Today’s New Verse News: CRYSTAL BALL
by Laura Rodley
In the knuckle of the nightmare what does he see? He swivels the joint around, sees faces of children, no longer innocent, their faces blank, then blown up. It is not that he had to bury any; that was not his job. Instead, he was flown above the rice paddies where the women worked, their wide hats resembling shiitake mushrooms when seen from the sky, their tiny hoes hoeing the fields, gathering the grain, letting the water out, sprayed with napalm and agent orange; they all ate it, its perfume a pollen of poison. He was up in a helicopter, delivering paychecks, manna from the government. What is easy to ignore when survival demands it comes back to stare you in the face. The children’s faces below, his fellow soldiers, a flip of propeller blade and they are gone, but not now, not fifty-five years later, a whole other lifetime. He still carries butterscotch lifesavers in his pockets that he handed out to the children that came begging; they saw him as Santa Claus, one of his many camouflaged elves. He can’t turn time back but his nightmares do it for him, every night he reenters the war zone he left behind, taught as a man from birth not to have feelings, then returning from duty, not to have feelings, with no one buying him a drink at the bar or asking him to speak at the high school, as the World War II vets were so honored. It’s a long way back, to the fields of yellow pollen that was not the dust of Ailanthus trees, a long way back to the drugs that were offered to make you forget, to the beers, to women offered, to the honor you held tight to your chest. He knew all the lyrics to The Doors, the Beatles, Dion and the Belmonts; where does that get him now? He’s held tight in the fist of his commanding officer suck it up, be a man. He’s held tight in the fist of his own heart, squeezing the life out of him and into him, regulating his every action, his every breath. But the rhythm of the heart is not the territory of nightmares, the nightmares leave notches, catch his breath; he wanted a gentle life, honor held tight in the fist that is his heart, caught off balance, flailing, ceaselessly trying to get into the groove, pay attention. His life depends on it.
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Laura Rodley, Pushcart Prize winner, is a quintuple Pushcart Prize nominee and quintuple Best of Net nominee. Latest books: Turn Left at Normal by Big Table Publishing, Counter Point by Prolific Press, and As You Write It Lucky Lucky 7, a collection of 11 writers' work.