"Keep" Series (part one): Short story

A little detail before we begin...

Back in my earlier high school days, I would take many different notes on my phone. Often times, I would be sitting on the bus ride home, just thinking about life, and an idea would come up. As a result, I have a bunch of random ideas, thoughts, or lists on the app called Keep Notes. But one of the things I would take note of were story ideas, play ideas, or poem ideas (most of which I think I went through and deleted at some point).

However, I thought it might be fun to show you guys some of my different creative works. Today, I am doing a short story, based of a story idea that was kept on the 29 June 2018. What did the prompt say? "Story idea: A man who messes up in the army marching"

Let's see how we go with this one! There is no plot - I have no clue why I thought this was a good story idea...

A Foot Out of Place

By Aynsley Vivian

"Wrong"

In the midst of a crisis, the last thing you want to worry about are the steps you took.

"Wrong again"

But each step is incredibly important.

"Keep working at it."

There are methods to follow, but generally, most people will respond quite naturally.

"Don't roll your eyes, you will get better."

Each step, is one they have learnt since childhood.

"And don't look at your feet like they're the problem."

"But they are the problem!" Aiming to kick the bed frame, I kicked the army doctor in the shins.

For a newfound cripple, I sure could kick hard. The doctor let out a grunt, put his head down for just a moment and held his breath. "Oh come on doc, are you telling me you've never had a bereaved man hurt you before?" He looked at me as if I were stupid.

"You know, you have the ability to mitigate your circumstances, you just don't have the willpower. You need the guts to say 'I will work at this, no matter how many times I fall over!'"

"And you need the guts to say 'My patient is strong enough, I felt that enough in the blow to my shins." He gave me a similar look to before. But when I wasn't looking, he added a nice bruise to my non-injured leg, making me fall to the floor.

"I will continue to do that, until you decide you stop smart-mouthing me, and use that mind to push your body. Or risk being pushed to the floor."

I got the message.

_________________________________________________________________________________________

Ever since the bomb went off in Cologne, I have been unable to do the simplest things. There are sights you cannot detach, from the simplest actions of your own body.

Jump ropes in the street were reduced to cotton balls. Coffee cups shattered across the ground from which came their ceramic. Glass reduced to the sand which composed them. Building blocks crumbled to undo the action of the mortar. Soccer balls resigned to the memories of children who played with them.

But even the children were reduced to the memory of survivors.

Limbs were strewn across the cobblestones of a once-populated city. It had become scarce in souls, and stagnant blood was suspended in the gaps between stone-lined streets.

Ironic, that the children who once danced to avoid the gaps in the pavement, allowed their blood to flow within these selfsame channels. While survivors hopped as the children once did, mothers allowed the blood to trickle across their fingers, as if it carried life anymore.

As if they wished their blood could mingle with the martyrs.

All the while, across the way, I laid watching the mothers, a large portion of bare leg muscle rearing its ugly head, hidden by the length of my trench coat. I knew that where those mothers sat, mourning over the rivers of blood, my own foreign blood was combined with their children's.

I knew now that the people of Cologne had my blood, that fluid which came closer to my heart than anything else. As well as to my brain. And since then, my mind has pulsed with the sights and memories which Cologne created. They course through my body.

And through the shattered leg from which I must stand and walk.

_________________________________________________________________________________________

The Colonel wanted to see me doing my exercises. After the war, you'd think he would give up, allow the men a break. But on his three day pass, he took me away to a army camp - void of the men who now returned home to families. The army doctor came along with me.

"You will do the boot camp exercises to the best of your ability. Is that clear?"

I looked at him, pleadingly. I pointed to my leg "Surely more bed rest, sir?"

He gazed into my eyes, perhaps wondering if any brain lay behind them. "From what the doc said, you have had too much bed rest and not enough exercise. You will now exercise, and little rest will be granted, have I made myself clear?"

Boot camp was hard. The Colonel yelled at me across the campsite, telling me I was going too slow. Being a soldier, you learn to hold your tongue when a commanding officer was yelling at you. But they couldn't control what you thought of them. When your leg is in throbbing pain after an accident in war, and they call you "weak" - you can think of worse insults for them.

The worst part of boot camp was doing it alone. No men to run alongside me. No comrades to build you up. I was back to square one, training up again, and I didn't even have the basics - relationships.

The final exercise of the day was the march. Once again, I did it alone. His voice yelled loudly, interrupting the silence of the nearby woods. I was dripping sweat. And with every leg movement, I faltered. He yelled at me to get up again. And I would fall. My face became muddied with the dirt of the ground. It was completely dry outside, and yet combined with my sweat, the dirt created clay mask all over. I could not march with ease. And I certainly did not want to do it alone.

I lay on the bed, my legs quivering with each frequent muscle spasm. The doctor watched my body shake. He just watched me, shaking. I began to tear up. "Why are you just looking at me? Don't you want to apologise? Can't you show me pity? While all those unbroken men celebrate, I lie here, bruised, dirty and broken, more than I was right after the bomb! Why must you torture me? Must I always suffer?"

The army doctor - who I had grown to despise - kept his head low. "You will learn to march again, or you will never celebrate as those men."

And with his words, he stepped out of his chair, opened his door and told me to go home.

_________________________________________________________________________________________

"You don't understand what happened that day, my recourse will never come. This leg will never heal. It belongs not where it is. It belongs to the mothers of those children!"

Breathe in. Breathe out. This was the discourse of therapy. After every exclamation, I must breathe. It seemed so unnecessary. I felt so inadequate, surely this was more weakness than I deserved. Surely my vulnerability would scar as much as Cologne.

After leaving boot camp months before, and with little in the way of recovery, the army doctor condemned me to white-walled office, and leather-bound chair: the therapist. And nothing so plain, could've angered me so much. Except the wooden stick upon which my complex body would depend upon, which taunted me as it would lean dependently on the chair.

"Where did it get the idea of mockery? Why now did it wish to reveal to me that it too is dependent on something else? Why must it taunt me?"

He gazed from behind the cup of tea his secretary had just brought in. "And what is that?"

"The walking stick! Why must I depend upon it, when it depends upon this chair to stand? Why must I rest on this chair to feel such comfort?" I began to stand. I began to pace. Clumsily. But confidently. I felt powerful. But the secretary walked in, and all at once, I was a fool.

She quickly moved out of the room, as if she had to leave when a patient was going senile. The therapist watched her close the door. "We are always dependent on something".

I remember crawling across the pavement, the friction of a single pant leg working against my movement. I remember a mother laying helpless on the streets, crimson-stained, melding not her life, but her tears with the streams. She did not offer a hand. Neither did the baker, whose shop was destroyed, offering bread to the broken - of which he was one, with a large shard of glass protruding from his left forearm. He acted as if it wasn't there. He may not have known - his eyes were strangely hazy and wide.

And by sheer willpower, I made it out of the city, now limping. I lay in a trench for hours, blacking out every now and then.

"You see, even then. It was willpower, it was not dependency. And who needs to walk properly? I made it out."

"You made it out, because another abandoned soldier helped you the rest of the way, to where camp was set up. You may not have walked properly even then, but you were dependent on your buddy."

"But this stick, its not even alive. It has no blood. I can't even trust it, it has no intelligence. I have a mind. I have a brain. You can't depend on a stick. And you shouldn't have to depend on a chair."

With this, the therapist put down his stationery and just looked at me. "Do you actually loathe the stick, or what you perceive as betrayal in Cologne?"

I think of the children of Cologne. Mothers crying in the streets. Blood, everywhere. But the crowds of mothers diminish in my memory daily. 20, to 15, to 5.

The therapist comes alongside me. "You're healing, soldier."

Suddenly, there are only two mothers in the streets. Whimpering and wailing. I search tirelessly with dry eyes for the many mothers who haunted my memory perpetually. Looking side to side, I forget to look up.

I look to the bright sky above and I see the faces of mothers I saw at conscription. At the ships, as their sons boarded and waved. They, one by one, cloud the brightness above me. They set the land in deep darkness, as the ash of the bomb rains down on me. As the embers of the explosion temporarily blind my eyes, I hear the cries of the men I commanded, reduced to the wails of children.

They were children. They had lives before this. They would have had a life after this.

The two mothers I saw crying the street sat alone, finding solidarity in their whimpers. But they were not alone. They held the blood of all the deceased. The mothers across the way, who would soon receive the news, would feel comfort in this maternal bond. Whilst they were not the son's mothers, the blood ran from the children, and mothers everywhere felt the pain.

"It should not have happened, mothers should be allowed to relate to their own, not to every child that ever died."

"You should not feel guilty for that which you cannot control. Your blood mixed with your soldiers. Those mothers were crying also for you."

"I don't need pity! I don't need their cries! I don't need Cologne!"

"Oh, but you do. For what else can justify the loss of proper gait? More importantly, where might you be able to feel connection to your men, if your leg was to be fully restored? You know you need this injury, in order to feel you have died alongside them."

If I was at all standing, I fell to the floor. "These legs will never be whole again, those mothers carry my blood, their blood!"

The therapist dropped to the floor "For the sake of your children, walk."

_________________________________________________________________________________________

My grandchildren carried the bouquet of flowers and sweetly lay them on each grave, one by one. They travelled down the lane, laying one of the small daisy bouquets they had prepared earlier that morning. I held my children in my arms, as we watched the young pay tribute to the dead in that innocent, unknowing way.

But I was very knowing. The children I both sheltered and rested on carried the burden of my stories and memories with them, always, till death do them part.

My grandchildren pay tribute to my other children, to my blood brothers with whom I always felt responsible. My ancestors will shelter the dead as if their own.

They will find me, letting go of my children, and marching towards the gate. Seeing blood beneath my feet, and counting it as my own. They will see me, handing a bouquet to the mothers, to the martyrs, to the masses.

I drop the stick, but not my dependence. I march with confidence, but not for myself, but for my children.

And in years of blood-stained tears, I sense the channels within the cobblestone streets close. I sense the pulsing of mind and heart has ended.

But blood marches through generation and generation, in the way it should. And it keeps our history - the blood, sweat and tears - alive.

March on. Whether you falter or not.