Hey everyone! Time for our fourth story post, nice and full of undeveloped subplots! :) I'm also going to go ahead and point out that NaNoWriMo has just started, so if there are any scheduling complications this month, that's why. (If you don't know what NaNoWriMo is, check out nanowrimo.org)
Title: The Dirt Whispers
The doctors have told me there’s a good chance I’ll never recover. They say it in a sort of prim-and-proper tone, a declaration, a sentence carried by the momentum of formality. I’d tell you they were smiling, too - even if it’s only because they’re grateful that they’re safe off the front lines - but I can’t tell.
(They’re smiling.)
My family knows, now. They’ve all sent letters. Mother’s was depressing to listen to, choked and miserable, I think. It’s hard to tell, in a way, just because it’s so wrong hearing her words claw their way out of a soldier’s smoke-scarred throat. The man in the bunk next to me reads them since I can’t anymore. I’ve never seen his face, never will. His name’s Lars. He tells people to call him Larry.
Father’s letter came out sounding like the doctors’ words do, overly intact, each fragment as carefully arranged as the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, creating a crackless cohesive whole. He laments my loss of vision, he says, and regrets that my younger brother will have to take over the family business now, instead of me. When Larry reads it aloud, something breaks through his voice - maybe amusement, maybe pity. His words are rough, gravelly, hardened by too many cigarettes: I imagine him as a big guy, burly, scarred, but I don’t know. All I know is that one of his legs got blown off by a land mine.
Upon my return, Father says, he’ll do his best to find me a good job where my blindness won’t be a disadvantage. I bet he will.
(He won’t.)
Sarah’s letter sounds especially strange. I can picture her handwriting tracing like a beetle’s scraggly footprints over the page, the overlarge underlegible print of a six-year-old still learning her letters. Something about it, both in its innocence and hearing it come out in Larry’s leering soldierly lilt, is depressing.
“Mama and Dada say your eyes got hurt,” Larry reads. “She spelled ‘eyes’ wrong. With an i-apostrophe-s.”
“Keep reading,” I say.
“Sure. So she says she hopes you feel better really soon - ‘really’ spelled like a fishing reel ‘reel’. She’ll get Mama to make you cookie cake once you’re home safe again. Also, don’t put soap in your eyes to try to clean out the badness, because she tried it, and it doesn’t work.”
Larry barks out coarse laughter. “What a doll,” he says. “Anyway, that’s it for this round.” He pats my shoulder in what I suspect is supposed to be a brotherly way.
“You’re sure that’s all of them?” There should be one more.
“That’s all.” I can picture the face I’ve never seen, just as I can picture the hospital unit around me without ever having noted anything but blackness: Larry, with thick brows and curly brown hair sticking up over his skull likes strands of wire, forehead creased with curiosity.
“Should there be one more?” Larry asks.
I remember suddenly: of course there’s no letter. There’s no more Ross to write the letter, with all its subtle whispers and sharp, outlawed happiness. I tell Larry no, he’s right, only three.
“You sure? They lose the letters sometimes, or give them to the wrong person. I got one one for a Camile Joyce, or something. “
“No,” I say. “That’s all. Thanks, Larry.”
“Sure, pal. Any time.”
He hands me the letters. The paper is cool and crinkled, something I wouldn’t have picked up on before. It just would’ve been paper. Nothing special about it.
I think about Jonas and Mother and Father and Sarah. My image of them, the theoretical formula that will always, in my mind, constitute their pictures. Years from now, if I never see again, like the doctors are predicting, will I still think of them as they are now? Will I have the sole advantage of keeping Sarah’s innocence all to myself as she slowly loses it to twenty different boys? Can I, for at least myself, comb the gray strands out of Father’s hair, and iron the wrinkles off of Mother’s skin? Will Jonas stay as sharp as the last time I saw him, suited up in a tuxedo, immaculate? And will he keep on giving me that look, now unseen, that glare of contempt: I don’t need to ask, it says, and I wish I could tell.
I don’t know. I don’t know anything. Maybe, in my head, they can stay perfect. At least for a while.
(Fat chance.)
I remember the last thing I saw, really saw, and not just as a flimsy, artificial, blundering picture behind my eyelids - or pupils, even, since it’s really all the same anymore.
We were walking down one of the derelict streets, pale dirt-colored buildings rising like dunes on either side. Just me and Ross. Cars trundled down the roads, coughing out clouds of swirling dust, making the landscape that much paler and dustier and dirt-colored.
A few cars were parked on the sides of the sideless road, gleaming in the harsh glare of the sun like ancient gems or shooting stars that were all wished out, and crashed.
I don’t know what the motive was, how the trail of evidence fit together to form the final, fatal verdict. Maybe it was an accident. Maybe it was on purpose. Maybe it was just one of those strange twists of life that no one ever really figures out, but people formulate skepticisms that become law. Maybe all things happen for a reason.
(There can be no reason for this.)
I know people always say these things happen in slow motion, but they say it because it’s true. It really does. Time warps, slows down, as if every particle of reality is suddenly sifting through a dense, sticky gel. And it happens even slower in my memory.
First, there was a faint click, like a lock latching.
Second, Ross looked at me: he was smiling, I’m pretty sure, behind the bandana that was keeping the dust out of his mouth. I could see it in his eyes. That’s what I remember best, is his eyes. They were a bright blue, flecked with something almost gold, like day breaking over the ocean. I think about his eyes a lot.
Third, the car parked not so far away, to our left, exploded.
There was sound, so much sound, like the whole earth was degenerating, devolving into its primal, chaotic elements: sound and fury. Then there was no sound at all, everything morphing into an amorphous calm, an eerie whining silence.
After this, which occupied the timeless length of a second or two, pain. Intense pain. And then a soft blanket, a cure: blackness.
(A cure, a poison. Is there so much difference?)
I’ve tried to look on the bright side. That’s what Mother always told me to do: “Look on the bright side! For every sunset, there’s a sunrise. Isn’t that a happy thought, sweetie?”
It’s sort of depressing, these days. Every time I think of sunsets, or sunrises, for that matter, even though I never really got about seeing enough of those since they were always so damned early in the morning, I just regret not seeing enough of them. Or having the right to see them ripped away.
At least I didn’t have to see what happened to Ross. The doctors say I probably wouldn’t be alive if it wasn’t for him, because his body sheltered me from some of the damage. The shrapnel, mostly. I asked to see him - I still had bandages wound over my eyes, at this point, so I didn’t know I was blind yet - and the doctors said it’d be best if I didn’t.
Two words, they said: hamburger meat.
So maybe it’s a mixed blessing. That’s what I try to tell myself, though it doesn’t work most of the time. I don’t have to lose anything else into the oblivion of memory, no images have to slip down the storm drains into the general muddled shit of times gone by. I can cradle Ross in my thoughts, lull him into that good night.
I guess that’s how it works. The world of the past gets to stay forever, the day - what was it, November 3rd? - can remain lit in my mind, like a lightbulb only I can see, one that’s dead to everyone else. Maybe that’s bad, maybe it’s not. I guess there are worse days to relive.
(The worst day: an ocean-blue eye, an unseen smile: hamburger meat.)
But maybe I should look on the bright side.
I understand things now I’ve never understood before. The texture of an orange, the taste of wind, the sound of a beating heart and the secrets it can keep, and the roughness masked behind the smooth overtones of ice cream.
I was never much of one to imagine things before the bomb went off. Now, imagination is all I have. Funny, how that kind of thing can happen. I find my mind wandering now, lost in places of its own devising, a made-up man with wiry brown hair and thick eyebrows reading letters from family members half a world away in his gravelly, time-tired voice.
These men claim they are missing legs, or eyes, or a heart. In my head, though, they are whole. They walk on two sturdy feet, bootsoles clomping down hard, smashing withered brown grass with easy grace. They don’t have to ask, they don’t have to tell. They are something that they can never again be in reality, not the simulacrums of themselves, but whatever the dirt whispers and wills them to be: entire, untethered, perfect.
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