Blood. Thunder. Shouting.

I blink rapidly, trying to clear the spots and crust from my eyes. The trench extends beyond sight to either side of me, labyrinthine, an inverse bulwark mortared with mud and blood and bones, the mute message of the land and the fallen a concrete one: [i]‘here and no further’[/i].

A man a year or two my junior, barely draft-age, comes trudging down the line, speaking to each clump of soldiers in turn, cupping his hands to be heard over mortar-fire. He reaches me, states simply in a voice that brooked no deviation, “we rush after the next bombardment”, and continues on without pause, his dull eyes a paired twin to the empty stares of his trench-mates.

I struggle to rise, exhausted, pain lancing down my left leg. The wound had healed poorly. With a hiss I stand, leaning heavily on the right, and peer carefully between the mud inclines and razor-wire. Even in the thundercloud-covered evening the indistinct shapes of the less-fortunate marked the scene ahead, a grim beckons to the inevitable. The chaos pauses briefly as a synchronic [i]THOOM[/i] reverberates from the trenches behind me, followed by a shrieking above and then ahead of me. I slide back down the hill slightly, taking cover, shielding body and eyes.

[i]BOOM![/i]

I catch brief flashes and feel the ground heave beneath me: it’s time to move. Just as I prepare to fling myself over our defenses and into no-man’s-land, the pain in my leg redoubles and I collapse in the mud, gritting my teeth to resist the urge to scream. As I feel one of my molars crack I roll over, spitting blood–



–and tumbled face-first into the dirt next to the park-bench I had been dozing on, coughing and hacking uncontrollably. A red-faced minute or two of lung-clearing spasms later, I fought my breath to stillness and struggled to rise to my hands and knees. Wrinkled arms and hands scraped and bruised from the fall slowly and carefully labored to drag this aged frame into a position resembling sitting, leaning heavily to the right to take pressure off the left.

[i]Damn sciatic nerve again, doctors never could repair the damage.[/i]

With a practiced heave and careful twist, I found myself once again seated, this time on a gentle grass incline, next to the bench, which faced a curiously familiar rising and dipping park hillside. Trees canopied the area, dimming a sunny afternoon that exposed to these old eyes the time-worn shadows of conflicts past. Gentle inclines belied trenches and hill-sized slight depressions mortar-fire. The evidence was still written everywhere, at least for those few who remained to see it, in a faded script that was gradually being swallowed by the land and time. The scars of the land in some ways yet remained, as mine remained, as I remained here.

I clearly hadn’t been of service to anyone for years, and so I found myself left with time to haunt familiar places such as these. A few people noticed my tumble, but none offered assistance, which led to spending the better part of an hour stretching and moving my left leg to soften the nerves and joints, increasing its capacity for stress as I struggled to climb to be seated on the bench. Aching with success, I took another glance across the park, noticing a couple boys firing off cap-guns at each other, and their carefree attitudes. It leaves one to wonder if, should us human scars of the past slip out of sight the world might start to heal, having been forgotten by both nature and new life alike.

Thoughts turned from fading to the shadows to catching sight of them, propagating stealthily from the shimmering wisps of dreams at the edges of heavy-lidded eyes. The ambient park noises are lost to the steady rhythm of a familiar heartbeat, eventually followed by thunder. Lids become stony, and bared eyes once again to…

Blood. Thunder. Shouting.