The shelling began at seven in the morning and hasn’t ceased since. Every few minutes, there’s a muffled launch, then a whistle and a hiss. Sometimes the strikes are close, sometimes far away. I’m lying in the dugout, and my imagination draws a burning mesh of trajectories carved into the frostbitten landscape of the mouse kingdom in unharvested fields; into the pattern of shredded tree lines where you’re more likely to meet a shell-shocked spirit or a dog than a human being; where mines, bags, cans, cartridges, bandages soaked in blood, pus, and who knows what else rot along the roadsides; into a tangle of trenches that looks like the intertwining of whale organs, with the dugout’s stomach and those sleeping in it. I remember shards of ice with blood-red berries that began to fall on the parapet five minutes before the shelling, when the sun warmed the branches covering our position. The ice cracked, crumbled, and fell onto the dirt mound right before my eyes, melted, leaving wet streaks and red berries on the black and brown soil. And then the shelling began, the shift ended, I’m lying in the belly of the dugout, having slipped past the net of shells like a wise fish, and I amuse myself, going over the shards of ice and blood-red berries in my mind.
***
Warmth in the winter trenches is currency. Or rather, not even currency, but a gold reserve, something that gives value to all currency, to bullets, to sleep, to food. A reserve distilled into tongues of flame – but isn’t gold itself a kind of fire? A hungry, fiery reserve, never enough, always demanding replenishment. We cherish life and freedom above money, above warmth – but only as long as we are at least a little warm, as long as those accounts, if not paid, are at least unfrozen. Everything warm is marked as familiar, as our own: from the gas burner to self-heating chemical insoles, to the filthy intimacy of bodies huddled in sleep. One cannot deceive warmth, just as one cannot deceive air. We tame fire, and fire tames us. It blooms at the burner’s iron tip not as some worn-out floral metaphor, but as something intimate and familiar when we stretch out our twisted, frozen fingers toward it. In the flickering dance of green, yellow, and blue against walls flushed pink, a fluidity of form reveals itself. The smoldering, feminine fire of eros––and fire burns through the metaphor. The raw ignition of gunpowder in a cartridge––when it turns into close-range fire––is the most terrifying. The noxious yet warm smoke of a trench candle, the same as it was in the war seventy years ago. Heat comes to the rescue from within––in a surge of fear and joy when a strike lands close, or mockingly from sounds that only resemble a close strike. A bird will suddenly rustle, a tree will creak, clothing will swish––and it scorches from the inside, throws you behind the parapet or into a puddle of mud in a single jolt. And then, for a long and hopeless time, you’ll have to shake out your clothes, dry them piece by piece over the burner, saving them with fire, from fire, for fire.
***
The concussion leaked as tears from his eyes and mucus from his nose. Clear liquid ran down his face onto his knees, onto the silvery blanket, onto his trembling arms and legs.
That afternoon, he limped from the Island for evacuation. No fear in his eyes, but sound and pressure were imprinted there. In the blood-shot whites still lingered the compressed instant of the blast––flash, thunder, and a force that paralyzes every sense at once. This was the birth of a new man: one who weeps and trembles. The invisible wound of a concussion, like any wound, tried to outgrow the one it had struck. It stared at me through dilated pupils, it trembled, it flowed onto the silver, it wanted and begged to go home.
When I came to the Island for the second concussed soldier, the first thing I heard was the crack of a tree falling across the trench. I knew immediately: the shift would be hard. War is not rock music, it’s techno. Not granite, but ash. A beautiful, unpredictable idiot, in the end.
At night I dreamed of roots. A thick, slightly wavy line, descending and branching outward into fine weaves of curved, dancing threads––then another, and another. They wove themselves into a pattern, of course, but an incomplete and improperly begun. A fragment so singular it was impossible to tell whether it belonged to any greater whole. A labyrinth stripped of passage. I woke to find my finger tracing that same root-labyrinth across my palm, as if marking the spot for a tattoo, sketching a new image of the future over the old.
In the morning, the Grads struck us. A bitter sting of gunpowder and scorched earth swept in. The sharp, intoxicating scent of wormwood over the wheatland. Both wormwood and I know: no wheat will grow here for a long time.
To aestheticize, so as not to die––to be perfectly honest. But who said that perspective is false? Even if it’s not allowed, I’ll do it. Even if others did before me, and others will after. The clear mucus on silver, blood-red eyes, scorched metal and gunpowder, the dreamed root, the wormwood––they were truly mine.