Prose
By W.J. Nunnery

Reflections: A Broken Verse
1.
    The bullets barked sporadic hymns deep into the windless 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 couldn¹t.
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 didn¹t 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 slow 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 don¹t 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.  An image of 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 didn¹t want to ruin it for you,
didn¹t 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 star¹s 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 wouldn¹t 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 don¹t 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
Earth¹s 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 Ben¹s funeral.  You didn¹t 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 body¹s 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, "it¹s been a while," and,  like old
friends, we'd try reminisce but that was as useless as seeking comfort
in an oven's busying flame and our eyes would begin to stroll, two
strangers, paired in an uncomfortable situation, looking anxiously for
a way out.
 The funeral was long.  Full of things that didn¹t 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 I¹m 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
voice¹s 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
17 Chequamegon Bay
Madison, WI 53719
(608)-772-7142
Email: Nunneryw@csp.edu