Windward

"O you who turn the wheel and look to windward,
Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you." — T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land

This boat is a sculpted incisor cutting the surface of the lake. A fierce sun debrides the foaming scars, and a stillness traps the heat beneath a sultry, birdless dome of exquisite blue.

A near-naked woman helms the boat, lion-haired and hewn by toil and sunlight into a gleaming statue of bronze. Her tawny-golden hair is a rippling banner proclaiming both her passage and her ferocity.

Midpoint of the lake, she cuts the engine and drifts, drags something bulky across the clean wood-finished deck. All her amazonian brawn is needed to wrestle and tip the object into the water. Fetid bubbles belch to the surface, and it drops quick to the forest of swaying weeds below.

Slick in the inferno afternoon, and like Kali, she stands and extends her arms. She begs the pitiless sky for relief, to have this sorry deed erased by a deluge. But the raging sun won't even blink.

No one at the shore or in the sundry craft enjoying the summer lake seems to notice her.

She imagines a horror film, a tiny hand reaching from the deep after the tale is supposedly told. Or a comedy: a sodden, piss-coloured toupee afloat for days until snagged by a thwarted fisherman's hook. A long red tie twisting like a wounded eel. A swampy red hat, its slogan unpicked, reduced to a handful of letters: M..e .me…. Great ……

Two cruel decades for this moment. Years of being gaslit, of callous disregard and wanton humiliation. Choose your slurs and slanders slyly enough, with sufficient precision, and you don't need fists, not even tiny ones.

With escape no option, frail murder remained by default, mewling and fretting, that poor abandoned runt of the human litter. She had bided her time, built her fortitude and power, and one fine day, when it was at last possible and the hawks had looked away, she had extinguished the remaining glint of light in watery eyes that had long-ago spurned brightness. As that vestige waned, the last words he heard in this world he'd done so much to sully were, "You will be hated as long as there are people to hate. Not only me. The world is well rid of you."

A new breeze licks at her sweat-salted skin, and she shivers. A squall is forming to the east, a dim knot of cloud like the ghost of a frown on a smiling face. Vacationers near the lakeshore scramble as the first fat drops hit. Her prayers have been answered at every step, and she thanks the sun and the heavens and the blessed clouds and starts up the boat and smiles at last and looks to glorious windward at the approaching storm.

She wonders, when it comes, what the thunder will say.

War Child

Across the desert, we chased a twisting inferno to a dry village, a beige settlement without breath. From its crumbled perimeter, it seemed empty of life, everything the colour of sand, except for a lone figure up ahead a ways.

When we got close we could see she was a young girl in a torn and bloody dress, faded apricot, her thin arms embracing a pockmarked boulder the shape of a broken yellow tooth (all colour here the ghost of colour, except red).

At first she shied and wouldn't speak; then after three days, she did nothing but.

She said: "War come storming from the hills, and we wunt ready, and my ma is gone now. I dont mean dead, but she am or she amnit, an now we hear her cry in them same hills of a night, dusk while dawn."

And later: "Fetching water, I sees two soldiers on the dust trail, and they was full a angry talk, but later I saw a third walking aside them, had on a dirty hood, couldnt tell if a man nor a woman, and the fighting men growed quieter like they was thinkin'."

And then: "Big sounds far off like bad weather, but up close the worst men took us from our loves." 

Right then, a rooster burst from some hidden place, loud tawny feathers blurring against grainy fawn. A great cry erupted from the throat of the sky, dry brutal thunder without rain. Lightning scratched the horizon like indecipherable runes.

But we needed answers, so I kept asking.

I admit, at some point I grabbed her by the wrists and was rough with her, aggravated by her strange recalcitrance. She was all noise, no signal; all heat, no light. Children can be infuriating, the way they filter everything, turning routine horror into some passive, ineffectual fantasy while cold reality churns on regardless, relentless. People, including the children themselves, can be torn limbless while we wait for the young to tell their ersatz truths.

We asked her where everyone else was, demanded she tell us when the soldiers had left and where they were headed. She looked at us, her brows arched with skepticism, and her scrawny frame trembled like aftershocks in the brown and naked hills.

Narrow-eyed, she continued: "Theyre still here. All a them. Silly men. Dont you hear the screams?"