Flesh and Bone
Short Story
χρυσοῦν τε θεῖσα στέφανον ἀμφὶ βοστρύχοις
λαμπρῷ κατόπτρῳ σχηματίζεται κόμην,
Euripipes Medea 1160-1
The fire burned In a scraggly swirl over the box-like tank. The fire was eternal, but the tank was from a particular moment in a particular place: Israel, 2023. All was scattered on the concrete ruins in the night going up like a bonfire fed by human bodies. Jason looked at the carnage and saw burnt jeans and burnt T-shirts and the unrecognizable faces of those who were so recently young. Other people may have wrenched or vomited but Jason was made of sterner stuff. Is face was taught and thin and his uniform trade that there was ample room for flesh had he wanted any on his frame.
But he didn’t, there wasn’t, and his movements were precise as if his body knew how much it could take and still be able to function in this way. He was looking for Ayut, a nurse assigned to protect his children. He had originally been going out with the tank under his command when he received a radio dispatch. He then turned the entire tank around to be here as fast as was humanly possible.
Jason peered into the telescopic sight to peer into the gloom that night had imposed. But this was no silent running for with every passing meter the tank scraped and sabered into the soft frozen sand. But he kept spinning his gaze. Even at this pace, the things he caught glimpses of were frightening. Every so often a shape resembling a face, or a leg came into view. A blood-drenched jacket. A pair of sandals. A necklace made out of leather. But more often it was just the uprooted bushes and denuded trees. But then something else came to sight: the blame torched cars with crackling paint and shattered windows. And outside could then see at least a dozen corpses which were twisted about in a dance of death. He continued to scan for anything that was a threat. Because threats were what mattered here.
Then a call came from HQ. Jason was ordered to assemble whatever tanks he had and strike towards Gaza. For only an instant he closed his eyes and could see hundreds of bodies in a death dance.
-
In the twilight missed haze, Medea was knocked prone beneath the concrete walls of her apartment. She scrambled to either side to see the ayut or the two children. She cried out for the nurse: “Ayut!” Fortunately, she rapidly received a reply from the older crone. “I am here but where are the children? Where are the boys?”
In her mind’s eye, Medea looked back in her memory to see the beheaded children that were taken by Hezbollah. But she focused on the here and now, and finally saw a long stretch of cloth which she knew to be part of a shirt. But everything wanted to cascade around the walls glowered and rattled on the grains of cement. Medea slipped her way above and below the textiles and grit which together made a soup, disastrous in its concoction. But Ebon creek his hand over the desk, which his father had used to send out orders. There was a pistol that had popped out of its door and was lying there. Medea noticed it was loaded and then scooped it up and put it in a pocket.
Gathering all her strength Medea longed over the final meter and hugged her son. She then saw the nurse and realized that a bar from the ceiling had fallen on her leg. She knew instantly that Ayut was trapped. She then slithered over to the beam and tried to lift it with her hands. But no operation would suffice to make any difference. She then searched around with her eyes to see if there was any crowbar or lever with which she could slide a fulcrum and lift the tangled morass.
Finally, she grabbed a chunk of wood which used to be part of a heavy bookshelf, and streamed her entire body to set a very small opening that the ayut could shimmy out of. Both of the boys were similarly rescued and the darkness coming with no light from any source cast a cradle into which they would huddle. From far outside there were rockets and bright orange guiding lights that lit up the sky. And one could see tall buildings on both sides of the divide. This was war in its most terrible glamour.
The heated air rushed inward with the explosions and crumbling buildings far behind it. And all they could do was huddle. And all around the horrors of terror and fear were let loose to pace the crumbling earth.
Medea hugged her two children and the man who brought them into life itself.
Then the Ayut pulled a long Medea’s sleeve and pleaded to go over to the next building and find her daughter and make sure that she was unharmed.
-
On a dirt path with various low trees and scrub grass, 10 tanks were assembled into a line. What they had seen was far beyond anything that anyone had encountered before: there were young men and young women tractored into the ground, with no face left to be discovered. Jason had tried to see if, even in the darkness, he could find any who might still be alive. Beneath the orange, he found nothing but mutilated bodies and hence children. Many were neatly lined up in a row along the Juniper bushes. Several men had to go off to the side and heaved their dinner onto a neat circle. When they came back no one mentioned it again. The litany came at them in their minds bellowing body parts and reciting cast-up limbs. There was one moment where Jason saw for just an instant a woman’s head pierced through with a bullet through the eye. Every scene was burned as a snapshot into horror. A slide show that went as a carousel.
The tanks tracked along the dirt road taking random potshots at whatever looked juicy and tempting. No threat was going to be left unmet. They saw many times where there were AK-47s littered to and fro, realizing that they were not the first Israeli tanks to be engaged. Jason itched for a combat. He wanted to plunder the ordinances to abandon. And most of all he wanted to cleanse this awful sense that his side had been napping while the enemy had been plotting this evil while his children slept. In his deepest memory was the scent of the woman who he loved, and at this very moment he wished he could tell her how much he loved her.
-
It was a swarming picture show, the horizon was lit up by rockets and guns that had only been secured this August. She held the children to her breast and simply waited for the daylight to come. But daylight may not bring much in the way of respite. And it was clear that the days before the war were a stiffened memory captured like a picture under glass.
But then her years were finally sensitized. And she heard to what steps coming up the rubble. They were quiet. Oh so very quiet. She lowered herself even further with the table hiding as much of their figures as was possible. Then she saw a mast face hunting for any living people. It carried an AK-47. It did not have much in the way of equipment.
She counted two. She recounted just to be sure. Then she stood up and quickly fired the pistol. This time Hamas was caught napping. The two went down very hard. Only looking for a moment at her boys, she rapidly looked over the two and shot each one again. Just to be sure.
Then she looked for others but found none. She then reached the boys between the cable and the rubble of a wall. Then she saw something underneath the table which had not been obvious before and probably was quite hidden.
-
The surprise was absolute. They had gone through a slight Valley and emerged right at the entrance of a small Hamas encampment. The noise from the rockets and the shelling as well as the constant rumblings of other tanks may have hidden their movement. And once in place, the tanks started lobbing mercilessly. The grind of their shells made the encampment pieces of rubble. No one got out until Jason did. He wanted to shore that none lived. He used a pistol to dispatch three who were still conscious.
Then they did this two more times before they were told to retreat. It was clear to Jason that there needed to be some repairs to his tank, and that way could see his children.
It was dawn and her rosy fingers pierced through the gloom. Everywhere there was ruin: houses, apartment buildings, hospitals, mosques, and temples. Jason said their course back only a little way to refuel and replenish to hunt again. He was tired and wanted to sleep.
-
He gave the tank over to the mechanics and wandered his way to his home. But when he got there all he saw was a complete ruin. There were only pyres of twisted metal and crumbling cement as the only sign that this had once been a house. He pulled out a telescopic sight and looked for any life. None seemed visible.
He made a sprint to see if anyone had survived. Racing through his mind was the idea that all that he had left was in an instant gone. With only a bent monument as a testament.
He then saw Medea standing in her dress waiting for him. But her face was not worried nor hysterical, but calm in that deadly sort of way that the last 24 hours had talked so well. He then noticed that two terrorists were lying in a pool of blood.
He nearly screamed: “Medea, where are the boys? Where is the nurse? What happened to make you a target for Hamas?”
He saw Medea who only looked at him. Then she asked: “When were you going to tell me that wanted a divorce and to marry Ayut’s daughter?” She held up the papers which were in the box that was hidden beneath the table.
He froze but before he could answer a pistol shot careened through his chest. His heartbeat no more. Then there was another pistol shot. There were eight bodies baking in the sun.
-
It was an hour before the Sgt. came to look at be ruins of Capt. Jason’s abode. Once he was there, he found the bodies of Jason, Medea, a nurse, the nurse’s daughter, two terrorists, and the two young boys. Searched the other houses they found a little girl who was screening for anyone who could feed her milk.
He handed off the girl to one of his subordinates and began to imagine writing that two terrorists came and shot the family only to be surprised by the Capt. Unfortunately, Jason was killed as well as the terrorists. If the facts did not fit the crime then change the facts.
The Sgt. then moved on to his next position to count the dead.