Sometimes stories don’t end up the way you want them. Sometimes you just need to let go. I think there are some interesting ideas in this one, though I would have liked them all to come together in the end.
DISCLAIMER: This work has not been edited beyond what was done in the video. The goal is to capture a story in a short amount of time and keep it as raw as possible.
The Story
Andre saw red. A figure peeled away from the color but colored the same. It rounded a column of fire that underlit its faces like an imp, a fiend, a devil.
“Play me a song,” it said.
Andre’s ears rang, so he couldn’t hear Dubois while he choked on his own blood. The dying soldier’s eyes looked in Andre’s direction, then narrowed, frustrated that his brother in arms wasn’t hearing his dying words.
But I am not your brother, Andre thought.
Then he realized Dubois wasn’t upset. His mouth opened a crack to show white teeth. Not a smile or frown.
Then Dubois’s face creased into a map of lines, which served as troughs for the blood to catch and flow into, spreading across his entire face in ribbons.
Fractured glass, Andre thought. That’s what it looked like. And it helped him separate himself from the sight of a man he knew well, dying slowly and miserably. Something within Andre wouldn’t allow him to let Dubois go, put him on the ground, in the ground, where he should be.
Andre looked away to see if that would pass the time. Morning crept down the hillside at a glacial pace. Distant buildings, ruined but likely teeming with the enemy looked like tombstones.
Fists pummeled Andre’s chest. Weak, but there. As if Andre held an upset child who had freed his arms from his swaddling clothes.
“You are a child,” Andre said. He felt the words, distant. Four dull notes. He tried to place them, and when he couldn’t, he repeated the words. Still nothing.
Dubois did hear, however, because his face pinched more severely, flattening all the creases that had been river beds, which now flooded. His face was a crimson mask. Dubois thought keeping his mouth closed would prolong his life, but he soon discovered that was folly. He let his last breath out with a word or two, or maybe just a moan–Andre’s ears still held that solitary note that had been plucked by his sidearm, which acted as a pillow for poor Dubois, twisted in Andre’s fingers.
Andre lay Dubois down, his elbows locked from holding him for so long. His pistol fell free and lodged in the mud beside Dubois’s head.
“You are a child,” Andre said again. A hint of something there, bending with that persistent ringing. He would find it eventually.
Andre set off, keeping to the morning shadows, crawling when he had to, and that was fine with him because he was tired of carrying Dubois’s remains along with him.
He rested near some rubble piled high enough so he could sit up. The mud and grass hadn’t completely washed Dubois off him. He took off his coat and tossed it aside. Still some of Dubois on his undershirt, he stripped that off too.
“You are a child,” he said to his pale, concave chest.
“What’s that?”
Startled, Andre threw his head back against the rubble. The figure in front of him, whom he could hear so clearly, leaned over with a rifle anchored to his shoulder.
Recognizing some of his own by their dress, Andre scrambled to his discarded coat to provide evidence that he was one of them. A swift kick to the ribs foiled that plan, and Andre curled into a ball.
“Found his handiwork yonder,” one said.
“Sick bastard,” said another.
“Trying to get rid of the evidence are we?” The man with the rifle asked, closer now, the barrel of the gun pressed above the ear than rang most. “What makes a man turn on his own, eh?”
Andre was transfixed, not afraid. How could he hear them? He couldn’t hear his own voice, and he hadn’t been able to hear Dubois’s. Maybe he had died on the short journey, and these were angels or devils, permitted to speak in this afterlife he found himself in, which disappointingly looked just like real life. Andre pushed his hand into the mud. Felt like real life.
He looked up to the man and said, “You are a child.”
Andre heard nothing but dull tones. He punched the mud, which dirtied the rifleman’s boots.
The rifleman checked his boot, then tsked. He brought his rifle to Andre’s forehead, pushed it until Andre’s head met cold stone. His finger moved to the trigger. He closed one eye.
Andre threw up his muddied hand, batting away the rifle, which went off right above his ear. That single dull note wailed louder than ever, and the two men above him moved in slow motion, their contours expanding into sound waves that distorted the sky.
Andre raised his other hand from the mud to fend off the rifleman who fell toward him. In that hand was his pistol, and, timed perfectly, as if fate, it tunneled into the rifleman’s open mouth. The barrel’s impact at the back of his throat and the subsequent recoil, pulled the trigger.
Andre saw red. His ears rang. Figures peeled away from the color. He lay there like the dead for some time. And perhaps he was.
“You are a child,” he said. White noise pervaded.
Andre stumbled to one of the ruined buildings back the way he had come. He couldn’t face the light any longer.
Inside had been ransacked. Bullet holes dressing the walls as much as the crumbling plaster, pictures of framed people he greeted as he entered their home. He stepped onto a rug, which led to a piano, keys exposed, like teeth. Not a smile or frown.
He lay his hands on them, noticing unsoiled sleeves. His coat as well. When had he put on a coat? Then he felt a weight on his head, on which he found a helmet. He placed it atop the piano next to a frame of the two men who had been devils. They didn’t speak, but Andre supposed he owed them a song.
He only knew four notes, but he was sure they would help him find the others.