THE TOPIC OF THIS CONTEST WAS:
The sagging porch faced east. Beyond the field of rotting pumpkins, a blood moon was rising. After a long day of moonshining, the two men alternated swigging from the same jug. They’d both heard the stories. They knew they had to get inside before the moon turned orange. Then, they noticed a little girl in a white dress skipping in their direction…
(Stories need only touch on this topic in some way to qualify. And, they could not exceed 850 words.) Before you continue reading, take a moment to consider where you would take that story…
It were a nightmare, it were.
I always thought that’s maybe why I survived. By telling myself I was only trapped in the most horrible of dreams, not out in the real world. By convincing my muddled brain that the rats, the fleas, the louses – all them mean and ill-tempered vermin of Satan’s creation – were only my fever, my pain, my damaged body making things up.
I survived by believing the stench, the reek of blood, sewerage, decay and death weren’t real. Those things were talked of by my beloved grandfather, who’d survived Waterloo and lost only one ear.
Surely they weren’t in my life.
I survived by pretending that the watery gruel, the mealy potatoes, the fusty biscuits and rotting figs all was my sick imagination, all part of that same hellish nightmare. By becoming so sure I was making up the drops of burning whisky and sour home-made hootch orderlies held to my cracked lips from the tin canteen cups.
And the sounds I could invent to survive! I were dreaming with the best of them, I reckon! Screaming, shouting, the rumbly-tumbly cannon fire out there somewhere, and up close, the groans, the moans, the shrieks, and my evil nightmare always jabbing at me with the sly rustle of the rats along the floors.
I survived by thinking the smashed and collapsing hospital walls and roof, half open to the skies, were only part of my dreams, a cruel hallucination. That’s not a word I knew as a boy, but when you lie there on those brick-hard boards, racked by so much pain, even through your nightmares you hear words said around you, over you, through you.
Officers, doctors, them blood-smeared orderlies, they don’t pull no punches. “Poor chap” were about as good as it got. Mostly it were “Cut it off…”, “He’s not long for this world…”, “Haul ëim away.” And a few times very near me I heard, “Hallucinations, I’d say. Let him think you’re his mother, Deakins.” “Some of these fellows’ minds are so far off, it’s a jolly good thing, eh? Hallucination might be our best medicine out here.”
In my sweaty nightmares I often thought of the term ëstiff upper lips.’ Something British officers and the other higher classes claim to have. Until them lips is blown off by mortar debris. Then what’s stiff, eh? Well, at least, my ugly puss didn’t have to deal with that. Only my other parts.
See where my left hand used to be? I dream it’s still there, still whole, not blown and sawed off, with bandages and those turny-straps keeping my very life in my body, my arm screaming past a point where it couldn’t scream no more.
Grandfather said pain is a mountain. You climb up, and when you reach the top, suddenly you look over them clouds and see blue skies, and you just float off into peace, no more pain. Meantime you can hide in your nightmare.
I was sure I’d wake up sometime. Wake up to find myself maybe lying in an apple orchard, ripe fruit and sweet blossoms all about, a regular garden of Eden. Or wake to lounging in some princess bedroom, a boo-door, as the French call it. A lassie with long red hair would feed me cool green grapes and stroke my forehead and sing me lullabies.
Or I’d wake back home in dear old England, my mother’s little smoky, dark cottage never looking so good. Aye, now I know it were a palace.
Alas, my nightmare, it were real enough. I was to awake over and over not in those fine safe places but in the hellhole my injuries had led me to. I began to understand this ward, this hospital were likely but waystations to my end. I tried to remember my Sunday School prayers.
But the wheel of fortune turns, as Will Shakespeare tells us. Every British schoolboy knows old Will. More than we knows those prayers. And here’s how the wheel turned for me.
A blood moon it were that night, the first since about 1850. I could see it through the hole where parts of the ceiling had been. Big and red and scary too, that moon were, stirring up all the old superstitions, and dropping an eerie light into the ward. I thought of plump pumpkins ready for picking in our village fields, and somehow my parched mouth began to water.
And suddenly here came girls! Little girls dressed in white, flitting about. Moths in the night, I thought, flying up to that blind blood moon, drawn there to that strange brightness.
But no, dimly bathed in red-orange, they were coming to us in our cots, pushing officers and doctors aside, talking gently, washing us, feeding us, slowly turning our waking nightmares into healing.
The tallest one, carrying a flickering lantern, came to my dingy corner. I heard rats scurrying off. She looked into my stinging eyes and said simply, “Take heart, young man.”
The blood moon soon retreated. But the girls in white remained, not just for that night but for the rest of my time there, and beyond.
That one girl, that one woman, that one nurse saved me and so many others. I’ll always remember her name, bless her. It were Florence Nightingale.
