Trigger Warning
The leader dragged his right leg into the hamlet’s courtyard and said: “Pretty, hey?”
“Perleese,” her father pleaded.
Men wearing khakis grinned. Some had crooked teeth. Their small, round faces were white under black berets. Their physical bulks made their faces look even smaller. They had been chosen for brawn not brain. The leader abhorred people with better ideas.
“Very pretty, indeed,” he continued, nodding approvingly.
Creating fear gave him a religious sensation of supreme power. The handmade locked breech pistol on his right hip was a gift from the president. The sharp fin on that pistol’s barrel he used to slash people’s faces before shooting them, doubling the thrill.
The girl’s triangular face housed plump, pouting lips. Her skin’s translucence suggested she could glow in the dark. Her opal eyes shimmered like water under a hot sun. She had never seen such nefariousness. She had only ever been surrounded by people concerned about her welfare. Her lips contracted into a tight, pinkish circle of quivering flesh. Her shock was made worse by it being May – her favourite month – and not because May was her birth month but because she loved the spring because spring said: “You have every right to hope.”
The leader’s right hand went up between her thighs. Daisies on surrounding slopes wobbled in the wind. Surrounding wind-hit wheat wailed as if the melancholy that forever swirls in human consciousness was crying over a war-torn land. Her father’s eyes beamed like a horse’s escaping a fire. He lunged towards the leader, screaming: “PIG!”
SWAT-KERRACKKK….
A jet of blood streamed from the father’s head. The leader had not had time to use his cherished fin.
“I detest insults,” he announced. “And especially unasked-for opinions. I’m rather sensitive about that.”
Nobody doubted his self-awareness.
His men laughed their empty cackles of submission.
Hammer-hit steel tent pegs clanged like thwarted desires as tents rose in the camp. Army experience had given Dick the credentials to organise the camp’s logistics. Searchlights painted granite electric blue. The orange-rimmed horizon, blocked by featureless mountains, meant only the big picture remained, details deadened by darkness.
A hand gripped Majlinda’s mother’s throat, her mother’s arms flailing like broken electricity cables. Her mother spat at their faces. The leader covered her mother’s mouth and said: “The sperm source that produced your pig son’s miserable existence has been eliminated – just like your pig son.”
NVA rocket launchers on a slope above a river near Dick’s Vietnam base had got pounded by gunships, shockwaves “knocking you back in your seat,” Dick said, “and parting your hair.”
“Did you see much action?” Dick was asked.
Dick nodded, gravely: “Yes, but veterans avoid talking about it. I did certain things. But I’ve never done anything I’ve ever been ashamed of. Never.”
Fluorescent lights made the refugee camp resemble a moonscape under ebony. Dogs’ eyes in the rubbish dump next door glinted hungrily, colours now black and grey.
Refugees waited to be “housed.” Dick forced families, unknown to each other, to live in the same tents.
Hammers thumped. Tents rose.
Dick told his translator: “Everyone gets the same. Tell them that.”
Majlinda’s mother, head-bowed, was sitting on a boulder. They had been shoved onto a bus by paramilitaries and sent across the border. A black hole shaped like a heart from a tank shell now sat in a wall of their house.
Dick: “They have to live with those people. We don’t have enough tents.”
Van Gogh crows ascended from wheat into blue. A baby with a spike through its torso was against a fence post, its lifeless placidity like a doll’s. A severed horse’s head sat under a singing tree that swayed in shrilling breeze. A charred cart, cut in half, once towed by the horse, faced blue. Clothes and cutlery littered the road. A boot squashed by a tank epitomised the individual’s hopelessness against organised brutality. A dog ripped flesh off a corpse. Bacteria invaded every molecule for miles.
Majlinda’s mother vomited. Tears fell under serene azure. Vomit’s stench complimented death’s pong. Their eyes had become chiselled sharp by terrifying visions. Their heaving hearts ejected sounds from their mouths like birds tormented by cats, mother and daughter clutching each other tenaciously.
Two hours, Dick thought, and this tent building will be over.
The refugees had poured in for days, urine and feces on the buses’ floors, passengers like crammed cattle, faces flattened against glass.
A man said his wife was dying. Her glum eyes seeped despair.
“What’s wrong with her?” Dick asked.
“Pains,” the man replied, “in the head and stomach. Terrible.”
People lied to stay in the camp’s hospital.
“Has she got a long-term illness?” Dick asked.
“Yes.”
“Have you got documents proving this?”
“They were burnt in the house!”
“Sorry, the hospital only deals with people in desperate need.”
The man’s whining mouth widened into rectangular rigidity.
Some people, Dick thought, will do anything to get an advantage! Even when others are suffering!
Majlinda’s mother buried her face into her daughter’s shoulder.
“We’ve got to move, Mum. I want to live to see those bastards die.”
Flames emerged from a roof. Burnt rafters pointed at injured angles. A giant fist had seemingly smashed terracotta. Smoke, coiling from windows, fled into blue.
A house’s owners, burning in its doorway, confirmed that the empty “laughter” reaching Majlinda and her mother over the land’s crests had been gunfire’s chuckling, uncertainty hissing like wind-swept reeds in their heads.
Their throats, throbbing like oxygen-depleted lungs, ejected howls high-pitched by disbelief.
Determined to express her experience made Majlinda announce: “Let’s get to the border.”
The barrel guffawing heard over the land’s unreal contentment had been the gunfire that had killed their neighbours. Their gasping mouths suggested that only oxygen stops insanity.
A worker was trying to calm a “ranting” woman. Majlinda’s mother had grabbed an unwrapped tent.
“Tell her,” Dick said, “she’s already got a tent, and that others, as badly off as her, need that tent.”
Greed amazed Dick. Decency meant conforming to authority’s desires.
They should help each other! Dick thought.
Convenient ideas are iron-clad in manicured morality.
Majlinda’s mother repeated something to the Albanian aid worker. Her eyes ejected lasers of desperate pleading.
“What did she say?” Dick asked.
“That she’s sorry,” the aid worker replied. “That she doesn’t want to cause inconvenience.”
“Good,” Dick replied. “Thank her.”
“I’ll give it back to you later,” the aid worker told her, Dick thinking: She should be ashamed, stealing tents, while others are suffering!
The aid worker realised that Majlinda’s mother needed more than just privacy, her throat throbbing with panicked agitation, “that man, that man…..” shrilling from her mouth.
The man supposed to be sharing a tent with Majlinda and her mother placed repudiation spotlights into Majlinda’s mother’s eyes.
“It’s amazing,” Dick said, “how people cheat when everyone is suffering.”
Interpretations soothe. We are unconsciously creative.
Majlinda’s mother screamed when the man dragged his right leg into the tent.
“NO!!” Majlinda told the aid worker. “He………”
Florescence increased the luminosity of her ocular spotlights.
The limping man yelled: “All I see is the bastard who shot me and killed my wife and children.”
Majlinda’s hands fled to her face.
“Everywhere,” the man yelped, “I look I see that fucking animal.”
“What are they doing?” Dick asked the aid worker. “People are waiting to enter tents!”
Small, inflated priorities trivialise the magnitude of the pain that surrounds us.
The limping man’s hands plastered his face. Tsunami sympathy, rushing through Majlinda’s mother chest, took the man from tyrant to victim, Majlinda’s mother embracing him.
“No problem now then?” Dick asked the Albanian aid worker.
“Not now,” the aid worker replied,
Another “hiccup” had been resolved.