Tightrope Walker

Into the heart of darkness they proudly step, with boots like blocks of stone. Heady mind and sullied soul, the bleak becomes the march.
She pulled her jacket around feeble shoulders and re-secured her hood. Long black lashes like needles blinked the floating rain from her eyes. A wall of dark figures paraded on in front of her, too little she was deemed to take the full brunt. Her muddied shoes slipped and skated, any way but where she aimed them, her focus now drawn to basics of one foot in front of the other. Alone the people on either side of her sat huddled in their castles, marvelling at her spirit and cursing at her rancour. The night was beginning to die, the day not yet begun, and still she marched through cold and dark and on towards the sun.
They needed her. She knew this. They knew this. Everyone knew but would never admit it. The most praise she hoped to receive was the feared look in the housewife’s eyes as she hurries her children indoors. Mary is younger than a couple of those pushed inside to safety, but she doesn’t follow along, she doesn’t have the luxury of a protective mother and a warm and safe home. Mary’s home is on the road, the sick path and its many bumps, its rocks and dirt. Her muddied boots are all that seem to care. Mary’s home is with the army, but still she doesn’t feel warm and safe with them, they feel safe with her. She is their guardian angel with claws and teeth and kicking feet.
Mary had shoes of black. They were not shinny but they were strong and they were clean. For now they were clean, but it wouldn’t be long and they’d have the blood and muck on them from a ground covered in empty cases for souls once, but now laying like deflated balloons, their skin gathered in tiny clumps of pale wrinkles.
Mary didn’t like what she had to do, she had never liked it. But it had never been for her to choose, it was something she had to do. She tried to reason with herself every day, that if she didn’t do what she did, thousands of lives would be snuffed out like rows of candles in the creeping gust. She was saving lives, not taking them. But it never did the trick, she had never managed to fool her own heart, and just because it was the enemy dying, it didn’t make it any more or less right.