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There’s no shame in running when the wolf bites your heels
ONCE UPON A TIME a man died in the arms of battle, singing swiftly, bullets to his chest. Spinning through the flesh of his belly singing songs against his bones was the wolf and war, patient and grinning. His blood was spiked with gun powder and when he closed his eyes and rattled out his last breath his fellow men at arms looked to the sky and thought,
Oh, how desperate must a man be to show the world
He too can charge at death?
“I’m awake, its raining fire.” He sighed, opening his gummy eyes to see the purple sky above him. And all the world did not weep and it did not stir because war is such a terrible and wide-wet mouth that screams constantly into the future. One dead man dragged through the chaos is one pebble dropping to the bottom of the sea. “But, I’m awake!” He cried.
Awake indeed he was, for his fingers flexed like spider legs and the blood that oozed from his wounds was still hot and sticky against his palms. The brothers of the gun pulled him to the trenches and looked at his grey face and didn’t see his open eyes and clacking jaw and behind their skulls they wept for him.
Shells cracked and yawned wildly over the rims of the dug outs and the flare and lick of orange flame and putrid smoke seemed to curl into the shape of some wicked wolf biting at shoulders. They left their dead comrade and joined their country over ground and many would not return. “But I am awake, I can feel the soil between my fingers and I can smell the taint of hell in the air.”
Awake, awake, awake he was.
But awake in death he remained.
He stood and dusted down his stained kit and trod his heavy boots into the earth hoping to feel an answering grumble but instead he heard the whirl of bullets and the clink of them lodged against metal helmets. Choruses of screams raised his head and he peered levelly across the tundra of destruction and saw charred souls and desperate men limping back towards the veins of mud in which they lived like rats. Alas, alas, so few returned, half shivering mad men from gases and cracked skulls.
“You’re dead.” said a creature, stooped and aged to the bone. Death, he supposed, looking for its jutting skull and empty eyes but finding only black cloth. He was from a humble lineage and taught the cold love of God as a boy, though he found no comfort at the thought of him. He didn’t see God in the jaws of war, not in the eyes of the Jerry boys he killed nor in the violent coils of fire in the sky and not now, seemingly in death.
“I’m awake,” He said slowly, watching destruction unfurl in front of his eyes.
“Dead.” The creature hummed tonelessly, pointed out past the trenches, where the gloom of night pressed back hungrily, a dog wilder than the wolf of war, natural and blacker than soot. “Take the road backwards and you’ll fall to your rest.”
He looked out towards the fields and saw a winding grey road that was not there before. It was lit with lanterns, candles flickering like hungry tongues, arched up towards the sky. He turned back to Death and sighed.
He was no hero. “I have a little girl at home. What will my wife do?”
“Live, I suspect.”
Too cruel, too cruel was the world of war. Too cruel indeed.
“I didn’t even get over the ridge.”
“To teeter over the ribs of war and not jump into the heart is something of a gift, young man.”
He turned towards the road and listen to the howl behind him, dirty great plumes of smoke and fire and cries from cat and mouse. He thought
Oh, how desperate are we men,
Biting at the heels of God?
On the road he met a man with one leg and a hip flask full of whiskey. In return for his help, arm slung over his shoulders as they both tottered up the endless path to death, he let him drink like a lamb suckling for milk. The warmth of a good drop did wonders to his aching belly and the sounds of war was long behind him, though in the dark curtains draped either side he could see other souls, grey and stumbling, limping towards the end. He wondered if each had their own road lit up with lanterns.
“You awake?” He asked and the man grunted against his hip.
“Awake, awake, I have forgotten what that feels like, lad.”
“Been on this road long?”
Please say no, please say no, please say no.
“Oh ay, since the beginning of time.”
His heart crunched and he stared ahead of them, whiskey in one hand, arm around the lame man, helping him ever forwards. Awake, awake, how could this happen when he was awake? The light was too dim and there was no echoing voice asking him of his sins. He’d been fed lies, though he knew what lies tasted likes even as a boy, but it still sent bitter pangs through his belly. There was no God and there was no Heaven and he was fighting for a country floating on a sea of lies.
“Will we ever reach the end?” He asked, mostly to himself and mostly to a God he knew was not there. And the man said
“This road lasts forever, son.
Heaven is waiting for better things to come.”
an:
found this in one of my journals from last year. i like it.
btw, america, congrats on being amazing. i stayed up til 6am watching the results and obama's speech.
love.
