The click was small. Barely audible. Like a twig snapping underfoot. But for Chris, it might as well have been a thunderclap. His breath caught, his weight froze, and the world shrank to the few inches between his heel and the metal disc buried beneath Georgian soil. A landmine. Real. Live. Waiting. His friends had gone ahead on the hiking trail — or rather, they had. Daniel and Alicia. Laughing. Holding hands when they thought he wasn’t looking. The betrayal hadn’t hit until hours later, when Daniel didn’t come back. Not for help. Not for Chris. Not even to watch.
At first, Chris thought it was just an accident. But then Alicia returned. Alone. Face pale. Eyes red. Her voice broke when she confessed — not the affair, but the truth. Daniel had left her. Said Chris was a problem that would solve itself. That he’d “already stepped out of the way.” Chris wanted to scream. To move. To collapse. But he couldn’t. One wrong shift, one misplaced ounce of weight, and he’d vanish in a red mist. He stood there, stranded on his own grave, as the hours bled away. No rescue. No sound but birds and the wind scraping through dry trees.
It wasn’t just the fear of death that haunted him. It was the stillness. The enforced silence. The realization that he had loved people who saw him as disposable. Alicia wept at his feet. Begged forgiveness. Said she never wanted this. But Chris’s eyes were cold now. Numb. Something had broken inside him that no mine could touch. And when a stranger appeared — a local, armed, grinning in a way that chilled Chris deeper than the mine — it became clear: there were worse things than dying. Especially when your body was the only thing keeping you safe.
The stranger circled them, laughed, and played cruel games. With Alicia. With fear. Chris was forced to watch, every nerve a prisoner. And in that moment, as day turned to dusk, he made a choice. Not to move. Not to scream. But to remember. Everything. Faces. Voices. Sins. And to survive. He would survive this mine. This cruelty. And if he lived, he would not forget. Forgiveness was off the table. Because sometimes, death isn’t justice. Sometimes, justice waits. It stands perfectly still, balanced on a razor’s edge, until the time is right to lift its foot.
