Carnations -ch.4 Up.5- -mutt Jeff- | Pale

He lit a cigarette with trembling fingers. The smoke tasted like the inside of a hospital tent. He didn’t mind.

The name had stuck after the war. Before that, he’d been just Jeff, or Private First Class Jeffries to the men who didn’t know him well enough. After the Armistice, after the gas had finished its slow work on his lungs and the nightmares had carved out a permanent home behind his ribs, he’d come back to the city and found it didn’t want him. Not the way he was. Ragged. Unhousebroken. A creature that had learned to bite first and ask questions never.

He crushed the cigarette under his heel and tucked the carnation back into his pocket. The stray dog had moved on, disappearing into the mouth of a storm drain. Jeff wondered if it had found a place to curl up, or if it was still running, still looking for something it couldn’t name. Pale Carnations -Ch.4 Up.5- -Mutt Jeff-

The pale carnation pressed against his heart like a promise.

Chapter 4, Up.5, ends.

“That’s you,” Jeff muttered to himself. “Mutt Jeff.”

He turned his collar up and walked toward the river. Somewhere down there, a woman he’d once loved was probably dead. Somewhere down there, the man who’d made her that way was still breathing. And Jeff—Mutt Jeff, the dog with no master and no leash—was going to find him. He lit a cigarette with trembling fingers

“Yeah,” he said to the empty street. “Same.”