I Can Pause My Heart

Reading Time: 16 minutes

The Soldier

He’s fucking tired. Not just tired, used up. Emptied out like a battery left in the cold. And he’s only nineteen. Maybe twenty now? He isn’t sure anymore and he really doesn’t care. They don’t mark birthdays out here. Days just stack like spent shell casings. You lose count.

There’s mud in his boots. In his sleeves. In the seams of his uniform. Always mud. Thick, grainy, clinging like guilt. The kind that never quite dries. Trucks fishtail through it, spraying the ditches, and the air hums with the churn of engines and boots and orders shouted from somewhere too far away to matter.

He never wanted this. Never signed up in any real way. But that didn’t stop the paper from arriving. Didn’t stop the hand on his shoulder, the sharp voice saying pack your shit, you’re going. Before he even understood what the fight was supposed to be. He didn’t choose violence, it chose him. He wasn’t meant to be on this trajectory. Why make him learn about Cioran, then spend him on this? Stupid fucking party posters. One minute he was in his mother’s kitchen, the smell of fried onions still in the air, and the next, training camp, blisters, mud.

Now he’s holding a weapon he barely understands. In the damp, the stock is slick and unsettled when he grips it, jerking just enough to feel like it wants to squirm out of his hands. It jams if you look at it sideways, especially when the air turns wet. They told him to trust it. That it was to protect him. But it feels more like malice strapped to his back. Like it’s not just a weapon, but a parasite. Like a tick, burrowed in, feeding slowly on blood. Something that gets heavier the longer you carry it, not only with weight, but with potential. It’s training you to hold it now, so you’ll know how to carry the regret later, when it’s no longer metal and wood, but what you’ve done with it is seared into your identity.

It’s never some a battlefield out of a movie. It’s protesters. Stupid, privileged, students. Angry, but only armed with idealistic signs and naive chants. Just hold the line. Look serious. Menacing. That’s what they were ordered to do. They probably wouldn’t need to shoot. That’s what the lieutenant muttered, eyes fixed somewhere over their heads. No going house to house, dragging someone they wanted out to the street, for a change.

The command came down, and now his entire company, or what remained after the desertions, would move out, far more soldiers than necessary for something like this. Other unit commanders had quietly refused, their resistance less a statement than a symptom of decay, a collapse of command authority mirroring the broader deterioration spreading across the country. They hadn’t joined the opposition officially, not yet. But they weren’t stopping it anymore. For his own company, compliance was no longer about duty or belief but about resignation, a muted acceptance of fate they couldn’t avoid.

The rumor was the capital was aflame and the party leaders had already fled. No one said it out loud. But everyone suspected. An ugly, unnamed event was looming again, everyone sensed it, though none spoke openly. It felt like something deeper and more final lay ahead this time: a reckoning that had been gathering silently, waiting for its moment.

He eats half a ROM bar from his coat pocket, the other half already gone from earlier. He doesn’t offer the rest. It was wrapped in the flag, like he and his comrades still were. Now, just a crumpled wrapper. A little sweet snack of both oppression and identity. The glares from the others slide off him. Fuck them. Let them be hungry. He’s not their brother. He’s not anyone’s.

But they find the town center empty. No chants, signs, or crowds. No flaming flags. Just fog. Thick and creeping, like the air itself wants to keep secrets. And the kind of cold that gets into your jaw and stays there, locking it shut. They march anyway. Because orders don’t care what makes sense.

He’s not here for a cause. The slogans meant nothing. Just sounds painted on walls. He’s not fighting for anything. He’s surviving. That’s all. Keep your head down. Don’t talk too much. Don’t be memorable. That’s how you survive.

So he marches. Because the others march. And stopping would draw attention, and attention is dangerous.

A medium-sized brown dog steps off the edge of the street and falls in beside him, as if it knows him. As if it’s come to join the march. Not afraid exactly. Not trusting either. Measuring. It trots alongside him, glancing up now and then, quick looks, almost expectant, or maybe just keeping score. A stray, someone’s pet? He keeps his eyes forward, trying not to be pulled into it. It’s not close enough to deal with and not far enough to forget. Just there, pacing him, steady and silent. The memory folds into the present without asking. Another dog, years ago, the little mutt that used to follow him to school, slipping from behind the bakery each afternoon. No collar. No bark. Just those unblinking eyes, always at his back. It never let him touch it, but it always walked him home, day after day, until the first snow came and it was gone. He never knew whether it had been guarding him or penning him in. And now, with this one shadowing him through the mist, he isn’t sure which he fears more. So he keeps walking, the dog at the edge of vision, and lets himself be weighed.

Then the dog vanished as quickly as it appeared, and he was alone again, with the others. They head into a cemetery. Not a wrong turn. This is the route. This is where they were sent. This is where the civilians will die. He feels that in his bones. He knows he should feel something more for them. Guilt, maybe. But what he feels is anger. Not sharp, just low and steady. This is a stupid place. A stupid plan. Who hides in a graveyard? Who drags a hundred soldiers into this? Stupid people. They’re making this happen. Not him. He doesn’t want this. He never did. He wanted anything else. But his boots sink into thawed ground, each step a fight. The earth sucks at him, like it’s reluctant to let him go. To stop him, or to claim him for itself?

He tells himself it’s just a waypoint. Just a place to pass through. Maybe the fog makes it look worse. Maybe they’re flanking something, circling. That’s what a brain is for, it manufactures excuses. But why send a company into a graveyard? Nothing about this makes sense.

His hands are going numb. He can’t feel the trigger, only the cold edge of the metal. The rifle doesn’t feel like protection. It feels like another mistake he hasn’t made yet. He wants to drop it. He wants to turn around. He wants to vanish into the mist and never be called by name again.

So he keeps walking. Because the others are walking. And no one knows what’s waiting ahead.

Because there’s nowhere else to go. Deserters don’t get forgiven, don’t just vanish. They get tracked. Labeled. Buried in shallow graves.

The Sharpshooter

The team had gathered briefly, speaking in short, restrained exchanges, quietly aware of the stakes. They had each, individually, chosen to align with the activists, not merely because they were weary of the slogans and the empty ideology of the ruling party, but because the thought of that party remaining in power had become intolerable. Now, facing the likelihood of violence, they focused on how to keep it from breaking loose. They considered carefully how to position themselves visibly but without threat, hoping their presence alone could serve as a quiet yet powerful deterrent. But, who would recognize them here, in this context? And what currency would that hold? The conversation had moved beyond ideological divisions or symbolic gestures; what mattered now was preventing tragedy, ensuring that when the day ended, no blood had been needlessly shed, if such an outcome still remained within their power to achieve.

And then the trucks were spotted coming up the road, and that ended the talk.

They left the town quietly. Not in retreat. Not with orders. Just a shared understanding, passed silently between them. They would not let the fight happen in front of shop windows or schoolchildren. They would not let blood settle on cobblestones that someone’s grandmother still swept each morning. So they walked out, toward the cemetery on the city’s edge.

There was no argument. No plan. Just the choice of ground. And the decision to make their stand on it.

Now he crouches behind stone, the cold biting through his knees. His pistol rests on his thigh. He knows what’s coming. Knows it in the way a trained body knows things before the mind confirms them. This is not new. This is not chaos. This is simply what follows.

They still call them a “team,” but it was never a team sport. No coordination. Only competition, against each other, against the world. They never set out to be revolutionaries. They are precise men, predominantly introverts, shaped by repetition and silence, honed into instruments of quiet performance. Some once wore gold medals, still displayed proudly in glass cases. Symbols of vicarious national pride. Tools of propaganda. Wrapped in flags. Paraded. Televised. Their medals fondled by calloused party leaders’ fingers.

Yet they are brothers, in a sense, countrymen, just like the soldiers they’re preparing to face. Raised on the same myths. Trained by the same hands. Now readying for fratricide in the fog, all for slogans no one believes, and a system that discarded them both. But even as the machine collapses, the gears keep spinning, grinding them down, and no one seems able to stop it.

He was taught to remain flawless under pressure, to breathe with intention, to let the rhythm of his heart guide the trigger. The training began when he was young, pre-dawn hours in cold rooms, whispering coaches, slow routines repeated until the pistol felt like a tendon. Imported weapons. Custom grips of exotic wood, sculpted to his hand. Ammunition without limit. It was his passion, his whole existence, and it would not have been possible without the state. If you wanted to do what you loved, you didn’t believe. You complied. You kept your thoughts to yourself and played along, because that was the price of participation. The competition to make the team was brutal. It was financed for glory, glory for the state. But it had meant something more to him.

It was a discipline not just of body, but of self-control. In a world of noise and slogans and clamor, it was silence that obeyed. Stillness that answered only to breath and nerve. It gave him purpose when nothing else made sense. It made him feel real. Made him feel clean.

His life appears to be about performance, but in truth, it has been almost entirely private, solitary, and obsessively internal. The moments on the podium are just the thinnest skin over years of repetition in empty rooms. What the world sees is the medal; what he lives is the silence. Preparing for a moment, a single competition.

Maybe, if left alone, he would have become a mathematician. He had the brain for it, the patience. The ability to disappear into patterns and emerge with something teased from immutable truth. But the state had tested and chosen his hands. And this is where it led.

He never thought of it as a weapon. It was a language he could speak fluently, when all other words failed. It was a piece of sporting equipment. He had never hunted. Never fantasized about killing. His life had been spent putting tiny holes in paper at great distances, performing a skill so precise, so rare, that of the billions alive, his true peers could fit in a single room.

He did it now because it was his nature. The focus. His obsession to be the best. To do otherwise would be wasteful of talent not all were born to. Chasing it had a price. But he could pay it, and never considered doing otherwise. Whether it was a rare gift or a cruel curse felt irrelevant.

But now, it seemed, he was being forced to choose violence. He did not know how to accommodate a new skill. He wasn’t violent. He was accurate.

It wasn’t really a skill, more a phenomenon. Something they measured with wires and electrodes, watching the space between heartbeats. Most shooters learned to fire between pulses. He could stretch that space, hold it, just long enough to land a cleaner shot. Later, they gave it a name: controlled cardiac interval extension. CCIC. He suspected the rest of the team resented him, not from envy, exactly, but because it turned a biological glitch into an unspoken standard. It wasn’t something you could train. It just happened. There aren’t many situations in a normal life where convincing your heart to play dead for a moment has any practical purpose, except, maybe, to steady a projectile tube while you punch holes in distant paper, for points, under lights, before flags.

His life looked like privilege from the outside. In some ways, it was. He traveled internationally for competitions. Two Olympics now. That alone set him apart. He heard how other athletes spoke. Saw how their countries worked. They weren’t evil, as he’d been told, just freer. Less afraid. With each trip, his eyes adjusted. He couldn’t unsee the cracks. But he said nothing. Not abroad. Not at home. Prison was not a hypothetical. It was what happened when you forgot how you fit into the system.

Then, one day, just before it all began, the team vanished. Not formally. Just gone. Seeping from the training facility like smoke.

Now they are here, in the cemetery at the edge of the city. Crouched behind stone, pistols clean and ready. Target pistols, small caliber, slow fire. Not built for war. But they don’t miss. They’ve been trained not to. And there is nowhere else left for that training to escape to. Trained and abandoned by the same state as the soldiers. Now preparing to kill each other over it. The dead must be horrified.

He thinks of the eyes of the girl on the bus. She used to sit across from him every morning that winter, wrapped in a coat too big for her shoulders, boots scuffed at the toes. She always read the same book, worn. “The Master and Margarita”, creased, the spine beginning to split. He remembers her hands, the way she turned each page, deliberately, gently. It would stir something in him, when he imagined those fingers brushing his cheek. It caused a tiny hitch in his breath that he made sure no one could see. He never let it rise to the surface. Once, she smiled at him. He wanted to say something, rather than just glow pink. Tried to rehearse it for the next ride home. All he managed was a nod. What could he say? “Do you want to see my trophies?” What would that even mean? It hit him then. Her name! He could’ve just asked her name.

Eventually, she stepped off the bus for the final time, and out of his life. He never saw her again. That was ten years ago. He still remembers the last page she was on, 327. He remembers everything. He wants to see those eyes again. To be seen by them again. Just… not here. Not like this.

He’d abandoned his opportunity to just evaporate into the population and just wait to see how things played out. But he’d made his choice already, before the town, before the trucks. Now, if he wanted out, he could try to surrender. But he won’t consider it. Not just because of what the secret police would do. That isn’t the only reason anymore.

He’d built some kind of shell, slowly. Precision, repetition, silence. Not armor. A cocoon. A way to stay untouched by the thing that trained him, used him, fed on his control. It worked, for a while. But they tore it open, forced him out, and made him choose. And now there was no crawling back in. What emerged wasn’t a butterfly. No colors. No gossamer wings. Just something black. Not shattered, but chipped away. Shaped, like obsidian, flaked to an edge beyond razor-sharp. A metamorphosis he never asked for.

He doesn’t know what he’s planning to fight against. Not really. He isn’t sure it matters. His heart wasn’t in it. But that didn’t matter now. Ethically, he saw no other choice. The only thing left to stop him was that untested heart. But perhaps, just for as long as he needed, he could pause that, too. Is he disengaging morality, or preserving it?

Or maybe he would just wound a few soldiers and, if not a limb, lop off a finger of this beast.

He glances at the name carved into the stone that shields him, hides him. Dead since 1924. Sixty-five years in the ground he stands on. He must have learned how to do it well by now, how to be dead. He wonders, if it comes to that, if the man below might train him how to be dead, be his mentor, the way his coaches once trained him to shoot. Would he forgive him for disturbing him? Resent his neediness? He’s likely grateful to have missed so many of this century’s bad ideas. Perhaps he and Mr. Marinescu could laugh together at the absurd notion that anyone ever “dies with honor.” If being dead is to be feared, Mr. Marinescu isn’t complaining. That, at least, is something. It would be better than what the secret police would do to him. And if he has any capacity for fear left in him, it’s only that he might not be exceptional at being dead.

Suddenly, a crack from a pistol, quiet, almost absurdly so. Like a branch snapping. Probably Radu’s Hammerli 160. A small-caliber target pistol, fired without fanfare. The answer comes from the fog: a rattling burst from an AK-47, sprayed wild and high. The soldiers can’t see them yet. Whoever it is fires blindly, but they feel some need to reply. The team is too far, too hidden. Their pistols produce no recoil. They carry little weight. Not built to kill, just to win medals. But they can kill. Perfectly, in the right hands. And there is no tolerance built into their construction for the sloppy imprecise hand of a frightened teenager.

A soldier, his countryman, just a boy, at the rear drops without a sound. The others move forward, thinking the civilians must not be able to hit the broadside of a barn. Another soft crack. Another straggler folds into the earth, just as unnoticed. Their ranks thin from the rear forward, the vanguard oblivious. No one has yet realized what’s begun. Or suspects how it might end.

It was never just his pulse he had to control. Today he must account for non-physical variables. He settles into natural point of aim, painting a sight picture in the air before him and letting the pistol fall into its outline. His breath stills, not because he’s aiming, but because his body already knows where the muzzle will land when the moment comes. He considers the wind, but there is virtually none. Mind first, body second, environment third, and then the act itself. So, he picks his target. Breathes. Counts heartbeats: one, two, three, four, five, He pauses his breath, his thoughts, his heartbeat. There is only the stillness. Then the click of the trigger… six, seven.

The Correspondent

It was beneath him. That’s what he told them, in no uncertain terms. They insisted it had a mythic tone, something urgent, something that demanded clarity, but he reminded them that myths were fantasies, comfort stories people told themselves to feel better about the world. He was a journalist. There were real events unfolding all around them. He would not lower himself to chase sensationalism. Full stop.

And yet, ever since he’d stepped off the bus in the city center, he hadn’t been able to learn anything definitive. The sky was low and colorless, the fog had returned with a kind of casual permanence, and the city looked as though it had been exhaled and forgotten. No one met him. He could locate no witnesses. He asked questions; the locals shrugged. They hadn’t seen a thing. He wasn’t buying it, not because he could prove otherwise, but because his instincts told him the silence was too clean.

Things had changed since “the event.” That much was obvious. The structure of authority, once rigid, even theatrical, had softened at the edges and then dissolved altogether. Commanders who once followed orders now quietly ignored them. No one said the regime had fallen, but no one acted like it still stood. One man told him no soldiers ever made it to the town. Another claimed there hadn’t been soldiers at all, just men in mismatched uniforms who came and went without saying a word. A boy whispered something about his uncle, an Olympic medalist sharpshooter, before his mother pulled him indoors. Someone else, older and impossibly dry, remarked that removing fresh bodies from a cemetery was unusual, they’re normally delivered, not collected. No one laughed.

Not talking had become the national sport, a survival skill as ingrained and reflexive as breathing. It could be televised like football. The omissions, the contradictions, the near-mechanical refusal to engage, these weren’t failures of memory or weaknesses of will. They were the architecture of self-preservation. And taken together, they left behind something unmistakable: not the facts of what had happened, but a void in the exact shape of a truth everyone recognized and no one would name.

He was finding only empty spaces. No one could say for certain whether those in power were truly gone, or simply hiding, waiting. Would there be vestiges that could still lash out? If the old order had collapsed, it had left behind a vacuum, and whatever filled that space would, by necessity, be of a similar shape. Nature abhors a vacuum, they say. And humans, being products of nature, abhor a vacuum of knowledge. When reality offers no explanation, they will invent one. And if it must be constructed from fragments, from guesswork, from fear, they will build it anyway. Humans excel at it. They take pride in it.

The cemetery was not cordoned off, not guarded, but there was no evidence of recent death, just the long-term residents. They weren’t talking either. He found no blood, no weapons, no names. Only silence. And a rumor that, rudely considering the setting, refused to die. Trucks had been there, either picking something up or dropping something off. That much he could still see, impressed in the soil.

From a payphone near the post office, he reached a spokesperson for what remained of the loyalist unit. The official line was that the company had been redeployed. No one would say where. The language was vague, the meaning thinner still. Fog gave way to shadow.

He saw men dressed like riot police, stationed at corners with nothing to contain. Clearly Securitat. He tried to smoke with them, the way bored men might, the way normal police sometimes would. But they didn’t speak. They didn’t blink. They stood unmoving, as if sedated, or simply awaiting instructions that would never come. It was becoming clear they were on the wrong side of history, whether they understood that yet or not. Another day or two and they’d be gone. But for now, they still weren’t safe to trifle with.

He managed to reach a member of the state Olympic team from his payphone encampment, someone who asked not to be named, now clearly keeping his distance. “Yes,” the man said, evenly. “Some sportsmen are going to be involved with the resistance. They are not unique in that.” He mentioned that two of the rugby team had been killed that week. “But this is real bullets. Not rugby.” The implication, don’t send rugby players to a gunfight, was not lost on him. The man admitted nothing. Denied less.

He confirmed only that the Olympic shooting team was at their compound. None had been killed, he said. The facility in Ghencea stood intact. They had been ordered to defend it by commanders who had since aligned themselves with the opposition, and all were doing so. It felt less like he was trying to inform, and more like he was trying to redirect. There was no official statement, no account of their involvement, no evidence of any confrontation, and yet…

He had no tangible facts to grasp, only fragments, all slick with contradiction. The usual fog of war, thickened with denial. But when you’re sent to report on what happened, you can’t file a story that says, “How the fuck should I know?”

He might have been rationalizing, overinterpreting, or shaping something more elegant than the truth ever was. But what he built was internally consistent, emotionally coherent, and structurally sound. It held together. And in a place where no one would say anything at all, that mattered.

Maybe he was full of shit. But he was tired. And he’d done the work. He’d respected the silence. In the end, what he’d built was harder to refute than to accept. That would have to be enough. He was ready to call it done. Ready to go home.

He connected the pieces no one would give him, and they settled into the only shape that made sense. If not the truth, then something that fit where the truth should have been. A hollow molded by absence. The outline of a story left behind after the real one had been buried and rotted away.

If it was a constructed truth, it was a well-constructed truth, measured, plausible, quiet. Maybe that was the best a journalist could offer when sent on a mission to harvest myth.

The picture that was forming looked improbable. But improbability had become the norm. It only sounded absurd if you imagined the army as capable. In truth, they were barely functional, young conscripts with minimal training, demoralized and misused. The Olympic team, on the other hand, was lavishly trained. Not for war, but for the glory of the state, for precision, for pressure. And that training had nowhere else to go. If it happened, it wouldn’t have been a battle. It would have been a bloodbath. And what remained of the state would bury it at all costs, not just the bodies, but the story. Not just the facts, but the shape of the truth. “Tragic” had lost its weight. It was everywhere, pinned to broadcasts, stapled to death. Worn smooth, like a coin passed too many times through too many hands.

On the bus out of town, he smoked and watched the country pass by out the window. He needed a headline. So he chose the only phrase that seemed to carry the right weight, as close to the truth as the world was ever going to get:

Government Troops Battle National Olympic Pistol Team in Cemetery; Military Annihilated.