I can't do it I told her. Trucks. Jeeps. Bodies. The deep crimson of blood on rough wool, of hair matted. I can't. I just can't.Over the yelling she shouted.
I just stared.
Her arm grabbed mine. I saw her mouth moving. Anger in her eyes. Trucks kept coming. Men running. Yelling. Shouting.
My knees were muddy. Cold. My hand red in him. And still. Trucks came. Bodies came. More yelling, came.
And I remember. A kite. I felt like a kite in winter. My arm a string. And Kate, that was her name. I remember her pulling me. Shouting. Pulling. And I wanted to fly, into the falling snow. Above the convoy of engines. Away from everything dull green. Of blood no longer red.
There were tents. And doctors. Flashes of silver. Cutting cloth. Opening flesh. Snow fell. Men ran with stretchers. Armbands dirty. Baggy eyes. Dirty hands. They ran on fumes of legs. And there were needles. Packets. Bandages. Yelling. Shouting. Whimpering. And eyes that leaked glassy muddy rivers over hollow cheeks.
Do your job. Do your job. I remember her saying that. I don't know if she said it more than once, but I heard it like an echo. I remember seeing my legs move, and my hands. And those words as more wounded arrived in this place without a smile, where Virgil had come. This place their mothers would never know. Their boy's last light. Three weeks from a telegram. Clean, crisp, direct as if giving dignity where there was just yelling and shouting and snow falling into the slush, muck and mire of misplaced blood.
So I did my job. And their blood mixed with his. And I cursed them all for dying, for making me die, for making me hate the world and everything in it.
19 comments:
Very Powerful! :)
Sue
Thanks Sue. :-)
no prob, Tree -- I'm really enjoying your writing :) Sue
Instinct. Response. Brought to the instant which immediately offends our sensibilities, we are driven to do one of two things - take flight or engage. Your character separates from self, you can visualize the splitting in this writing - separates from self in order to do what must be done, separates from the self's humanity, otherwise the shattering might come too soon, completely aware that once self has integrated with the soul again, it will shatter. Heart and mind might arrive later on to heal it, or rescue it, whether it's within, or through another, but in those moments, with blood on our hands, we suddenly become aware how fragile we are, how fragile this life is.
Trée, you are outstanding in conveying what walks most valiant about the human spirit, even while teetering at the edge of a fragility. You can't write of it like this, with this knowing, with these deep-veined impressions, unless it's contained in you. I look to you and in you, and see.
S., there is something inside of me. It is not nothing. Beyond that, like this chapter, a mystery. I don't say that to be coy. I say it because when I look within, all I see is pain, a bottomless swirling pain. I have been cursed with a sensitive nature. Even the dimmest of light is bright to my eye. And so I retreat in self-protection. I withdraw almost as a survival mechanism. And I look upon the wharf, as Keats did upon arriving in Italy, and make a not unlike observation: I see all manor of men, but none like me. I am alone in this way. And in this way, a chapter like this, from seemingly nowhere, appears and I take dictation. The writing occurs in just a finger of minutes. Revision is nil. And even now, as I read it, having written it this morning, I do not recognize it as my own. And yet, still, I know, within is more, that once purged, I will not know from where other than that dark place inside, where no light I know has reached.
Sigh, Trée, light needs the darkness in order to be light! One is nothing without the other! One cannot know Joy without first knowing its lover, companion - Pain!
There is a spirit that resides in me, a spirit that breaches my capacity for speech, it lives almost as a stranger in me. I come into the page just as you do, carrying everything I've ever been, have ever felt, have ever lived, dreamed, and I blink. And when I open my eyes, I open them to birth. I open them to the evidence of the stranger who flew into me, while I went to dark, and wrote for me, what was living and breathing inside me, when there.
Trée, my love, it's the light and dark of us, pain and joy of us. We don't exist as we are without them, we can't. The nature of life, of this world we inhabit, is to mate all its extremes, to its complementary form. It's the curved hip of a woman, perfected when it meets the arc of a man, and vice versa.
The light has reached you, Trée, even now, in the darkest of your days - draw back the curtains of your eyes, and let it in.
Then hold my hand and show me the way.
Ssssshhhh, I am...
*blushes* thank you so much for the comment.
I look forward to reading your work.
Welcome aboard Gray. Come swim in my soul. Life-vest optional. :-D
S.
Sigh
Wow, I could hear that story. Very intense.
There was something today. My daughter asked how it was that someone could grab your neck and make you pass out. My husband answered, presure on a nerve. I asked him if he ever had anyone do that to him and in my forming that question it came back to me, that it had happened to me, and I saw it happen, or what it did to me. I saw my mouth open up to the sky and white light of pain come from me everywhere, lightening from my mouth. That is how it felt. That is what I saw reading this, the involuntary flooding of body and soul of an energy that is unbeatable. (Oddly, our day involved kites, too. Just wrote a bit of that in for a window post, but that's another story.)
powerful
a quaking kind of powerful
Erin, always my pleasure to have your thoughts. Thank you. :-)
This sis passionate in the bitterness, and to use your own words, clean crisp and direct.
Mothers not knowing their 'boy's last light three week from telegram' sums up Life's cruelty in so few words!
Excellent writing!
Thanks Mona. I think too of parent and child and the gulf between them as island to mainland. Much, I suppose, as Mary's letter we saw, the one she never mailed.
Gray, my training in learning styles tells me you are an auditory learner, which if true, is rare since only 15% of the population learns best by hearing. I'm a visual learner and I tend to write as I see, image rich, so to see that you "heard" this chapter is very interesting to me. When I wrote it, I saw it. And Mary saw it, although I used a lot of yelling and shouting and such--still, to see, it was a seeing, not a hearing. You make me want to reread this one now, which I think I'll do. To see what you heard. :-D
How on earth did I miss this?
I have repeated that mantra, " do your job" to myself over and over again, not amidst the tragedy of war, but instead with one hurricane passed and another bearing down on us and as we drove in the storm of Rita to the air field for the militairy to evacuate our passengers, our patients, I kept on repeating to myself, through my fear of that storm, of the responsibility... " do your job".
Cat, tell me more about your job, this experience. You've got my attention.
Post a Comment