Missives From Troy

I was trying Write or Die, and gave myself fifteen minutes to write 500 words. This happened. I’m kind of curious about it now.

Over the river and through the woods, there was nothing left to see. All the little soldiers had wandered home years before, through the empty lanes and over the dry riverbeds. There was hardly anything left to see in the woods, which had been demolished to make fires and pyres and battering rams and arrows. What twigs were left over were not enough for the remaining creatures to thread together into shabby nests and homes.

Amongst the rubble lived a little girl with shabby clothes and ragged nails. She ate the gravel and drank the sap from the bleeding vines. She lived in a trench and slept under a covering of abandoned machinery. She washed her hair in the dirt and scrubbed her face with the stones from the fields. Her friends were the skeletal birds and the bones of the woodland animals. She had elaborate conversations with the puppets of the dead and made herself castles with the remains of the empires long fallen. She was happy, because her world was complete.

Away, there was a little boy who ran through green fields and played in babbling streams. He stalked the little creatures of the thickets near his home and watched as the birds of every plumage took to the air and flew into blue skies. He was cleaned in the clear water and pressed into clothes dried in the sunlight. He was happy, because his world was complete.

In between, there was a soldier. He wore his uniform as though he had forgotten he had skin beneath. His cap sat on his head where his hair once had been, and his rifle filled his hand as though the two were made for companionship. He breathed the air so long as it was there to be inhaled, and he gave it no other thought. He groomed his shoes and his shoulders, but a beard grew on his face where he no longer investigated to see what he looked like. The soldier was neither happy nor sad, because his world was not meant to be complete.

At the end of the world, there was a woman. She brushed her hair from her face, but did not perceive its hue. She brushed her hands of debris, but did not note the nature of it. Her eyes were always lifted to the empty sky. She was neither happy nor sad, because her world did not exist.

In the world, there are barren lakes and lush valleys. There are clean brooks and polluted eddies. There are snow-capped peaks and frozen basins. There are parched buttes and inhospitable deserts. The world is neither happy nor sad, because the world is complete. 

What became of the girl and the boy and the soldier and the woman was the world’s business alone.