‘Nam pizda,’ says Rat.

We’re fucked. He’s peeking at the sky through a gap in our pit’s entrance, which is camouflaged with trash and sod.

Nearby flows the Dnipro, father of you all, eternal, slow with heavy waters and clumps of ice, moving despite the dams submerged beneath the floodwaters’ cataracts. Overhead, the night shines with the full face of your mother the moon, and suspended in her glow is a drone, a medium-sized bomber with thermal vision.

One of yours.

One of yours, because when its black eye sees the white heat of Rat leaning out of your pit, instead of a grenade it drops an empty two-litre Coke bottle, wrapped in duct tape for some reason, and then, with a whine of its propellers, it tilts and flies back to where it came from, on the far bank of the great river. The bottle lands in the mud a few metres from our pit. Rat shakes his head, disgusted at the pilot’s sloppy work, then pauses for a moment, listening out for other, foreign drones.

The silence is broken only by the murmur of the great river and the distant thunder of incoming Russian artillery, and the even more distant rumble of yours, from the opposite bank, like a faraway storm.

‘That’s our arta working,’ says Rat, trying buck himself up.

‘Ours,’ you agree.

Work, that’s what this war amounts to now, the arta working while you two hang out in a pit and wait for their arta to go to work on you.

Rat slowly slips out of the pit, pushing aside the entrance camouflage, then crawls on the ground toward the bottle, moving both quickly and ponderously because of the mud, like a huge amphibian, dirty grey in faded MultiCam. He grabs the bottle and hurries back to the pit, a giant newt in a bronik and a helmet.

You turn off your little red headlamp, take out the folding knife your sister gave you before you left for your 42^nd birthday, though you weren’t celebrating your birthday, because by then you couldn’t celebrate your birthday, though you hadn’t yet gone to war, you were only driving around delivering humanitarka.

It’s a really good knife, you know it was pricey, you sharpen it often with a little ceramic whetstone, so now you have no trouble cutting the tape holding both halves of the bottle together. Inside are the contents of two American MRE military rations, removed from their usual multipack so they could fit inside the bottle along with a pack of cigarettes, a lighter and a little piece of paper with a handwritten note from your kombat: ‘Look after yourselves, boys.’ These words are written in Ukrainian. Because you never went to a Ukrainian school you can’t read Cyrillic handwriting, only print, but Rat can, because he did go to a Ukrainian school, and he reads the kombat’s disgustingly insolent words out to you.

Бережіть себе, хлопці. Look after yourselves. How can you look out for yourselves on the wrong side of the river?

‘Fuck him,’ you say.

You don’t know if the kombat wrote it out of stupidity or sarcasm, but you don’t like it at all.

‘Fuck ’im,’ agrees Rat.

Rat fishes around in the airdropped package.

‘No water,’ he finally says.

‘They’ll bring water too. Or else I’ll go to the river.’

‘You won’t come back from the river.’

‘Probably not.’

You both say nothing for a good while, knowing that what you’re saying nothing about is the situation you’ve found yourselves in, because it’s hard to say anything about it, but also hard to ignore it.

‘Nam pizda,’ says Rat again after a while, still staring at the contents of the airdrop, as if there was something unusual in it, as if amid the silver foil of the MRE packs he aimed to spot something that could give him at least a scrap of hope into which he could dig his claws and not let go.

There’s no hope in the bottle.

Translated by Sean Gasper Bye