The Coward

Warmer than a slept-in bed, more familiar than a mother’s arms. The coward grovels the dirt, prone where he fell; in a crater, big enough barely for a child, the coward shelters from the shredding air. His paper-dry mouth is metallic and tastes of gunpowder.

The coward wills himself to his duty and his friends, already dead. His captain falls, shouted words reaching his frayed neurons, even as a hole explodes and rips out of the guts of bravest man he ever knew. The captain dies facing the coward; his face wrenched in the taut scream of wounds and waste and war.

Hot metal cuts like broken glass through the coward’s cheek and hand, but he is unfeeling except for the deep life of the earth below him and the oblivion of fear above. The ground is bursting all around him, violent as vomit and the air thumps and he has to fight to heave it into his lungs. His ears send only a tunnelled one-pitch tone so that his mind is merely dimly aware of the screams that are queuing in his head to be heard at night, decades later.

The coward is more scared than he has ever been. More frightened than he thought possible; more than when, as a child, he watched his mother die; more even than when he stepped between his little brother and his father’s blame and belt. The coward is so afraid he wishes for death to free him from the terror of this horror and the horror of his terror.

Chaos and noise and fear and destruction and death. Blind and afraid and numb and deaf, the coward, unseeing pushes against crumbling, vibrating, living earth. Against the weight of his sack, his bloody body, his rationality, the echos of his mother’s pleas; against the weight of all he has ever known, from the good earth, from home.

Standing now, he runs. Wide-eyed, blinking is his only protection against the bullets that cut the air around him. He moves as in a frustrated dream. Adrenaline keeps him on clumsy feet until he feels the winding nausea of the first hit. The menace of its hard anger is shocking to him and he does not understand how the man who sent the bullet could fill it with such hate. The second rips him worse and he feels the fear of flesh collapsing into the empty of the wound. He pleads in his head for surrender. He has never known such pain: full of badness and harm.

The soldier falls. The third bullet callous and cruel in the face of his mental white flag. He falls on his wounds, flat and dull and he feels his insides spread loose below him while metal clay fills his nostrils like a child upside down in water. His heaving chest expands into the empty space below but no air comes and clay fills his mouth and his broken arms cannot clear the passage. Heaving, fighting, drowning, the coward dies in the earth he didn’t want to leave.