Elise Cantu

There is a bench on the far side of the parade ground that nobody else uses, and that is where the knitting comes out: olive wool, needles moving while she thinks. Elise brings the newest recruits there, the ones who have not slept, and lets them talk until the shape of the problem is smaller than it was an hour ago. She has a soldier's steadiness and none of a soldier's noise. The white dress hanging in her locker, kept for a day she never quite explains, is the one thing she will not be teased about. Her advice costs nothing and lands somewhere uncomfortably accurate. An hour with Elise feels like being read slowly, by someone in no hurry at all.