, and it’s insane. I hate that people on top buy things they don’t need while people starve and I can’t do anything because I’m just smoke. Smoke in the asylum. Huh.” Abby was in concord with Gabriel and she nodded to him, but she couldn’t respond. It was like Gabriel had aged 20 years and she was just a kid. She still saw the young face and the long smooth hair, but his eyes had changed. They seemed dark and dreary. That should have augured Gabriel’s demise at the time, it didn’t. It seemed to make his presence more laudable. Abby wanted the conversation to end there; she wanted to lave the terror she’d just heard, but it didn’t.

“I hated the war to. We were just hired guns, suborned for the government. Hated it, I hate myself now, all the time. God I don’t deserve to live.” Abby had no clue how to respond to that she was confounded. She’d never known anyone who’d tried to commit suicide, but she knew the signs. She looked at Gabriel; he seemed to have changed completely. His face was distraught, his eye’s stormy, and it scared her. He almost looked like he was a man walking to the gibbet. Gabriel looked at her his face in pain.

“Here Abby take these, I don’t want them.” He reached into the neck of his shirt and grabbed the pendent from under his shirt. It was his dog tags. They were worn thin and smooth. Gabriel stood up, but before he walked away, he whispered in her ear.

“If you meet my angel tell her I’m sorry I couldn’t be there, but I had to go.” Gabriel kissed her on the head before he walked away.


Three weeks later Abby looked up at the police officer after she told him her story and then she slide Gabriel's tags across the metal table. She hadn’t known what possessed her to wear them with her dress, maybe it was because she didn’t have a date. Abby watched as officer put the tags in a plastic bag. It nearly seared her to know that Gabriel was dead. Her entrails felt charred and burned. How could they think she’d killed Gabriel? The officer suck a breath in, Abby prepared herself for another your guilty speech and probably would have gotten it if there hadn’t been a knock on the interrogation room’s door. The officer got up and walked out of the room Abby laid her head on the table waiting for the worst. The officer walked back into the room and told her she was free to go. Abby was shocked, relived, but shocked. The Officer told her places were she could wait for her father to come pick her up.

Abby waited in the lobby for quite awhile, nothing exciting happened. The only person that caught her eye was a pregnant woman with puffy eyes that came running in. The woman was immediately met by the officer that had interrogated her. The man looked sympathetically at the woman than handed her a silver chain with worn, smoothed dog tags dangling from them. Gabriel’s angel had arrived. Abby walked up to the woman and the officer. She arrived un noticed and was able to catch the woman’s teary response to what the cop was telling her.

“…Suicide?!? How, why? Are you sure?” Abby was taken back Gabriel had committed suicide. Her heart nearly stopped as she thought of Gabriel’s pale, ice eyes. She then looked at the woman’s distended belly and wanted to scream at him. How could he leave a wife and child? She was so confused. However, Abby interrupted the conversation and told the woman Gabriel’s message.