The Post Mortem

S

The war wasn’t glorious. It wasn’t heroic and it hadn’t been clean, in more ways than one. There had been blood and bones and shrapnel, to be sure, but there had also been dirty and misused morals. It was all blurred lines on the battlefield. When sitting on the boat, when putting on a uniform with shiny buttons and sharp creases, it had been easy and exciting. The comradeship as everyone united in fighting for honour had been uplifting and enthralling… The idea of murder didn’t even enter into it. But fighting and killing were two different things. A fight was when you and your mates got into a brawl at the local pub, and went home with black eyes and bruised knuckles. Killing was seeing people fall down dead, because you’d shot them.

The death itself wasn’t clean, either. Blood wasn’t like what people thought it was. It wasn’t like water. It was thick and heavy and tasted like the metal of bullets at the back of your throat. But the most important difference was that it didn’t seep into the ground to nourish new life, but instead stayed in clotted pools on the surface of the earth. The expanding puddles of blood, blooming out from beneath a soldier, would slowly cool and form a skin, almost black in colour. It was that dark.

They eyes stayed with you, too. Not the cliché of the emotionless unstaring eye (though that was true too) but the full extent of reality. The reality of dust caking onto the iris within minutes, as it bulged from the socket, white and flecked with red. There was something unnerving about grey eyes.

The worst was having to pick up bodies of the dead. No, the bodies of those still alive. The bodies of people you had fought alongside, who were your best friends, or might as well have been. A man shot by round upon round of machine gun fire didn’t stay intact, either. Bullets had the power to rip off limbs and tear open guts, spilling intestines. And then they’d be groaning as you tried to push their organs back into their body, hoping to God that you weren’t making them die any more dead than they already were. And when you’d try and keep the pieces together, because that was all that was left of them, you’d get gore under your nails that no amount of gnawing would get rid of. And the scent would cling to your skin, a constant reminder of how fragile people were, and how easily you could come undone. And it all stayed with you, forever.

It was easy to remember these things. But the unintentional post-mortem lessons about the human body weren’t the only things that stuck with him, no. He could remember the sounds and smells of smoke and whining bombs. He remembered the endless mud, and the men who couldn’t take their shoes off because the flesh would peel off with the leather, rotting. He could remember everything. He could remember it all. The nightmares would keep him awake at night, and sometimes he was afraid to close his eyes for what he would see.

But sometimes you had to take it one memory at a time.

S

AN. Written as an exercise in my Creative Writing class. Constructive crit appreciated.