GOD AND WAR

(this is just an exert from my story "God and War". In it, a boy was just shot a wounded through an apage mouth by an agressive officer dubbed "master." this is the story of boys in a prisoner of war prison.)

After the Asian boy in Tommy’s cell had died, it was a sure sign that the stench would increase even more. The second the master left the main prison, the one five-year-old boy next to Tommy had started to wail. Tommy tried to comfort his shaking and confused cellmate, mainly because he needed comforting himself, but when his wails did not subside, Jon had punched him upside the head and knocked him unconscious.

Jon had been standing right next to the Asian boy and was drenched in his blood. He had wiped what he could off of his clothes, inhaled deeply and groaned, his shoulders sagging slightly from their stock-straight usual position. Tommy wiped his hand on Jon’s shoulder, grinning slightly.

“You’re gonna stink to high heaven by the end of today,” Tommy said playfully.

Jon brushed Tommy’s hand aside and spoke in his cold voice, “No, I won’t. Dried blood hardly smells as bad as dead bodies. In a week or so, your nose will be numb, anyway.” Without even looking at Tommy, he stalked past him and kneeled by the body of the deceased Asian boy. Tommy watched as Jon made the sign of the cross and muttered a quick prayer. He then stood up and unceremoniously kicked the body, turning the other cellmates.

“Move Johine to the bathroom,” he ordered. The other boys jumped in response and slowly began to drag the Asian child, Johine, to the corner opposite of the sleeping corner – it, out of all the corners, was the darkest and smelled the vilest.

Tommy watched as they heaved the body upward and tossed it in the corner, to which he collapsed in, arms spread-eagled, with a dull splat. The boy’s kicked him and piled his arms on top of his chest. Tommy watched, also, and they attempted to fold his legs in as much as they could. Finally, something snapped and they fit the limbs neatly in the corner.

“Wait –” Tommy said, coming to a revelation. “We aren’t going to…to…. excrete on him, will we?’

Jon looked from Johine’s dead and twisted body and then back up at Tommy. He nodded slowly, his eyes twinkling with the first hint of laughter Tommy had yet seen in him. “Yeah, yeah, we are.”

It was Tommy’s turn, now, for his jaw to drop. When he was shocked, his mouth was always agape. When Pocke had turned to them earlier, there was a close chance that he would have shot Tommy, as well, if he had remained in such apparent disgust and appall. A shiver ran down his spine and Tommy twitched his tensioned shoulder violently, imagining his body in place of Johine’s.

As soon as Tommy had shown his haunted feeling about the entire prospect of a dead body, a snigger finally slipped through Jon’s lips. He snorted once, twice, and then broke out into peals of laughter, clutching his sides with his eyes rolling.

“It’s not funny! It’s a dead person, Jon – you can’t just…can’t just excrete on it. I mean, is that what Johine would want?”

Jon’s laughter stopped short, but he still had a wide grin on his face, though, when he spoke, his voice was just as cold and forceful as ever. “It doesn’t matter what Johine wanted. Johine’s dead, see? Or do you think he’s still alive? Do you want to go check, or do you want to join him?”

Jon pushed Tommy forward. Tommy turned around to take a swing at Jon, just to hit him to stop him from speaking. He appeared to be such a sensible boy, but now he was acting just as aggressive and ruthless as any other teasing schoolchild.

Before Tommy could swing at him, he saw the look etched deep onto Jon’s face. He still was grinning widely, his teeth yellowed and brown, decaying in the absence of hygiene. His brow was furrowed with concentration of winning the fight, or, at least, being as witty as possible. But his eyes were burning with a fiery passion of fear. You realize that when you feel the emotion in someone else’s eyes, you do not see the actual positions of the eyes, which contribute to the deciphering, and you do not see how slitted or wide the pupils are, though that contributes to the deciphering as well. What you see is the feeling emanating from the body themselves – those feelings, those vibes, if you will, are transmitted through the doors to the soul.

The eyes.

Jon pushed Tommy backward and Tommy tripped, falling down to the metal floor that clashed against his tailbone. He fell down and snapped his neck back, his head landing right in the middle of Johine’s chubby torso. From the flat of his back, he looked up at Jon, whose grin had faded but not the hypnotizing fear in his eyes. He licked his lips and a black dotted spider slipped from his mouth and onto his lip. Tommy watched as Jon bit down on his lower lip, and the spider was crushed, the one paper-thin and string-like legs tumbling down to the floor, where it was blown away by his breath. The black splotch of the spider’s dead body, for everything seemed to be dead in this corner, was still on Jon’s lips as he said,

“Stop looking for God in death and men.”