War!
Written: 3/12/2018, by S. Sparrow
A nurse leaves the operating room to obtain a much needed item that she never found, because, when she walked out of the room, a bullet had wasted no time and created two parallel holes in her neck, which began to drain itself of blood. Trying to scream, but unable to find her voice, she slumps against the door and uses her two hands to plug the two holes, which causes blood to spill between her fingers. Weak, she is unable to keep her balance and falls into the dirt, the back of her head first, shortly followed by her back, while her legs rest there, already grounded. Lying in the dirt, she is able to use her legs to repeatedly kick the door, causing another nurse to walk out, only for the sniper to make up for his previous miss by boring a bullet into the new nurse’s skull. Writhing on the ground, the first nurse decides that the sniper is keeping her alive as a means of luring more people into his field of vision, so she decides to relax and wait for death. Coldness greets her right leg, she tries to look up, and she sees blood pooling towards her, and she vainly attempts to keep her legs out of the pool, to die with dignity.
A butcher’s boy meets a middle school math teacher in an open field, they both exchange greetings from their guns as they rush towards each other, but neither is looking down the barrel, bullets sink into dirt and wood, and both hope that the other would be intimidated and flee, so as to avoid combat. The boy is lucky enough to get a round into the teacher’s knee, dropping him, but his magazine is empty while the teacher’s still has enough rounds to celebrate a new year. His one shot, point blank, is enough to mangle the boy’s intestines, and the boy responds by mashing the side of the teacher’s head with the butt of his gun. Both dropping, they begin to crawl over each other, trying to grab each other’s knife, due to convenience. The teacher stick’s a finger into the wound of the boy who never had a chance to achieve anything more than being born into a butcher’s family, and the boy winces in pain, causing him to grab the teacher with every limb, causing the teachers arm to be stuck, his finger unable to leave the moist little hole that it had previously created by squeezing a trigger. Eventually, the boy fingers find the teacher’s knife, and uses it the way his father taught him, wildly, brutally, focused on severing, not stopping, so the teacher screams as the boy hacks an arm loose, a desperate and confused attempt to remove the finger from the wound. A mountain climber, a baker, and a coal miner stumble onto the scene, free the teacher, and send two bullets through each of the boy’s eyes.
An athlete with promise finds their hands chained to a metal bar that lies, waiting, above his head, his feet try to tap the floor, just to give his arms at least a second of relief. When a toe manages to touch, he is once again hit in the back by some flat, blunt object. It hurts like hell, and he worries that the lack of actual damage will allow them to keep beating him, but he also isn’t sure why they’re beating him, or who is beating him. Everyone speaks in what he assumes is the language of the enemy, its foreign to him, and that’s proof enough. It is unclear if they’re trying to ask him questions while they use force to make him sway, to make his cuffs jingle against the bar, to replace any natural coloring on his back with an artificial array of browns, yellows, and purples, with the occasional red. A car salesman comes into the room with a car battery and wires, and the athlete wonders if this will make him a hero.
A sculptor wonders through a forest, hoping that he can exit the forest, hoping that he’ll be able to find some sign of his people that will allow him to return to safety. Traveling at night has become the norm for him, strange men have appeared in the woods, driving their wrongly colored jeeps, better armed than he, especially since he was only armed with a 9mm pistol that was sparsely loaded, since he had to rely on it to provide him with food. The previous night involved him sinking three bullets to get one rabbit, which he ate raw, which he split open with his knife and dug into with his teeth, like a dog going at a bag of chips. Fires weren’t worth the smoke, gunfire was safe when the mortars crash around him. Sometimes he studies the road, trying to figure out if the jeeps were heading towards their own space, or are going away from their own space. Which direction had he come from? When he had first fled into the woods, when he saw the journalist get a grenade in her stomach, a perfect throw that had caused her insides to exit through her backside. He had seen the lumberjack’s brains, the severed hand of the “next Hemingway”, the crater that, only moments before, was a patch of grass where the fisherman, the salesman, and the high school class president stood. So he went into the woods, hoping to prevent a similar example being made of him. Sometimes he would fantasize about leaving the woods, only to hear that the violence was over, but he knew such fantasies were dangerous.
A delivery boy sits in the hot safety that the tank provides, fantasizing about another delivery boy, just like him, but the race of the enemy, sitting in some other tank, thinking about him.
A doctor listens to a construction worker explain his “first screw”, while waiting for his nurse to prepare the morphine. He was never one to stand around and soak in recollections of rape, but the man had a decorated chest, and he had earned the privilege of his last words being heard. “Girls back home, damn, that’s how you make women, not like here, not like here. Girls don’t fight here, no sir, they just stare at you with those doll eyes as they sink into wherever it is inside of them that they go to. I’d say that the soul leaves their body, but they don’t have souls, no way, not just cause of how strange their ways are, but because they don’t fight back. That’s what”, pausing to spit blood into a nearby dish, continuing with shining red lips and teeth, “what makes our girls so special, they fight. They’re pure as they come, and they wont let big beasts like me take them over so easily. Why, that’s how you can tell that a girl has value, if she fights or not, and it doesn’t matter if she screws, it matters if she doesn’t want to, that’s how you can evaluate purity. I remember”, a genuine, sunshine smile beaming across his face as the doctor waits, “the first girl that I had had managed to fuck up my back with a razor that she kept with her, who knows why, and I remember”, laughing that hollow, rattling laugh, “I stood up, put my hands on my back, and kicked the shit out of her. Oh boy, she was so fucked up that, by the time I finished, I was worried that I accidentally put her face down in, well she was bleeding badly, and I didn’t want her to drown, you can’t do that to those kinds of girls.” The nurse approached with a syringe in hand. A barber had to explain to the eagle scout that his last friend, a shoe salesman, had his body juiced by a collapsing building, and the one before that, a gambler, was currently dead or in some camp, so he wasn’t exactly in the market for having friends. Yet, the two of them were the only ones holding down the post, and the scout was determined to befriend the barber, since it was the only minor achievement available. After several days, the eagle scout had successfully been burned alive, had desperately tried to escape the flames that clung to him, had struggled as his lungs filled with smoke, as the post burned around him. So, then, the barber chose not to explain himself to the mall cop, who assumed that the barber was just a quiet type, making them the type of friends that didn’t need to talk to be close, whose company was enough. After a week of silence, the mall cop mentioned his idea of their relationship to the barber, who was immediately angry, causing him to stew in silence, leaving the mall cop, a week later, to still think that they were friends while the machete hacked and hacked, hoping to replace a segment of neck with air. The barber then ended up with the dry cleaner, who didn’t give a shit about the barber, who only wanted to go home. Naturally, the barber liked this cold companion, and eventually opened up to him, unsolicited and intoxicated, about his life before the violence, something he had never told his revolving cast of friends. The dry cleaner hardly listened, but when the barber stated his past profession, the companion had to ask why he became a soldier, instead of a barber, the barber could only make some vague statement about honor, one repeated enough times, to himself, for it to lose any sense of meaning.
A proud grandson finds himself strapped to a board, fabric over his face, water pouring over him for what feels like eternity, an unending lifetime of drowning. The water stops, he tries to catch his breath, but more comes, he body tries to spasm, is desperate to escape, but the restraints are good at what they do. Another breath, another pouring, another breath, and so on, until he has trouble remembering how he got there, what his life was like before the airless hell he is subjected to, and the only memory he can grab a hold of is the moment when he told his grandfather, a decorated veteran, that he had signed up to do his duty, and the way that his grandfather cackled at him.
A truck driver sits in the hot safety that the tank provides, fantasizing about another truck driver, just like him, but the race of the enemy, sitting in some other tank, thinking about him.
A historian and a street youth comb the fresh rubble of a former, thriving community. “Go through and salvage what you can, get weapons, bullets, whatever you think is valuable.” The youth digs through one spot, finds the corpse of a crossing guard, wearing the outfit of the enemy, and the historian says, “Don’t touch him, now look for something else.” When the youth scrambles away, the poet moves to the ex-person and places an IED under it. After he is commanded to move twice, the youth understands his purpose, and starts to pocket what really interests him, a burned photograph of a woman that only has her legs and slit left, an ivory comb, a small figurine that represents some folklore figure, either benevolent or a trickster, and, of course, bullets. An addict shoots that black, vinegar smelling, crap into his arm, and is able to lie back and feel good. He was worried that the violence would take away from his favored activity, especially since he was in a foreign country, but then he learned that foreigners get high too. The first time he copped, he was told that a lot of people like him usually start using to avoid their problems, to relax their consciouses, but he didn’t believe it, he was a killer with killers killing killers, what problems were there? Back home he had to worry about making it day by day, but now death is assured, so he didn’t know what there was to worry about. Death isn’t scary if you feel good when it happens, he reasoned, so he was always high. He liked to say that he had track marks for every friend that he lost, but he only said it to himself, he had nobody to say it to. He was pleased that he ended up in a beautiful country, he liked to stare at the country side. Sometimes he forgot about the violence, and that would stress him out, because it made him feel bad for being an addict.
“They got me in the stomach, didn’t they?” “Its not that bad, its fine.” “Its never fine if its the stomach, I don’t, I’m not going to make it with this one.” “We’ll be back to base soon, the doctor will-” “Oh, that fucker had his brains blown out in a whorehouse.” “What?” “The day after you left, he goes into town and gets blown twice.” “So who is the current doctor?” “What does it matter, I’m as good as-” “Fuck, okay, don’t worry, I wont drop you again.” “Fucking-” “I wont do it again, I promise.” “Look here, see this, where is it, oh, oh can you-” “Do you need me to-” “Yeah, get this button open for me, my fingers can’t get a grip, they keep slipping-” “Don’t worry, I have it-” “In the end I can’t, can’t even open a damn pocket. Okay, now reach inside, get out the photograph that’s in there.” “Here.” “No, don’t give it to me, its not for me, I want you to take it.” “Why, who is this?” “She was my steady back home, now she’s yours.” “What?” “I’m dying here, I’m going to die looking up at this fucking sky. What kind of sky is this anyways? Not like the one I grew up with, its all wrong, its too bright, its-” “You’re going to make it, we aren’t far-” “But my, fuck, my fucking, I’m ripped open, I’m cold, I need you to stop lying and listen to me. You’re a good man, I can tell that by the way that you won’t be honest to me. I know that I’m probably worse than I think I am, especially since, eh, especially since you keep looking at me that way. I can see the shock behind your eyes. Now, since your a good man, I know you’ll survive the war, and when you do I’ll need you to marry my girl. I want you to go, to, to, turn the picture over, there’s an address.” “I have to carry you, let’s just focus on getting-” “I want to say this before the pain successfully silences me, you have to listen. I need you to go to that address, explain you story, and I need you to put a good fuck into her. I need you to be her man, because I can’t guarantee that she’ll pick right. She picked me the first time and now you need to go there and fuck her brains out so that she’ll appreciate you.” “Look-” “And I’ll be watching on the other side-” “We’re almost-” “I’ll want to see you inside of her-” “I can see the gate, its-” “I just want to see her have an orgasm, I never got to see that before.” “I’m going to put you down now.” “You need to treat her right.”
A tailor sprints across a field, pushing his body to its limits, willing to break something if that means that he can keep running, if he can keep the jeep behind it. He ran over the hill knowing that there would be a forest on the other side, knowing that he could escape into there, where the murderers wouldn’t follow due to a lack of ammo, one that was made clear by their lack of gunfire, their resignation to using the car as a weapon. However, when he was over the hill, the tailor saw that craters had claimed land that had previously belonged to the forest, that he still had a long ways to go. He also discovered that the jeep, like him, had an easier time going downhill than uphill, and he decided, too late, to jump out of its way, into the safety of the mortar’s kiss, but his legs were ground under the tires of the jeep, which, after passing him, tried to circle around, and drive up the hill at him, but the driver was too bloodthirsty, and his recklessness caused him to crash into a crater. Jeep on its side, the tailor tried to crawl, but his legs screamed at him as he dragged them across the rocks and dirt, so he started to lie there, hoping that the other men were dead, that help would come. Out of a demolition ditch came one man, bleeding from an ear, but generally healthy, and the man, a carnival worker, walked uphill towards the tailor, who caused the car to flip by his pathetic will to live, who was now throwing stones at the carny, stones that were to weakly thrown to be a threat, stones that meekly rolled down the dirt after a seconds freedom from the surface. At least one of these stones was able to get the carnival worker’s nose to match his ear, and, in response, the carny’s knife removed any sense of humanity, lips, nose, ears, hair, teeth, tongue, eyes, skin, from the tailor’s face.
A washed up news anchor sits in the hot safety that the tank provides, fantasizing about another washed up nobody, just like him, but the race of the enemy, sitting in some other tank, thinking about him.
Two fathers share a cell, neither is from the same place, neither speaks with the same sounds. Eventually, conditions make them desperate to form a small human connection, small enough to not bring pain, so, every night, they spoon each other, not knowing that they have much more in common than a situation.
A shepherd returns to his home after several days, after the birds signal to him that all life, good or bad, is no longer present. When the wreckage is finally in his field of vision, he doesn’t cry, he is shocked by how little he feels like crying, even more so than the destruction shocks him. When he was on his own, he had pictured his home as being much worse, he had pictured blood and gore everywhere, murdered sheep, disemboweled children, babies that had been divided by bayonets, beheaded women that had blood coming out of their privates, but there was none of that, it was mostly just rubble. As he stood on top of what he assumed was the school, although it could easily be ten other buildings, due to a lack of variation in architecture, he surveyed the scene and saw nothing but rubble, ash, and dirt that had been flung around. For a minute, he wondered if he was really gone for a couple days, or if he had been gone for a lot longer, it seemed like the violence had not been around for some time, but the birds still watched as he watched, so he knew that it had to be fresh. When he was finally able to accept that, yes, this mess was in fact the place where he was born and raised, where his father lived, and his father before, and his father before, and so on. He started to think about moving on, about where he’d have to move to, but he ignored the thought, because he still had to find a way to eat, to get water, to survive, and he wasn’t sure if the violence would return, and he wasn’t sure of where the violence had already struck. Closing his eyes, he thought of himself as being in the eye of the storm. Days ago he’d been in the storm of artillery fire, gunfire, mutilation and misery, but, now, it was peaceful. Opening his eyes and looking up, he felt that the way the birds circled only cemented this imagery, felt that he as truly safe, even if only for a day or two. Hunger was finally able to move him to action, and he started to wonder around the town to find something to eat, something to fill his stomach before the next vacancy. He knew where the bakery, the grocery store, and the butcher’s store were, but not with the town like this, he didn’t know which buildings to search, they were all the same to him. Eventually, making his way over the warm stone, he saw a figure, a body. It was clear that they were dead, but he knew that he knew them, they were a neighbor, whoever they were, and he had to at least bury them, he left his town to burn, so he had to at least try to make things right. However, when he went to lift the corpse, he was suddenly blinded, deafened and knocked back. His arms were in more pain than he thought possible, and he wildly tried to rub his eyes in a desperate attempt to see, but he couldn’t feel his face at all. He tried to get up, but he could not, he just kept slipping, and when his sight returned to him, he saw his knees sliding around in blood, his blood, that was pouring from the stumps of his arms. The birds circled overhead.