Welcome Home

A twisted storm of shot and shell, wind and rain that ripped the ground, and bloody glowing blooms of red, warring and breeding with the sundered sky.

A man, draped in sopping cloth, his back turned away from me, hands dirty and bare, one hanging by his side, the other placed against black wet stone that jutted from the earth.

I can hardly see, the air is thick with falling rain, and I cannot stand, the ground is too slick, and I am too frightened.

At least, part of me is frightened; the other parts gawk in an ambivalent wonder as the world changes right before my eyes—every shell that falls heaves the land, and every raindrop melts the dirt. All together, the mush burns with an ember glow, from the ground at my feet to the dark sky above. Some of this fire blooms without sound, high above my head or far from my eyes, but others come with a roar in the night, and the mud at my feet sloshes.

And despite it all, even as this seething mass of fiery activity, I am at once so close to it, and so far from it.

Even as the thunder and guns shake the air all around me, I know that this is not me, and that I have no real part in it, only the part which I choose to play; I am too small.

I move a knee, cold and shaking, but the sole of my boot has no grip, and I am forced to hold to stones around me.

The figure before me stirs, and even as I see the familiar color of field gray in what's left of his uniform, I am afraid.

He is much too similar to everything else, this cold and mechanical chaos; he is one with it, with his tattered cloth and hanging gait, and I am not.

I do not belong.

I do not belong!

But still, he turns, showing me a head wrapped in a mask, looking at me with big sad eyes made of glass. He regards me for a moment, and I wonder if he sees what I see, that my heart and mind are wholly different from the black earth riddled with holes behind me.

And even though he wears a mask, I know that behind that gray suede and that heavy canister, he smiles.

Slowly, and yet deliberately, he raises his hand, gray and clammy in the cold, and offers it to me.

I look at it, and see how it so closely resembles the hand of a corpse, with dirt in its creases, and I think about how cold it would be, if I were to take it, and I do not want to.

But I know that I must—I have no other choice—and before I make the decision to, my arm moves and our two hands clasp.

I wasn't wrong, about how cold it would be.

I find myself hoping that my warmth will show him how different I am from him and from this place, prove it to him, perhaps, and that he will know I do not belong, and leave me be.

But as I look into the lenses of his mask, and see a blossoming of fire in the sky above him, I know that this will not be, for he cares not for the warmth in my hand; only that it needs to be taken away, if I'm to survive.

And I realize, in that moment, that he carries no threat other than the ghastly companionship of war: he is war, to me; not that hideous and loud and all too close cacophony behind him: he is, because he was once as warm as I was, and he was changed, and in him I see me.

And there's no telling how soon I will be like him.

Then, as he looks down at me, just one bit of movement in the muffled mass around us, he utters two words, and I know all that I had thought was right.

"Welcome home."

Behind him, an explosion illuminates the corpses.