Malarkey finds a house number in the rubble of war, he starts a running joke, you thought it was stupid at first but then it became real. Too real.
Malarkey had found the number by the foot of a door, one hell of a thing.
It might have been Holland. It might have been Belgium.
By then, every place had started sharing the same bones: crumbling brick, roof beams split open, lace curtains breathing through shattered windows, a table still set for people who had run or died or learned not to come back.
The number had been nailed beside a door that no longer existed. And a house that was no longer a home.
White porcelain. Blue figures. Cracked through the middle.
Malarkey pried it loose with the careful seriousness of a man stealing crown jewels.
You watched him do it from the other side of the ruined entryway, rifle loose in your hands, shoulders aching from the march and the cold and the weight of trying to stay funny around men who were funnier than grief had any right to be.
You looked around once, habit.
Always watching his back.
You walked over and bent next to him, your cheek brushed against his helmet.
“Look at that,” Malarkey said, turning around with the little plate held between two dirty fingers. “We got ourselves a place.”
As soon as he turned the joke whittled, his eyes snagged yours, and it was a curious little look you couldn't decipher, so you spoke instead.
"Yeah?" you smirked looking down at the number.
Skip immediately looked up.
“No roof, no windows, but hell, Don, it’s spacious.”
Penkala, sitting on a busted wall and picking plaster dust from his sleeve, added, “Rent’s murder.”
You took it from Malarkey’s hand and turned it over. His rough fingers catching your pinkie, you hesitated but he dropped his hand.
One bent screw still clung to the back like it had not been informed the house was gone.
“That’s not a house,” you said. clicking your tongue. “That’s a number.”
Not smug. Not smooth. Malarkey never looked smooth. He looked pleased with himself in the goofy, open way he got when he knew he had found something stupid enough for Skip and Penkala to carry for weeks.
“Not with that attitude.”
That was the beginning of it.
A stupid little plate from a dead house.
And Malarkey, who had decided it was yours.
The first official 31 was a foxhole with water in the bottom and a view of absolutely nothing.
Skip slid into it, looked around like he was inspecting a hotel room, and said, “Welcome to 31.”
Penkala squatted beside him and nodded. “Little damp. Charming though.”
Malarkey held up the number. “We’re renovating.”
You laughed before you could stop yourself, a real laugh that surprised you on the way out. Malarkey looked over, quick, like he had heard something better than the joke.
That was the first thing you started noticing about him.
He always looked up when you laughed.
Not long. Not enough for anyone to catch him. But there it was, a little flick of his eyes, that soft pull at the corner of his mouth like he had done something right and was trying not to be too proud of it.
After that, 31 followed you.
A busted barn became 31’s gone rural.
You rememeber standing at the threshold, barking at the others to catch up.
Hell you remember when Malark caught your sleeve and tugged you in.
A stolen corner in a billet with three blankets and a smell nobody wanted to identify became Company moved us uptown.
Guarnere started pointing out that they were insane. Luz tried to steal the number but Malarkey snatched it back, said you we're the owner and that's stealing property.
A shell crater with half a wagon wheel in it became 31’s got a driveway now.
A ditch became 31’s summer property.
Skip grabbing a fistful of wildflowers and sprinkling it on you and Malarkey who grabbed grass and tossed it towards Skip but fell on Penkala instead who got some in his mouth spluttering, "What the hell!"
A room with only one wall left became open floor plan.
If it had mud, you had a mortgage. If it had rats, you had tenants. If it had a ceiling, Skip declared you were getting soft.
Malarkey would not let the bit die if somebody had handed him a shovel.
“Careful with the front door,” he’d say, crawling into a hole in the ground.
“There is no front door,” you’d answer.
Malarkey carried the number in his pack, wrapped in a sock with a hole in the heel. He claimed it was for protection. Skip said wrapping real estate in footwear was disrespectful. Penkala said the property should be grateful for insulation.
You pretended not to care.
But you started looking for it.
On marches, you’d catch the corner of the porcelain plate when Malarkey shifted his pack. In billets, you’d see him set it against a wall before he sat down, as if the number had to face outward to count. Once, during a lull, he cleaned mud from the blue paint with the edge of his thumbnail, gentle as anything.
That was another thing you noticed.
Malarkey’s hands never stayed still after a fight.
He joked first. Always. He came out of fire with his mouth moving, tripping over some crack meant to make Skip snort or Penkala roll his eyes. But once the noise died, once men stopped counting heads out loud, his fingers went searching for something to do.
Rubbing dirt off his rifle sight.
Folding and refolding a scrap of paper.
Turning 31 over in his palm.
Like if his hands stopped moving, the war might catch up to him.
You noticed that before you noticed the rest.
The way his grin came quickest when things were worst.
The way he listened for Skip’s voice before relaxing.
The way he and Penkala could argue over nothing with the seriousness of diplomats while shells landed somewhere close enough to make the ground remember.
The way Malarkey looked younger when he was tired.
The way he looked at you when he thought you were busy looking at anything else.
Once billeted in a town, you found him trying to prop the plate on a half fallen off shelf.
“You hanging a sign?” you asked.
He glanced down at you from a broken crate. “People oughta know where they are.”
“Yeah, but now we’re in a classy building.”
Skip, from the ground, lifted one hand. “Put it higher. Makes the place look taller.”
Penkala opened one eye. “We got vaulted ceilings.”
“There’s a hole in the roof,” you said.
Malarkey looked up through it. Snow or ash drifted down through the dark.
Then you both laughed, but his laugh changed halfway through. Softer. Almost private.
You felt it then, quick and inconvenient under your ribs.
Something you did not have time for.
So you looked away first.
By Bastogne, the joke should have died.
A lot of things should have.
The snow swallowed sound, swallowed color, swallowed the parts of men that had made them easy to recognize. Everybody looked the same under white frost and gray wool. Everybody moved slower. Everybody’s mouth cracked. Everybody’s eyes got older.
Even 31 looked different in Bastogne.
Malarkey had tucked it inside his jacket once his pack froze too stiff to open without swearing. The little porcelain plate sat against his chest, absurd and useless and important for no reason anyone could afford to explain.
Your foxhole was a mean little scrape in the earth, too narrow for comfort Skip and Penkala were wedged in another hole opposite you, shoulders bumping, rifles close, helmets low. Snow had gathered along the rim like the whole forest was trying to bury you politely.
You sat beside Malarkey with your knees drawn up, numb from the hips down.
He had been quiet too long.
That was how you knew he was cold in a way that scared him.
Not because he complained. Malarkey would complain about food, officers, socks, holes, marches, and Skip’s breath like a man born with a constitutional right to object. But real fear made him quieter. It put his humor somewhere deeper, somewhere he had to dig for it.
You leaned into him just enough for your sleeves to touch.
“You stealing body heat?”
“At least you’re honest.”
“Not much.” His breath fogged white. “But 31’s got central heating.”
Skip lifted his head from across the hole. “No it doesn’t.”
Penkala’s teeth clicked once before he answered. “Management’s been informed.”
You reached inside Malarkey’s jacket without warning.
“That’s easy for you to say. You got very cold hands.”
You found the plate tucked in the inner fold and pulled it free like a magician producing proof of bad decisions.
The 31 caught what little moonlight made it through the trees.
You held it up between you, cracked porcelain and blue numbers and all, and burst out laughing.
Cackling, really, because the whole idea of it, a house number in a frozen foxhole in Bastogne, four idiots pretending they had property rights in hell ,was so stupid it looped around into holy.
“Gentlemen,” you announced, waving it toward Skip and Penkala, “welcome home.”
Skip’s face split into a grin.
“Oh, thank God. I was worried we were lost.”
Penkala squinted at the plate. “Place has gone downhill.”
“Excuse you,” Malarkey said, taking it from you and wiping snow off the edge with his thumb. “This is prime Ardennes real estate.”
“Prime?” Skip said. “I can’t feel my ass.”
“That’s because you’re sittin’ in the foyer,” Malarkey told him.
Penkala nodded solemnly. “Common mistake.”
You laughed again, and Malarkey looked at you.
That quick upward glance. That pleased little look he tried to hide by fussing with the number. His thumb rubbed over the crack in the porcelain, slow and careful.
The foxhole seemed smaller suddenly.
Skip and Penkala kept going, because of course they did.
“We got a kitchen?” Skip asked.
“Yeah,” Penkala said. “It’s the part where we imagine food.”
“Dining room’s over there,” Malarkey said, pointing at a mound of snow. “Dress code required.”
You looked down at your filthy jacket. “Am I underdressed?”
Malarkey’s eyes moved over your face.
Mud on your cheek. Frost on your lashes. Lips chapped from cold. Nothing worth looking at, not really. Nothing soft left in any of you.
But he looked like he had forgotten the punchline.
“No,” he said, quieter than the joke needed. “You’re all right.”
Skip stopped talking for half a breath.
Penkala, mercifully or cruelly, looked away with the expression of a man pretending he had gone blind for the public good.
You felt your face warm despite the cold.
Malarkey noticed that too.
He cleared his throat and immediately ruined it.
“Wouldn’t pass inspection, but who the hell would?”
He rocked into the frozen wall, grinning now, and held the number protectively against his chest.
“Careful with the house.”
“That’s not a house,” you said, but softer this time.
Malarkey looked at you across the tiny space between your sleeves.
“Not with that attitude,” he said again.
It should have been nothing.
A reused joke. A cracked number. Skip snickering into his glove. Penkala muttering something about rent control. Trees creaking overhead. Artillery grumbling far enough away to pretend it might stay there.
But you looked at Malarkey, at his red nose, tired eyes, the grin he kept offering the world like a dare, the porcelain number pressed against his jacket over his heart and something inside you gave up fighting.
Because 31 had never been a place.
It was Malarkey’s hands cleaning mud off a broken thing.
It was his voice making a foxhole sound less like a grave.
It was Skip laughing. Penkala groaning. Your own shoulder against Malarkey’s in the snow.
It was the stupid, impossible little home you carried from ruin to ruin because Malarkey had found a number and decided the war did not get to have everything.
He caught you looking again.
You smiled, helpless and cold and gone.
Malarkey’s mouth twitched.
“That’s a very specific nothing.”
Skip groaned. “Oh, for crying out loud.”
Penkala pulled his helmet lower. “Wake me when they get married or when the roof comes in.”
“There’s no roof,” you said.
And when night had come, the fires putout, the food that tasted like shit had gone, you settled next to Malark.
Your knee bumping his, he looked over at you.
That night, 31 moved again.
Just from Malarkey’s jacket to the wall of your foxhole, where he had wedged it between two roots and a clump of frozen dirt like a man hanging a proper address beside a front door.
There was only the dark, the snow, the smell of damp wool, and Malarkey lying too close beside you because the foxhole had been dug by men who apparently believed shoulders were optional.
You stared at the little porcelain number until your chest started to shake.
“You’re shaking the whole damn property.”
You pressed your glove hard against your mouth, trying to swallow the laugh before it got you both yelled at or killed. Across the line, somebody coughed. Somewhere beyond the trees, artillery rolled low and mean, like thunder that had learned everybody’s names.
Malarkey reached up and tapped the sign once.
He turned his face into his sleeve, shoulders shaking now too, both of you trying to make no sound and failing in small, helpless bursts. The foxhole was freezing. Your toes were numb. There was death packed into every acre of forest around you.
And still, Malarkey had hung up a house number.
Still, you were laughing.
“Don,” you whispered, breathless, “that is the stupidest thing you’ve ever done.”
His grin flashed faintly in the dark. “Top five, maybe.”
“Property ownership’s a big step.”
“You stole it off a dead house.”
“Homeowner,” he corrected.
You ducked your head before another laugh could escape, and he ducked his too, both of you folding toward the same small pocket of dark between your collars and helmets.
When you lifted your eyes, his were already there.
Not all at once. It just faded out of both of you, leaving the cold behind, and the silence, and that awful knowledge that morning was never guaranteed. His face was close enough that you could see the frost gathered on his lashes. Close enough to see his smile soften into something he could not joke his way around.
For once, Malarkey did not look away.
“You know,” he whispered, “if we ever get a roof, hell if we get the damn house, y'know a real one.."
He trailed off waiting for you to reject the whole fool idea of it but your heart had raced, did something stupid.
Your mouth twitched. “Yeah?"
“Yeah.” His eyes dropped, just once, to your mouth. “With that attitude, yeah.”
The ache of it hit you then.
Not like fear. Not like shellfire.
Softer, and somehow worse.
You looked past him at the little cracked 31 in the dirt wall, barely visible in the dark, absurd and brave and doomed as anything else men carried through war.
Then you looked back at him.
“If we move again, if we're sepearted…”
His expression changed before you finished. Like he understood the joke, and the part under it. Like he heard the thing you were too afraid to say plainly.
“I go where you go.” he said.
It was not a promise. Not exactly.
Promises were too clean for Bastogne.
You leaned in first, or maybe he did. It was hard to tell in a foxhole that small, in a war that had been pushing you toward him for weeks with dirty hands.
The kiss was careful for half a second, startled and quiet, as if both of you were waiting for the other to pull away.
Then his gloved hand found the front of your jacket, not pulling, just holding on, and your fingers curled against his sleeve.
And for one snow-choked minute, before the forest remembered you, before the war came looking again, 31 was real.
Because it stopped being about a house or a number.
You looked at Malarkey, who's mouth had gone soft from the kiss, from laughter and something that hurts sweet.
