The lost hour

Just a little something for a competition. Enjoy!

The lost hour

If you close your eyes, the gunfire sounds like thunder. Rolling angrily across the beach, up the crumbling, sparsely-covered hills where the Turks lie and shoot us down like ducks. People are screaming. Someone collapses in front of me and I topple over them, kicking up sand and blood, and I wonder, truly, if this is what hell is like.

They tell us to dig. Dig, dig, dig, until you can’t feel your arms anymore. Dig until the bullets ring like birds over your head and the mud is under your fingernails. Dig until it’s a motion, until it’s all your body knows how to do.

Even after it all, I’m still digging. In my sleep. Shovelling stagnant summer air in our small Fitzroy bedroom until her arms are around me, holding my trembling limbs to her as I cry.

I laid with my back against the trench wall, watching the endless blue of the sky fade to yellow and pink at the horizon. It was light still, light enough to see each other’s eyes. Muddied faces stared back at me across the trench, hollow and raw.

The sea air was heady with salt and the metallic stench of fresh blood, but it was silent, aside from the odd bird call. Trumpets blew and a strange, temporary peace brought us from the trenches, to tend to our dead. We emerged like madmen, caution and shock turning our limbs numb and useless, as we searched for familiar faces amongst the human debris of unforgivable war.

We told them to rest in peace. As we closed their eyes and fetched rings and bibles from their persons. And none of us, ever, will rest in peace. Peace is the story we will tell our children as we shudder in the arms of our wives. Peace is something we will never touch, even in sleep, every moment as restless and familiar as the war where loose, empty eyes of boys not yet men will stare at the sun, still waiting for it to set. And we will wake, crying, the memory of it all hanging like the ghost of an old conversation.

This is our lost hour. After the war, every morning when we rouse as if someone has grabbed us, and we lie still in the purgatory of dream and wake, where time suspends motionless with us as we blink away the sand that’s not there anymore. Our flesh as grey and lifeless as theirs as we lie on our backs and we feel ourselves digging again. Digging with nowhere to go. No one to save.

Sometimes you let the razor hang a little closer to your throat. And you let the selfish thought touch you, for a second. You imagine how easily the life would leak out of you, decades of memory and effort in a bleeding husk on the tiled floor.

And then you wash your face, and you go about your day.