Life Before War
by Kim Firmston
Published October 2009 - FreeFall Magazine Volume XIX, Number 2, Winter edition. Short Listed in the 2008 CBC Literary Award, short story catagory. Nominated for the Writers Guild of Alberta Howard O'Hagen Award, the Journey Prize and The National Magazine Awards.
Even before I wake up, I’m firing. Finger squeezed tight to the trigger. Metal biting skin. Leaves raining down. Blinding hot sunlight filtering through. Round after round tearing apart the jungle canopy. It’s been so long since the killing affected me.
In my life before war, my father was a shaman, that much I remember. Leading our village in the traditional ways of prayer and harvest. Light and dark. Good and evil. I was eleven when the rebels came. Only three years before now. They pressed their still hot rifle barrels to my head. Made me commit my first murder. It was kill or be killed and in one action, one slice of the machete forced into my shaking hands, I was parentless, homeless, shunned.
Memory soon washed away with the blood. Killing became easy. Almost nothing. I learned to be emboldened by brown brown - a mixture of cocaine and gunpowder that burned my nose, ate my stomach and made my brain hot and furious. With the Commander stoking this fire he built inside me I walked for days hungry and thirsty, carried supplies, erected camps, fought, murdered and became numb. But last night, in the village where the people didn’t fight, something changed.
Blue moonlight, bright as day. The village dancing around the fire. Tapping and clapping. Singing and swirling. Warm orange light reflecting off their shining bodies. Adults. Not a child among them. Not even a baby to add her little coos and cries to the song.
Our Commander, anger shooting from his sharp crimson eyes, demanded the children’s location. Our ranks had been stripped from many battles against the government forces. We needed reinforcements. New meat. Fresh fodder. Young, soon to be soldiers, who would fight without fear. Who would do what they were told and act without logic or reason.
Not one of the villagers spoke. They just shuffled, humming softly, tapping their dark brown thighs with broad loose fingered hands in maddening unison. Tap, tap, tap. Their faces calm. Mouths turned up. Eyes unafraid. The Commander gave the order. My AK-47 rattling in my ice-cold palms, I picked off the leader. Still they wouldn't speak. Just tap, tap, tap as we began to shoot them – one by one. Tap, tap, tap as if their death was a song.
Now fully awake, shaded from the hot noon sun by jungle canopy, I push another bullet into the banana-shaped cartridge of my AK. It’s easy to load. Easy to clean. Easy to shoot. Even an eight-year-old can do it. The Commander is all fire today. His eyes red flame. His temper flowing and curling, making us quick and obedient.
“They thought sending the children away would keep them safe!” his voice is a bomb detonating in an open field. “They don’t know that we are the righteous hand of God. That we are the chosen ones!”
Guns rattling, we all shout in agreement. Punctuated passion.
“Today we will find their children. A glorious reward to the first soldier to capture them. Go!”
My boots are quick. I hunt through the darkness of the foliage. Through the musky air, the crunch of collapsing plants, the smell of decay. The children can’t be far. Warm water drips down broad shadowy leaves, runs over my skin, sinks into whitened scars of past battles. Bullets, machetes, whippings. My shell-shocked skeleton doesn't feel pain anymore. I am blind to suffering. Lost on my path. Heavy with damage.
A strange beat reaches my ears. A thud, thud, thud that is out of sync with the surroundings. My heart and feet stop simultaneously. We may be hunting the children, but the government is hunting us. I must be on guard. I know I won’t live long. The fire the Commander has lit in my soul will eventually consume me, down to ashes.
Creeping ahead heel, toe, heel, toe, I follow the sound. The thudding is unlike anything I’ve heard before. It’s constant. Like the dripping of rain through my tent. Thud, thud, thud, thud. There’s more now. Slapping. Snapping. Clapping. As constant as the thuds. Pounding. Howling. Whooping. My eyes form slits. My heart speeds. Strange gurgling noises. What is it?
Through branches and trunks, vines and leaves, the jungle ends. Outside the thick murky wall, in the blinding bare sunlight, are the children. Not huddled. Not crying. Not hiding. But circled in the dry yellow grass and dusty red-brown dirt. With two drums pounding, their feet make small puffs of earth lift into the air as they swirl, twirl and spin, arms raised. They clap their hands. Twist around. They look so light. Their joy lifting them off the ground.
Snapping back into the gloom, I look for my comrades. Open my ears wide. Surely I am not the only one who heard the beat. Nothing. My speed has put me out front. With this find I’ll become an officer. I’ll get more food, more alcohol, better drugs. Others will look up to me. I’ll become invulnerable to bullets. With quick precision I fire off a flare. Red smoke explodes in the sky above my head. A signal to my unit. Time to kill and capture.
My rifle barrel tracks along the children’s heads. My finger lays lightly on the trigger. I aim my AK. I’ll kill the little ones first, too weak and too frightened to do more than cry. The rest are thin. They won’t need much food. Today I’m blessed. Heel, toe, heel, toe, I creep out into the light. Exposed under the hot, bright glare. My body, my rifle feeling unnaturally heavy the further I move away from the darkness. The children look, pause, then continue their strange celebration. I see the same creased eyes and pulled up lips as the adults last night. What is that expression? It looks so familiar. I creep closer.
A girls spins and claps, letting out short guttural outbursts.
That sound – I’ve heard it somewhere before.
She skips, leaps and dances over to me, her feet light, hands raised in friendship. No fear of my weapon. No fear of me. Just squinting eyes that sparkle. “Welcome.” Her voice is lyrical. Sing song. Happy.
I say nothing. My AK weighs in my arms. Pulls towards the earth. The barrel dips and falls to the ground between us. My arms. My legs. My head. Too heavy. I look at the circle of shifting, jumping, slapping children. Agile as flickering sunlight shimmying though the trees. “What are you doing?”
“Dancing.”
“Where are your guns?”
“We don’t have any.”
Then it comes to me in a flash. My mother, father, sisters, brothers, elders, friends, family – dancing. A celebration. Their faces like these children. Smiling. Their throats choked up with sounds. Laughing. Fire roaring in celebration. Sparks rising and falling around us on currents of warmth and comfort. My home. My life before war.
“You have to come with me.” I struggle to raise my barrel. Bold but unwieldy. “You’re to be soldiers. Like me.”
“Like you?” She pulls a small cracked mirror out of her pocket and holds it up.
My face is black, streaked. Hollow. Empty. Gone. “This isn't me. Your mirror lies.” I snatch it from her grasp.
“It’s just a reflection,” she shrugs, and reaches to take it back.
I pull it away. Towards me. This isn't my face. This isn't me. Where did I go? Who am I now?
“We just want to dance.” The girl skips up onto her toes, high in the air and leaps back to the circle.
Staring at the mirror still clasped in my dirt-crusted fingers, I study my own image. It is the picture of the enemy. An image of the ones who worship darkness. Somehow, I've become tainted. The music throbs. The drums capture the beat of my heart. In the circle the children are bright and happy. Light and clean. Perhaps they can fix me. Perhaps they know what to do. Stumbling, shuffling, dragging, I make my way to the circle, my feet creating great ditches behind me. The closer I get, the harder it is to hold my own weight. My gun drags, tip down, through the dirt. Can I be cured?
“Dance with us?” a small boy asks, his feet twisting, as I arrive on the edge.
“I can’t.” I’m not sure how to enter.
“Why?”
My weight is too much. “I’m polluted, can you fix me?”
“I only know how to dance.”
We both stand bathed in the beat. Thump, thump, thump. My feet remain hard and heavy. The boy bounces. “What will you do?”
I turn outward, toward the jungle and raise my gun. “I can keep you safe.” More of my kind will be coming. More enemies like me. I have called them.
It isn’t long before I see the glint of eyes in the afternoon sun. They stare out of the green jungle wall. Slowly one staggers forward. He’s younger than me. His AK wavering as he raises it to my head. “What are they doing?” he hisses, his eyes quick.
“Dancing.”
He stands, silent, watching. Rifle tip slowly falling to the earth. “I remember dancing.”
He comes to stand next to me. His gun at the ready. We can defend them. But not for long.
Another boy exits the safety of the jungle mesh, wipes the back of his hand across his mouth. Spits blood. “We danced when my brother was born,” he says, his eyes wet with newly found tears. “The Commander made me kill him. Kill or die.”
The boy joins us.
More and more children, their fatigues dirty, torn and gory come out of the jungle. Each one remembers and each one stands beside the next until our guns form a prickly barrier, a protective shell to defend the dancing children.
Finally the Commander arrives. Wondering where we are. Why we’re so long in our mission. How we could have been defeated. I see his anger wafting and growing like a fuming, drifting demon. Our guns point in his direction. We stand in unison. His anger expands. It lifts from his body and speeds forward, toward us, toward the children. His heated flaming spirit slams the girl with the mirror onto the ground. Her knees skinned by the dirt. Her arm ruby and wet. We return fire, guns chattering. The children clap and shout, thump their drums and pound their feet trying to frighten the demon away. Their joy rising up to meet his dark spirit. The girl pulls to a stand, twirls and smiles then laughs hard at our commander. His strength diminishes. Sinks. Fails. We stop firing. He stomps back into the shadows, shaking the leaves with his fury.
My soldiers cheer the victory. Our bodies enjoying a momentary lightening before the heaviness burdens us once more. The children resume their dance but a distant rumbling halts the celebration. All eyes watch the thin dirt road raised out of the dried grasses not far from where we stand. The thunder of large trucks with big guns moves closer and soon clouds of red-brown dirt block the sun. They too have been drawn to my flare.
I stand ready to fight, we all do, but we know it’s over. We’re done. Even joy can’t stop bullets. I direct my soldiers to aim at the road. We’ll fight until the end. We’ll do what we can to rid ourselves of the enemy inside.
Five trucks break the top of the hill, white as the hot sky. English letters, UN, printed on a stripe of red. They stop in a long line. Big guns trained on us. We don’t back down. Two solders get out. One with gun raised. One, hand held up. They walk slowly, tentatively. “Easy does it. Easy does it. Who’s in charge?” one asks.
I step forward. No longer afraid. My fingers tap, tap, tapping on the trigger of my gun. Tap, tap, tap like my heartbeat.
“What are you doing?” he asks.
“Defending,” I say.
The blue helmeted soldier looks puzzled. In the center the dancing has started again with small leaps. Hands clapping a gentle rhythm. Drums thumping a quieter beat. The slow march. “What are they doing?” He flicks his chin.
“Dancing.”
The soldiers scratch their heads. Frown. “Are you with the rebels?”
The girl comes to stand beside me. Her brown hand lays lightly on my shoulder. I give her mirror back, my mouth pulling up. “Not anymore.”
“You had better come with us. We’ll take you to a safe place. A place where you can stop being soldiers. Go to school. Have fun.”
A shot is fired from the jungle. The Commander is back with his officers. Blue helmeted men pour out of the trucks, they load the dancing children inside to safety. Load my soldiers too. Try to load me.
But I stay and fight. I need to cleanse my soul of demons. Put out the Commander’s fire. Rid myself of the enemy inside. Remember my life before war.
My gun spouts hot casings. Enemy bullets flying through my skin. Shattering bones. Pouring my poisoned blood over the ground. Making me lighter. My feet leap. I laugh loud at the enemy. My dance freeing me. My father, the shaman, appears and wraps his arms around me. Squeezes his love through me. Crushes the enemy out of my body. We lift upward towards the sky. A dark bleeding skeleton face down on the dirt below. My heaviness gone at last.
I can’t go home. None of my soldiers can. But maybe, each of us may find a way back to our life before war if we can just learn to dance.
Even before I wake up, I’m firing. Finger squeezed tight to the trigger. Metal biting skin. Leaves raining down. Blinding hot sunlight filtering through. Round after round tearing apart the jungle canopy. It’s been so long since the killing affected me.
In my life before war, my father was a shaman, that much I remember. Leading our village in the traditional ways of prayer and harvest. Light and dark. Good and evil. I was eleven when the rebels came. Only three years before now. They pressed their still hot rifle barrels to my head. Made me commit my first murder. It was kill or be killed and in one action, one slice of the machete forced into my shaking hands, I was parentless, homeless, shunned.
Memory soon washed away with the blood. Killing became easy. Almost nothing. I learned to be emboldened by brown brown - a mixture of cocaine and gunpowder that burned my nose, ate my stomach and made my brain hot and furious. With the Commander stoking this fire he built inside me I walked for days hungry and thirsty, carried supplies, erected camps, fought, murdered and became numb. But last night, in the village where the people didn’t fight, something changed.
Blue moonlight, bright as day. The village dancing around the fire. Tapping and clapping. Singing and swirling. Warm orange light reflecting off their shining bodies. Adults. Not a child among them. Not even a baby to add her little coos and cries to the song.
Our Commander, anger shooting from his sharp crimson eyes, demanded the children’s location. Our ranks had been stripped from many battles against the government forces. We needed reinforcements. New meat. Fresh fodder. Young, soon to be soldiers, who would fight without fear. Who would do what they were told and act without logic or reason.
Not one of the villagers spoke. They just shuffled, humming softly, tapping their dark brown thighs with broad loose fingered hands in maddening unison. Tap, tap, tap. Their faces calm. Mouths turned up. Eyes unafraid. The Commander gave the order. My AK-47 rattling in my ice-cold palms, I picked off the leader. Still they wouldn't speak. Just tap, tap, tap as we began to shoot them – one by one. Tap, tap, tap as if their death was a song.
Now fully awake, shaded from the hot noon sun by jungle canopy, I push another bullet into the banana-shaped cartridge of my AK. It’s easy to load. Easy to clean. Easy to shoot. Even an eight-year-old can do it. The Commander is all fire today. His eyes red flame. His temper flowing and curling, making us quick and obedient.
“They thought sending the children away would keep them safe!” his voice is a bomb detonating in an open field. “They don’t know that we are the righteous hand of God. That we are the chosen ones!”
Guns rattling, we all shout in agreement. Punctuated passion.
“Today we will find their children. A glorious reward to the first soldier to capture them. Go!”
My boots are quick. I hunt through the darkness of the foliage. Through the musky air, the crunch of collapsing plants, the smell of decay. The children can’t be far. Warm water drips down broad shadowy leaves, runs over my skin, sinks into whitened scars of past battles. Bullets, machetes, whippings. My shell-shocked skeleton doesn't feel pain anymore. I am blind to suffering. Lost on my path. Heavy with damage.
A strange beat reaches my ears. A thud, thud, thud that is out of sync with the surroundings. My heart and feet stop simultaneously. We may be hunting the children, but the government is hunting us. I must be on guard. I know I won’t live long. The fire the Commander has lit in my soul will eventually consume me, down to ashes.
Creeping ahead heel, toe, heel, toe, I follow the sound. The thudding is unlike anything I’ve heard before. It’s constant. Like the dripping of rain through my tent. Thud, thud, thud, thud. There’s more now. Slapping. Snapping. Clapping. As constant as the thuds. Pounding. Howling. Whooping. My eyes form slits. My heart speeds. Strange gurgling noises. What is it?
Through branches and trunks, vines and leaves, the jungle ends. Outside the thick murky wall, in the blinding bare sunlight, are the children. Not huddled. Not crying. Not hiding. But circled in the dry yellow grass and dusty red-brown dirt. With two drums pounding, their feet make small puffs of earth lift into the air as they swirl, twirl and spin, arms raised. They clap their hands. Twist around. They look so light. Their joy lifting them off the ground.
Snapping back into the gloom, I look for my comrades. Open my ears wide. Surely I am not the only one who heard the beat. Nothing. My speed has put me out front. With this find I’ll become an officer. I’ll get more food, more alcohol, better drugs. Others will look up to me. I’ll become invulnerable to bullets. With quick precision I fire off a flare. Red smoke explodes in the sky above my head. A signal to my unit. Time to kill and capture.
My rifle barrel tracks along the children’s heads. My finger lays lightly on the trigger. I aim my AK. I’ll kill the little ones first, too weak and too frightened to do more than cry. The rest are thin. They won’t need much food. Today I’m blessed. Heel, toe, heel, toe, I creep out into the light. Exposed under the hot, bright glare. My body, my rifle feeling unnaturally heavy the further I move away from the darkness. The children look, pause, then continue their strange celebration. I see the same creased eyes and pulled up lips as the adults last night. What is that expression? It looks so familiar. I creep closer.
A girls spins and claps, letting out short guttural outbursts.
That sound – I’ve heard it somewhere before.
She skips, leaps and dances over to me, her feet light, hands raised in friendship. No fear of my weapon. No fear of me. Just squinting eyes that sparkle. “Welcome.” Her voice is lyrical. Sing song. Happy.
I say nothing. My AK weighs in my arms. Pulls towards the earth. The barrel dips and falls to the ground between us. My arms. My legs. My head. Too heavy. I look at the circle of shifting, jumping, slapping children. Agile as flickering sunlight shimmying though the trees. “What are you doing?”
“Dancing.”
“Where are your guns?”
“We don’t have any.”
Then it comes to me in a flash. My mother, father, sisters, brothers, elders, friends, family – dancing. A celebration. Their faces like these children. Smiling. Their throats choked up with sounds. Laughing. Fire roaring in celebration. Sparks rising and falling around us on currents of warmth and comfort. My home. My life before war.
“You have to come with me.” I struggle to raise my barrel. Bold but unwieldy. “You’re to be soldiers. Like me.”
“Like you?” She pulls a small cracked mirror out of her pocket and holds it up.
My face is black, streaked. Hollow. Empty. Gone. “This isn't me. Your mirror lies.” I snatch it from her grasp.
“It’s just a reflection,” she shrugs, and reaches to take it back.
I pull it away. Towards me. This isn't my face. This isn't me. Where did I go? Who am I now?
“We just want to dance.” The girl skips up onto her toes, high in the air and leaps back to the circle.
Staring at the mirror still clasped in my dirt-crusted fingers, I study my own image. It is the picture of the enemy. An image of the ones who worship darkness. Somehow, I've become tainted. The music throbs. The drums capture the beat of my heart. In the circle the children are bright and happy. Light and clean. Perhaps they can fix me. Perhaps they know what to do. Stumbling, shuffling, dragging, I make my way to the circle, my feet creating great ditches behind me. The closer I get, the harder it is to hold my own weight. My gun drags, tip down, through the dirt. Can I be cured?
“Dance with us?” a small boy asks, his feet twisting, as I arrive on the edge.
“I can’t.” I’m not sure how to enter.
“Why?”
My weight is too much. “I’m polluted, can you fix me?”
“I only know how to dance.”
We both stand bathed in the beat. Thump, thump, thump. My feet remain hard and heavy. The boy bounces. “What will you do?”
I turn outward, toward the jungle and raise my gun. “I can keep you safe.” More of my kind will be coming. More enemies like me. I have called them.
It isn’t long before I see the glint of eyes in the afternoon sun. They stare out of the green jungle wall. Slowly one staggers forward. He’s younger than me. His AK wavering as he raises it to my head. “What are they doing?” he hisses, his eyes quick.
“Dancing.”
He stands, silent, watching. Rifle tip slowly falling to the earth. “I remember dancing.”
He comes to stand next to me. His gun at the ready. We can defend them. But not for long.
Another boy exits the safety of the jungle mesh, wipes the back of his hand across his mouth. Spits blood. “We danced when my brother was born,” he says, his eyes wet with newly found tears. “The Commander made me kill him. Kill or die.”
The boy joins us.
More and more children, their fatigues dirty, torn and gory come out of the jungle. Each one remembers and each one stands beside the next until our guns form a prickly barrier, a protective shell to defend the dancing children.
Finally the Commander arrives. Wondering where we are. Why we’re so long in our mission. How we could have been defeated. I see his anger wafting and growing like a fuming, drifting demon. Our guns point in his direction. We stand in unison. His anger expands. It lifts from his body and speeds forward, toward us, toward the children. His heated flaming spirit slams the girl with the mirror onto the ground. Her knees skinned by the dirt. Her arm ruby and wet. We return fire, guns chattering. The children clap and shout, thump their drums and pound their feet trying to frighten the demon away. Their joy rising up to meet his dark spirit. The girl pulls to a stand, twirls and smiles then laughs hard at our commander. His strength diminishes. Sinks. Fails. We stop firing. He stomps back into the shadows, shaking the leaves with his fury.
My soldiers cheer the victory. Our bodies enjoying a momentary lightening before the heaviness burdens us once more. The children resume their dance but a distant rumbling halts the celebration. All eyes watch the thin dirt road raised out of the dried grasses not far from where we stand. The thunder of large trucks with big guns moves closer and soon clouds of red-brown dirt block the sun. They too have been drawn to my flare.
I stand ready to fight, we all do, but we know it’s over. We’re done. Even joy can’t stop bullets. I direct my soldiers to aim at the road. We’ll fight until the end. We’ll do what we can to rid ourselves of the enemy inside.
Five trucks break the top of the hill, white as the hot sky. English letters, UN, printed on a stripe of red. They stop in a long line. Big guns trained on us. We don’t back down. Two solders get out. One with gun raised. One, hand held up. They walk slowly, tentatively. “Easy does it. Easy does it. Who’s in charge?” one asks.
I step forward. No longer afraid. My fingers tap, tap, tapping on the trigger of my gun. Tap, tap, tap like my heartbeat.
“What are you doing?” he asks.
“Defending,” I say.
The blue helmeted soldier looks puzzled. In the center the dancing has started again with small leaps. Hands clapping a gentle rhythm. Drums thumping a quieter beat. The slow march. “What are they doing?” He flicks his chin.
“Dancing.”
The soldiers scratch their heads. Frown. “Are you with the rebels?”
The girl comes to stand beside me. Her brown hand lays lightly on my shoulder. I give her mirror back, my mouth pulling up. “Not anymore.”
“You had better come with us. We’ll take you to a safe place. A place where you can stop being soldiers. Go to school. Have fun.”
A shot is fired from the jungle. The Commander is back with his officers. Blue helmeted men pour out of the trucks, they load the dancing children inside to safety. Load my soldiers too. Try to load me.
But I stay and fight. I need to cleanse my soul of demons. Put out the Commander’s fire. Rid myself of the enemy inside. Remember my life before war.
My gun spouts hot casings. Enemy bullets flying through my skin. Shattering bones. Pouring my poisoned blood over the ground. Making me lighter. My feet leap. I laugh loud at the enemy. My dance freeing me. My father, the shaman, appears and wraps his arms around me. Squeezes his love through me. Crushes the enemy out of my body. We lift upward towards the sky. A dark bleeding skeleton face down on the dirt below. My heaviness gone at last.
I can’t go home. None of my soldiers can. But maybe, each of us may find a way back to our life before war if we can just learn to dance.