The Attic                                                                

by Polly Card

he scratches woke him.  He came round disorientated and confused by a recent, unintelligible dream.  They came from somewhere above him, irregular and insistent.  He listened, threw one leg over the blanket and turned over, irritated.  He guessed it was just before dawn, the darkest part of the night.  Holding a pillow to his ear he would muffle the sound and investigate in the morning.  But the scrapes were persistent.  He kicked off the blanket and reached for his glasses.  He was a tall man but the bed was ludicrously high.  He leapt lightly onto the silk rug and threw on a purple gown.  For all the good it would do him he resolved to investigate.

Pale light from the street lamp slanted through the crack in the heavy velvet curtains.  He moved through the grainy dark of the hall to the landing without making a sound or turning on a light.  From there he trod heavy-footed to frighten what ever it was away.  Just above him was the trap door that led to the attic.  The attic was why he had bought the flat and the reason he hated it.  Most of the time he forgot its existence, but every once in a while he was reminded of the books he had stored there.  He climbed barefoot onto a chest of draws and bumped his head on the latch above.

Heaving up through the hatch he listened and scanned the gloom.  Nothing.  The throbbing hum of the boiler below pulsed with foreboding.  The air was stale and smelt of damp plaster.  He could almost stand straight.  He stepped carefully where he thought the beams should be and avoided the weak ceiling and floor in-between.  The loft was full of cardboard boxes laid out like tombs in neat rows.  He could make out the yellow tape marked ‘discontinued stock’.  The box nearest to him had its bright label torn off and was open; he took out a book and wiped away the dust.  ‘The Wayfarer’ by Oliver Hatcher.  The sleeve was a painting of a sun baked rural track.  The path cut across fields, over hills and tapered into the distance.  It was his only novel and it hadn’t sold.

In his early twenties Oliver had spent a summer at a friend’s house in southern France where he had read and wandered.  He was young and restless.  Looking for adventure he set off on foot through France to Spain.  In the darkness he caressed the bump expanding on his forehead and recalled that glamorous summer; drinking champagne in a cabin in the mountains, listening to opera with the windows open, writing, walking and swimming; in lakes, along rivers, under waterfalls.  He remembered the sunlight on his skin.

After a year he returned to London.  He had kept a journal, part of which had become this slim travel novel.  He had shown promise, the critics had said, but holding it, he felt he no longer had the courage or opportunity to try again.  That promise had turned out to be empty and he wore the disappointment like a bruise.

He heard a scratch behind him.  He fought the childish compulsion to flee.  He straightened up as much as he could and moved deliberately and slowly to face it.  It stood not five feet away.   In the darkness he could make out a black hooded shape with bright eyes.  Its head was cocked, it was watching him.

They examined each other.  The creature had compelling eyes.  Rook or raven he didn’t know.  It lurched towards him dazed, its beak open and panting.  He tried to shoo it away but it floundered forward.  Oliver stepped back and watched.  Its indigo feathers were lustrous, it didn’t look shabby or old, but something about the angle of its wing and unpredictability of its movements suggested a dying dance.

Unable to fly it bumped backwards into a corner.  It pitched to and fro in the narrow space between the boxes one wing bent and trailing.  Watching it he was sick and sorry.  Oliver wanted it to go with grace, close its eyes and tuck its head under its wing quietly.  He had seen plenty of dead animals having grown up in the country, the feathers and mess of a pheasant stuck in the grill of his father’s land rover, but he had never seen anything die of natural causes.  The bird's circling slowed; it crouched on backward bended knees and was still, petrified in a distorted bow.  Oliver stood there until the morning light came up through the hatch.  Then, using two books as a shovel, he scooped up the black and broken thing and left the attic.

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Fame                                                                                           

by Martha Clarkson

iving in L.A. for a month, I can see a second job will be required.  I can’t meet my sixth of the rent running food at a mid-priced restaurant.  Running food is the purgatory of the restaurant business.  The most important job, getting the food to the table hot, but I don’t take home wads of waiter cash.  No one tips the food runner.  It also eats gas, being located at the end of a strip mall an hour from the apartment where I’m the one guy living with five girls.  My friends think I have it made, living with so many girls, but it’s hard to get time in the bathroom.

I land a second job in the coffee bar at a Borders bookstore down the street.  It’s upstairs, out of the way, between Travel and Military History.  The timers on the pots keep us busier than the customer lines.  It’s not Starbucks.

All of us working here are in the same boat, planning to start auditioning as soon as we find someone to snap our head-shots for cheap—the photographs that will make us look the part of whatever role; college kid, high school kid, out-of-work mechanic.  Our white aprons have brown smears of coffee and chocolate by mid-shift.

I take a twenty from a woman who calls herself Mona Lisa.  I have to ask her name to write it on the side of the cup so we can call her when her drink is ready.  Page 2 of the manual.  It’s hard not to smile at both the name and the high arches of purple eye shadow.  I give her change and pass the paper cup over to Barlow, (Milton Barlow III, mind you), who moves to the back counter for drip.  Barlow played a FedEx delivery guy on-screen for three minutes in a soap two years ago.  He carries the videotape in his pack.

I look up to see that the next customer is Tom Hanks.  I falter.  Only a second—the time it takes for at least five thoughts to run across my mind:  swoon, autograph, beg, name a movie (his, of course, since I don’t have one yet), guess the coffee choice like I know him.

I stick to the rules and say hi.  Grande soy latte with hazelnut.  He reaches into his pocket for the money.  My brain drives down a cul-de-sac of conversation.

I say, “Hey, I really admire you because I’m an actor, too.”  I adjust my clean apron.

“Oh really?” he responds, sincere, like he’s just moved to L.A. and is settling into the phenomenon.

“Of course.  Just here from Kennewick, where I played Brick in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof to a packed house.”  I leave out the part about the audience being mostly parents of the actors.

“That’s terrific,” he says, and lightly punches my arm.  “I love Cat.  Love Brick.  My agent loves Brick.  Let’s do lunch.  Tomorrow, say, around one?”  He slips me a card with his favorite restaurant printed on it.  Some avant garde name like Tangerine or Pattie.  A place where I’ll bet he has the same table every time, in the courtyard by the fountain, and the chef fixes him dishes that aren’t on the menu.

I reach to take the card from him, and instead it’s a ten and I’m a barista again, still unsure how I’ll pay my car insurance this month.  I wipe my sweating left hand on my apron front, smearing a glob of chocolate syrup that landed there two customers ago.

The buttons on the cash register chirp as I push them.  I make his change from the divided drawer.  There is the blast of the milk steamer like a throat-clearing as Barlow fiddles with the knobs.  I look up just in time to see Tom’s mouth moving at me but the milk bubbling drowns out the volume.  I want to say ‘what’ but the milk gurgling still hasn’t stopped.  There is a moment of stupor on both our parts, that he grants me, like looking in a mirror.  But he turns away too fast for me to say something witty.

I pick up the magic marker and cup.

“Name?” I say, with the smile I’ve been told to practice.  Page 3 of the manual.  By this time he’s over at the condiment bar flapping a raw sugar packet.  I autograph the cup for him.

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Signs at Intersections                                                                   

by Robert Aquino Dollesin

 ast night I was smoking a cigarette on my front porch when the woman who lives with her husband and four children in the house next to mine stormed out her front door carrying a suitcase.  Her husband called after her, his arms held out in front of him as if he was expecting her to fall into them.  She did not turn around.  When she reached her Toyota she shoved the suitcase into the trunk, and then she hopped in behind the steering wheel, slamming the door behind her.   After screeching out of the sloped driveway, she sped past my house.

I turned and looked at her husband standing in the doorway, the four children crowded in shadows behind him.

But the wife did not get farther than the stop sign on the corner.  By the dreadful sound her tires made when they locked against the pavement I was sure an accident had occurred.  I watched her husband and children race to the corner where they hung about the driver’s side window for a long time.  Finally, the woman’s family stepped back and the Toyota inched into the intersection, looped around and returned home.

I found the whole incident puzzling.

This morning after she kissed her husband off to work, and helped the kids onto the school bus, I flicked my cigarette away and approached her.  Even though we only shared a loose acquaintance with one another I asked her about her short-lived escape.

She looked at me and blinked several times.  Her pale face colored, an almost riffling, cuttlefish effect.

“If I’m being too nosy—“ I began to say when she did not offer an explanation.

Shaking her head and smiling, she said, “No. That’s not it.“

I stood waiting expectantly.  She stared down the street in the direction of the stop sign and said, “Have you ever done something you wished you hadn’t?”

Although I couldn’t think of anything specific, I nodded and said, “Of course.”

She went on and added, “We all make mistakes.  Do things without thinking and sometimes those things lead us to do other things, thinking we can fix them.  Also, without thinking.”

I shrugged.   I could tell she could tell I was not understanding.

Before whirling to reenter her house, she looked one final time at the stop sign on the corner.  “Sometimes the most unlikely signs,” she said, “force us to stop and see things clearly.”

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A Dormouse Dilemma                                                                                             

by William Gladys

lthough our ancient family of Hazel Dormice has for many years sought to distance its specialness from the common order of Rodentia, we have, sadly, been unsuccessful.   Memories of objectionable past episodes—too painful to recall in detail—has motivated us to physically, not  spiritually, surrender to scientific criteria, and acknowledge that the Hazel Dormouse, Muscardinus avellanarius, is  regrettably a   member of the order Rodentia.  Much to our dismay and irritation however, there are frequent reminders aired by an assortment of British TV and radio presenters.  Hopefully, compassionate inquisitive folks will question and come to understand why Hazel Dormice favour separation from the Rodentia.  There is no mystery however and the reason is quite clear.  In Britain and other regions of Europe, black and brown rats have for centuries been implicated in nauseating acts of violent depravity, and naturally, we, a gentle class, aspire to be cut off, isolated from such abhorrent conduct.  The ambivalence associated within this repellent black and brown rat grouping is regarded by some as a justified reason for excluding them not from the order of Rodentia, but from their characterized notoriety.   Historical data however illustrates the distressing role, that the black rat Rattus rattus, and the brown rat Rattus norvegicus, has played in spreading disease throughout  Europe, during medieval times, and later periods as well, but this is where the ambivalence referred to earlier becomes problematic.  It is often asked:  Was it the rat or was it the flea, which was primarily responsible, for spreading the Bubonic plague bacillus that caused so many human fatalities during the period of the Black Death?  Bewildering views put forward by those who defend the flea are suspect, even though in reality we would like this to be the case.  Regrettably, and therefore to our everlasting shame, there is indisputable proof that the rat was responsible for the spreading of a terrible disease, which caused death and destruction on a massive scale.  The horrors of the 1914-1918 conflict in Europe, and its horrendous consequences, plainly reinforces the mortifying reputation of this obnoxious opportunist  flesh eater, something Muscardinus avellanarius deplores and condemns; an act beyond the pail, a repetitive obscenity too far!   And yet extraordinarily enough,  there is  a lone Dormouse luminary, —he  shall  remain nameless—who  has declared that the consequences of the 1914-1918 war, and the infamous role that pitiless elements of the Rodentia played in it, was basically an innate response  to  the idiocy of Homo-sapiens who created the horrific state of affairs in the first place!  He even goes as far as to suggest that black and brown rats cannot be blamed or held responsible for a reaction that is instinctive.  How ridiculous!  It is a highly complex conundrum nevertheless, and no one would deny that, but even so, the foremost issue for Muscardinus avellanarius still remains; an imperative to obtain scientific re-categorisation as soon as possible.  Nothing else will redeem or satisfy our continuing associative ‘Rodentian’ ignominy.    

In the meantime a less urgent but still highly important matter relates to our endangered species status.   Hazel Dormice are showered with copious amounts of care and attention, but equally, unwanted and irksome intrusion also, and I am reminded of the celebrated but over quoted exhortation—forgive me for including it here!   “Never in the history of mouse kind have there been so many secure and restful nesting boxes provided for so few, by so many, but on the other hand, never before have so few been subjected  to so much wearisome interference by so many.”  W.S. Dormouse—‘Daily Nature Magazine’ June 1995. 

It is the last italicised sentence which  perturbs us so much. Let me state without more ado however, that we are not ungrateful for the care and attention that is lavished on us.  On the contrary, the nesting boxes so generously provided, are expertly made and expertly positioned.   Furthermore, before slipping into the delightful realm of our winter hibernation or summer torpor, it is extremely comforting to know that while we sleep, we have nothing to fear from our mortal enemy the weasel.  But, and I articulate from experience, it is very distressing when settled into a calming and blissful  sleep,  to be abruptly lifted  from such a gorgeous all embracing slumber, and be subjected to a top to tail examination by  a well meaning but irritating Dormouse inspector!  Why only last year I was  immersed in a heavenly dream; cutting perfect circles in hazel nut shells and gorging myself silly, when an examiner and his colleague abruptly ended my reverie, rudely lifted me out of my somnolent state, and  prodded, poked, weighed, measured and recorded all my vital statistics in a little notebook!  Not at all pleasant I assure you.  And all the time I sensed that the inspector was under a self-satisfied notion that I was sound asleep and not conscious of the comings and goings?  Humph!  Sudden upheaval of this nature not only brings on pounding headaches, but worst of all in winter it takes forever to get warm again!  Consequently my request is two fold.  First of all, those who are keenly concerned about the well being of Hazel Dormice, should ensure above all else that we be reclassified into a new order as soon as possible, and secondly;  respectfully notify all those who participate in this form of waking torture to put an immediate halt to these disruptive intrusions.  May we graciously request every three years instead, which isn’t asking too much surely?  Consequently in expectation of a constructive response, we look forward with pleasure to seeing Muscardinus avellanarius honourably established in a new scientific order very soon.  Similarly, we are confident that in the years ahead, our essential cherished hibernations and torpors will be blessed with a glorious, serene and untroubled continuity freed from rude interference.                            

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Misha                                                                                                                            

 by Pamela Tyree Griffin

isha quickly goes for my breast.  She sucks my smooth mound—just like a baby.  If she would speak, she'd say how much she loves me but she just makes those sweet noises that make me happy.  I feel as though I am in love for the first time.

Far overseas is Troy, my husband.  He hates it where he is.  He despises the heat, the sand, the blood, the smell of death, missing me.  I don't know what he would say were he to witness this clinging of Misha to me.  I don't know what I would say or how I would explain why I never spoke of this sooner.

Time passes —Minutes?  Hours?  I don't know.  I do know that this feeling, this incredible feeling, tugs at my heart as hard as at my breast. Misha, for now, is my own sweet secret-answering a question I have never asked.  She asks for nothing—I am free to just lie here.  I am content as is she.

Misha continues.  A feeling overtakes me, a sweet yet undefined love surrounds us.  She looks up and catches me looking down at her.  In her deep brown eyes is reflected my face.  There is a calm there which I don't believe I can duplicate without her.

I want to keep this to myself a little longer but I know I will have to tell  Troy everything.  He must know of this secret, deeply held—this miracle.  I don't know what he will say about my taking so long to confess.  Yet I know he must be told before he comes home.  Home to me, his wife and to sweet Misha, our three week old little girl.

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I Believe I Can Fly                                                           

by Marilynn

disagreed with how the family treated Matt. Yet, merely a neighbor, I could only sit back and observe the attempt to make him normal.  He wasn’t, you know.    

Constantly pushing him to learn frustrated him and he retreated to the corner and rolled up in a ball, when Maryann, his Mom, clicked Baby Einstein into the DVD player and tried to remove his cape.  The cape, an old flannel baby blanket imprinted with the ABC’s, was never laundered.    

I suspect he understood the concept of flying from the birds, always perched on the ledge outside of the bedroom window of their Victorian style house.  He might’ve whispered, “Fly?” to them when the pressure got too heavy in the house, the pressure to banish his autism, the rocking hand-flapping.       

Sunday mornings were the worst.  Imagine a blue suit, necktie and baby blanket-cape combo, forced on Matt like a straight jacket.  He must try to sit still, wedged between his older brother and sister.  They pretended he was normal, returning inquisitive looks with smiles, each holding one of Matt’s hands tightly so that he could not flap.  

I didn’t think much about it when one morning  I saw Matt shimmy down the drain pipe on his side of the house, assuming his Mom was close behind carrying a switch.  Forty-five minutes later we were bolting from house to house asking, “Seen a small boy, about this high, dirty cape?”       

After no luck, we jumped into my van and headed toward nowhere in particular. Maryann dialed 9-1-1.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     A few blocks away, waiting for the light to change, I glanced up at the clock atop the steeple of the Presbyterian Church.  Eight-forty-five a.m.  I looked back at the street  then jammed on the breaks and jumped out of the van in time to look back up at the cape fluttering in the wind.  Matt was reaching for the minute hand on the clock, hanging precariously onto the slope of the roof.     

Barely a hands-length from touching it, he was distracted  by a flock of birds overhead.  He stood upright, arched his skinny body and spread his arms wide.  The wind filled his cape with enough power to hold him upright until he could jump into the air and join the precise formation of his kindred spirits heading for a destination known only to beings with wings.                       

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Dental Work                                                              

by Gary Moshimer

achel heard her husband say, “That’s different.”  They were on the way to the oral surgeon. Rachel managed to lift her pre-medicated head to see what he was looking at—a scruffy fellow standing on the median strip, holding a sign that said: DENTAL WORK NEEDED.  The 'W' was drawn like an inverted molar.

There was a group of them in the parking lot of the medical building, uniformly small men and women of some foreign persuasion, jibbering in an unfamiliar language, holding the signs and wearing red bandannas of solidarity.  Rachel’s husband rushed her through the sliding doors like a bodyguard.

Rachel was led to a room for the mining of her impacted wisdom teeth.  A nurse coaxed a vein.  The one window in this room was narrow, about a foot wide, and when Rachel turned her head she clearly saw the crowd of little people approaching, swinging their signs for attention.  Were they protesting her, just because her husband had adequate insurance?

The doctor's face floated before her, saying how she would be going to sleep now, before she could even count to five, but he was wrong about that, because Rachel counted ten of the bandannas watching her through that window, their pleading faces stacked.  She wanted to ask what this was all about, but her mouth was no longer attached to her brain.

But somehow her brain was still working.  Why wasn't she asleep like they said?  She thought of the horror stories of people waking up during open heart surgery.  She tried to motion with her arm, but it too no longer cooperated with her brain.  Hopefully that meant she would also feel no pain.

Instead of poking instruments into her mouth, the doctor pushed the spotlight away from her face, peeled off his gloves, mumbled something to the nurse and chuckled.  He swung the X-ray machine out of his way, aiming its long snout at a side door.  Then he said, "Okay, we're ready."

The side door opened and the little people filed in, each stopping momentarily in front of the X-ray machine, which was not an X-ray machine at all, but a shrink-ray of some kind.  Five of these people were shrunken to the height of about an inch (the others muttering and slinking out in a discouraged way), scooped by the assistant's hand to a metal tray for the selection of miniscule tools, and from there placed one by one into Rachel’s mouth, which was braced open with a rubber block.  She felt their feet land on her tongue, just tickles, and wondered if they had put coverings on their feet.  She didn't remember seeing that.  That's disgusting, she thought.

As the doctor and nurse gazed out the window—he was pointing out his new car—the shrunken gang started work on Rachel’s gums.  There were tiny slicing and sucking sounds, the taps of tiny hammers, creaks of pry-bars.  At least she couldn't feel anything.  They were shouting to each other and singing in that native language, work songs echoing through the caverns of her sinuses and down to her own vocal cords, setting up some sympathy vibrations so it was like Rachel sang with them, a ventriloquist with her mouth cranked open.

The doctor and nurse disappeared for a while and returned with steaming coffee cups.  They chatted in words Rachel did not recognize and threw glances at her and laughed.  At one point a worker—male, no doubt—jumped from Rachel’s mouth to her chest, slipped under the bib and between the buttons of her blouse and burrowed into cleavage.  She couldn't even squirm.

So this was the kind of dental work they meant.  Rachel had nothing against immigrants and could even sympathize somewhat with their plight, but now her husband's insurance would be billed for big bucks while the doctor was probably paying these people minimum wage.  What was the world coming to?  Someone was going to hear about this!

Eventually the teeth were dragged (Rachel pictured rope pulleys of dental floss) across her tongue and heaved, following little counting and grunting sounds, into a metal basin on her chest.  She thought she still felt someone exploring inside her bra, but that was when the sleepy feeling finally hit, when it was all over.

She had no recollection of making it to the car or getting home. Over the hazy weekend her husband tended her chipmunk face with ice and broth and pain pills.

Monday became clear, and with it the crazy dream.  She started to tell him about it, flossing the rest of her teeth delicately.  "What's that?" he said, indicating the red piece of something dangling from the floss.  "A piece of you?  Or maybe some bloody gauze."

Rachel swept the tiny red thing off with a finger.  She squinted at it.  "Go get your giant magnifying glass," she told him.

She put the thing on a cutting board, opened and spread it with tweezers and straight-pinned it to the board like a lab specimen.  "Aha!" she said to her husband when he returned.  "Take a look at that!"

He studied it through the glass.  There were tiny black polka-dots on the cloth.

"What am I looking at?" he said.

"That," Rachel said triumphantly, "is a bandanna."

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Leaving for Viviers                                                                           

by Tom Sheehan

he boy slipped from a hole in the remnants of a stone wall that marked one section of his grandfather’s farm, crawled behind a small tree, and stared down into the valley.  At least a week before, shells from distant cannon and mortar had severed the wall in dozens of places, and a crater sat where the chicken house used to be.  The pig pen, from the dead of winter, was a new abomination, with the small fence heaved asunder and unknown body parts strewn every which way.

The Alsace winter of 1944 had been cold and worn with misery, but now, as he breathed new air, he could see buds on the trees on the floor of the valley and across nearby hills.  From a distance he heard a bird call for a friend, and heard the answer.  It made him smile for the first time in the morning.  Then, far off, he saw a group of soldiers marching back into their small encampment with three enemy soldiers walking ahead of them, docile prisoners at the points of rifles, their hands clasped atop their heads.  All the soldiers, front and back, the catching and the caught, trudged tired and worn, as if they were weary of the war, too weary to carry on.  Days earlier great tanks, support vehicles and hundreds of soldiers had passed through the valley and gone ahead.  The boy could see their tracks trenchant in the new grass trying for green, in the matted grain fields on early legs, and coming out of the small, now distorted copse of maples and birches at the edge of the hill that for a hundred years had provided heat for the family.

As he looked down on the small group, he didn’t know who to feel sorry for, the ones up front or the ones with the rifles.  More than a dozen of them were armed with rifles.  The sun bounced off their helmets and parts of their weapons.  The bird called again.

“Just let us know if any soldiers are coming this way,” his grandfather had said as he ushered him out of the house that morning.  “Give us enough time so we can hide a few things.”  The old man had patted him on the head, the way he did on most errands these days, the way his father had patted him, the way he had learned.

On some days the boy had forgotten what his father looked like.  He’d been dead for more than two years, shot by one side or the other at a tumultuous point of the war.  So the boy didn’t know who he hated.  But he hated somebody.  Anybody who came on their land stood a good chance.

He saw an officer come out of a tent and stand at the head of the soldiers.  Then all the soldiers of the small camp gathered around the officer, who was apparently talking to them.  He saw the officer make gestures and point back toward Viviers.  He could not hear the officer’s voice and tried to read his body language.  Soon many of the soldiers ran to places in the campsite.  Some began to shave, some just to wash their faces or strip to the waist and wash themselves.  All of them had come to life in an instant, as if the war was over, but it was surely not.  A whole fleet of planes, big ones, were flying overhead, the broad sky filled with aircraft as far as he could see, the noise another part of the everlasting whine even when he thought a small silence had been earned.

Three of the soldiers stood still where they were, not at attention it appeared, but the officer continued talking to them, making more gestures the boy could not understand.  Then the three prisoners were put inside a fenced enclosure, and the three soldiers the officer had been talking to took up guard positions.  Another low sound, a hum, came to him.  At the end of the small valley the boy saw two big trucks coming down the narrow road.  The trucks, big army trucks, stopped at the campsite.  After a while all the soldiers, including the officer, climbed up on the trucks, but not the three on guard, or the three prisoners still inside the fence.  The trucks turned around and headed back toward Viviers, down the narrow road, becoming dark dominoes moving.

The guards sat down.  The prisoners sat down inside the enclosure.  Each looked like they were talking to their own kind.  A bird called, one answered and another.  All six men looked back toward Viviers and then across the valley where the bird had called again, or one like it, or one near it.  Buds, green as good vines, jittered nervously on tree limbs as a small spring breeze lifted its arms and waved.  The boy smiled and said hello under his breath.

But the smile made the boy feel sad.  For at that same moment he remembered his sister, and the day she walked into the barn just ahead of some soldiers coming from behind the barn.  She had not seen them and at least three of them followed her inside.  He was hidden where his grandfather had left him, in a hole against one wall, the hole he just now slipped out of as he watched more soldiers, the ones with the prisoners.  His grandfather had told him never to leave the hole while he was away and told his sister to stay hidden in the barn, but he knew she just had to feed their last animal, a mere piglet.  He remembered hearing her screaming and he cried again, as he had on many days since.  The soldiers left the barn after a long while.  When his sister did not come out of the barn, he crept out of the hole and went to look for her.

She was dead, hanging from a beam in the barn.  She was fourteen.  Her clothes had been torn from her and she had tied some in knots to cover herself.  The boy knew everything in an instant.  The soldiers did not tie the noose.  They did not toss the rope over the beam in the barn.  They did not get her to stand on the milk stool that still leaned against one wall.  But they were the hangmen.  He knew it.  He knew his sister.

It was the same day he heard the distant whine, the whine as it drew closer.  It was the whine and roar of war and all its collected parts coming one at a time, or in continuing odd pairs, the machinery of war, sounding out itself in pieces but slowly building its full way.  At first it was as faint as if an old playmate, Rene or Jean, had called from the next farm or the next hill, coming as it did into a part of one ear, at the edge of all sound, at the edge of the belief of sound, and then came all the pieces of sound… the single bullets slicing in the air, the soft thump against wood or clatter on rock at the end of poor aim, the arc of shells screaming inside his head harsh as a close whistle, the distant impulses that sent the shells toward him and the farm and the tremors in the earth, the vibrations in the air as strong as evil itself, and soon the yelling rising up on its legs, the orders, the cries of terror and fright, the war itself, the terrible machine rolling across the land the way plows once wandered, turning everything over, the very land itself and all it offered up, the vines, the grass, the golden grains, day into night, night into day, silence into noise, noise into silence, peace into war.  The awful impulses that came with war.

With his grandfather off on the strange errands he often attended to, the boy kept watch on the encampment.  He knew that more than silence and language separated the two small groups of soldiers down below.  He tried to imagine all their differences and was hounded by the difficulty the problem presented.  Nothing, he believed, could be resolved from distance.  More whines arose.  More planes passed over the valley, like a cloud of sparrows erroneously leaping south.  The sound roared in his ears as the war continued beyond him and the farm and his secret hole in the ground.

For more than an hour the three soldiers on guard were talking and obviously arguing.  One of them kept pointing over his shoulder, back to where the trucks had gone.  Gestures and wild motions came out of him as if he were on stage, in a wild drama.  Perhaps it was a comedy.  The boy did not know.  Then the lead actor, the one with the motions and gestures, walked to the enclosure, opened the gate and pointed off to the other end of the valley, where the war was.  The prisoners came out of the enclosure and began to walk off toward the war.  Then they began running, stumbling, falling, rising, running again.  The three guards put their rifles to shoulder and shot them in the back.

In the silence that followed the guard soldiers began to clean themselves.  Two shaved, one washed his torso completely.  All three were waving their arms in odd motions, marionettes against drab canvas.  Finally all three of them, rifles over their shoulders, began to walk toward Viviers.

Now the boy knew who he hated.