HOW TO GET A MESSAGE BEHIND ENEMY LINES — K.S. LOKENSGARD
/Tattoo the small, dangerous words to a man’s shaved scalp. When the hair has grown back, send the man ahead with a knife and a small pack of food. Show him the hidden routes through the mountains when spring has come. Trace the lines on the map with your fingers and then burn it.
Write the secrets on a piece of your mother’s stationery, using a cipher that makes the message look like a different message, banal and weather-related. Press your lips to the flowers scrawled around the border of the page and sign it with a fake name. Send this one through the normal post.
Take hostages from a skirmish at the border. Look carefully at the one with close-bitten fingernails and then turn her by blackmail, with threats about her own secrets. Watch her wring her hands in panic and then agree. Send her home with instructions: Have her eavesdrop behind the curtain. Have her bring a tray of drinks around the party, listening for the person you told her about. Have her pass on the message in the dim light of a back hallway, fraught seconds passing while her heart pounds.
When the terrain sounds familiar in the reports coming back, ignore it with a shake of your head. Chalk it up to coincidence. Remember the thing that caused the war: the midnight betrayal, the sick dropping-off in your chest when you found out, the wound that remains tender even now. When your friends say things like, you’re better off now and you’ve just got to move on, keep the secrets of your wartime campaign to yourself. Not everyone has the stomach for war.
And when you realize that across the frontline of the enemy, where smoke rises in clouds and dogs bark into air already full—when you realize what that place is, take a moment. When you come to understand that it’s just a different part of yourself, bloodied beyond recognition, that you drew the line with your own hand—that this whole country is just your body, and you have been sneaking word to your own traitor heart, give yourself a minute. Give yourself a minute. Smooth your skirt. Tuck your hair behind your ears. Listen to the boy’s bumbling apology as it falls from his lips.
Then, call your spies back. Realize that you can speak to yourself without casualties. That you can love someone who hurt you; that you can leave him behind. Look out over the valleys, the fields, the sparrows darting from the trees. Leave notes in the branches with soft things written on them. Watch new growth sprout up in the places that you burned.
K.S. Lokensgard is a writer and lawyer from Washington, D.C.
