1.
The bullets barked sporadic hymns deep into the still midnight air as our commander’s coarse calls, got lost, echoing between a past, long since absent, and a present, merciless, blurred by every sunrise, every sunset, and a future, unnamed, unmanned, drifting away. Everything smelled musty; starless, the sky seemed to be getting closer, closer, inhaling us in an unstained and winding type of darkness and we’d all forgotten how to cry or what it was to cry or why, exactly, anyone would ever feel a need to cry.

On my knees, I was crouched; they were both scarred and scabbing and the broth of my blood had combined with the ground’s chalky dirt, a brown and red and pebbled-filled soup-like swirl. Bombs were sinking from the sky, in surround sound, whistling like sirens. I was shaking, quick and acute spasms.

“Move. Go,” my partner said to me, our trembling bodies weighed down by the cold and burly steel of dull ammunition.

I couldn’t. I wanted to move. Really, I did. But I just couldn’t. Then, in a second of stupidity, he stood up, popping his neck like a deer or an antelope. But, looking back through time’s lens, examining it now, maybe it was an act of brilliance, his own personal great escape. Painlessly, a shot captured him between his bushy blond eyebrows and I could sense the lead, as his eyes hurricaned to the back of his head, expand, like ink in water, through his mushed brain and he started to fade and I reached out my hand in a naïve effort, unsuccessful. Since it was noisy, falling, he didn’t make a sound, the forested tree that nobody was to hear.

Move.

I wanted to. Really, I did.

2.
You probably don’t remember but you wrote me a letter. It seems forever ago now. Your handwriting was scribbles, barely readable, but your sentiments rang through my rattling head, high-pitched, like xylophone tones, and sang life into my decaying and slowly to beat heart and as the letter crinkled in my hands, sounding as sweeping waves sloshing upside a young boat’s pearly surface, I looked up. Saw nothing. I thought of a swing set—I don’t know why—swaying, a grandfathers clock’s golden pendulum, in the middle of some people-less playground I had yet to but knew then I probably never would be and, in submission, I dropped my head and prayed. I prayed for you. On the other side of the world maybe staring at that same sky. Hopefully not. Not that sky. I prayed for that swing. I don’t have a clue why but for some reason I thought that that swing set was something that desperately need to be prayed for.

Hours; hours and hours and hours, I sat, crunched into a rickety wooden desk that was cowering under the heart-shaped carvings of latent lovers, my pencil pressed against the yellow lined paper, its graphite not moving, not knowing the words to etch. You were young and had yet to realize the world and I didn’t want to ruin it for you, didn’t want you scared of the ride before your height was even measured. So I said nothing. Wrote something bland like: “see you soon” or “I miss you” and put my pencil away. But now as I sit here, in this room which seems to be souring with each new star’s tap into the sky, and as you, my son, sit here, both of us older than we need to be, with wrinkles we should not yet have, I can’t help but think of the words, I regret not saying, the lines, I regret not writing.

3.
When we picked you up from the airport it was a windy May afternoon and the sun was winking at the world, shining through a mound of Kleenex-colored clouds and you were smiling and you had a beard and a mustache. However, I could see, swimming in the undercurrents of your eyes, something I knew all too well. Overjoyed, your mother hugged you, wrapping her arms around your body as if she’d never done it before, and she kissed you and I did the same. You acted like a new man, sticking your hand out for me to shake; talking in a deeper voice, laughing at jokes you wouldn’t have laughed at before, ones you hardly understood. But I knew how much over there makes its visitors into men—or something of the sort—shuddering spastically in the wiry cage of their own frail skeleton; I chose not to say anything, not to you, not to your mother. Especially not your mother. Because for some incomprehensible reason—I don’t know but I guess—I thought it might not have happened to you.

4.
The sun was setting, a magnified ball of light sliding to the Earth’s edge and everyone was wearing black and the coffin, a shiny maple brown, stretched as the ghost of all the memories, all the images, I thought I had since shed and had accepted as gone, forgotten. It was Ben’s funeral. You didn’t know Ben but I believe it would’ve done some good if you had. You were going to be named for him but your mother ruled against it. They said, alcohol had destroyed his liver, a tapeworm, nibbling away at his body’s insides and he died. But really, and anyone there with the flag, red, white and blue, stitched to the lapel of their jacket would attest and knew: it was the stark discovery of that desolate and dreary unknown, standing firm, planted across the ocean, a revolving illusion, hemispheres away. That’s what got him and none of us cried and none of us had cried. Throughout the evening’s course, our hands, globs of loose gelatin, would interlock, attempting to do something of familiarity and protocol, a simple shake, but even that seemed odd. We’d say things like, “so good to see you,” and, “it’s been a while,” and like C.L. we’d try reminisce but that was useless, like seeking comfort in the oven’s busying flame and our eyes would begin to stroll, strangers in an uncomfortable situation, looking for a way out.

The funeral was long. Full of things that didn’t make sense to those who knew; plot holes noticed only by the cast that had seen and been backstage. They closed the casket, two men dressed in black, wearing red ties. Put him in the ground. And we all left, a decimated congregation marching its separate ways.

5.
As though it were a kitten, you petted my ego and it purred, a soft and rolling purr. You said something like “Dad I’m going to join the army. I want to be just like you,” and, against my instinct’s better judgment and with a grin waltzing, as though for Debby, across my face’s floor, I said, “O.K.” and you left. Your mother cried for weeks, anytime she saw your picture, smelled your scent, heard your voice’s reverberation in any dust covered something that used to be yours. She still cries.

6.
A calm and stale and vacant wind howls, with a fragile pianissimo, nameless melodies into the small crevices life leaves behind and into the even smaller ones of lives left behind and you are sitting next to me, silent, staring. You are always silent and always staring. Bags are under my eyes, bottomless and heavy and black. In our living room, I’m sitting in this familiar chair, its rocking axial squeaking and squabbling with age, and its hand-carved wood rubs, a rough gradient, against my back and I’m reading. Your mouth is twitching and I’m reading. Not a book, for fiction and fantasy and all that the two represent are, like rats and rodents, exterminated from my life, no longer existent. Unable to leave and come back completely, I’m glancing at some body count. A week old. Maybe. Matthew, 21, Luke, 23, John, 20. Their names, their ages, cemented now, inseparable statistics, bellowing from the ruffled pages, testaments, not old but new, Bible verses, broken; and, now, I gaze over to you, still alive, still breathing, silent, staring, always and wonder how many more still-alives and still-breathings should be included, remembered, missed.

***

W.J. Nunnery

W.J. Nunnery is a freshman, at Concordia University in St. Paul. He has been writing for the majority of his life, from elementary to now. He’s involved in many things, clubs, sports, music; and all of these things have had a huge influence on his life and his writings.