The Making of a Man — Isabella Burns
France in the springtime is not romantic. The nation has traded its dazzling lights for explosions, its bird songs for gun shots, and its lovers for soldiers. France in the springtime is war.
When a person is in war, they understand that it cannot merely be called war. War is an action, not a decree. These boys felt the war, felt the ripples of the ink signature that signed death into reality. Their war is the stench of rotten horse flesh, the biting nip of hypothermia, the screams of nightmares and the rustle of fabric as boys crawl over, desperate to gag the screaming soldier before the enemy can hear. No senses escaped the horror. Boys walked around with eyes sprouting on their heads, with needles on the roofs of their mouths. Every booming explosion and downpour of mud sent them crouching, sparing themselves from becoming part of the grotesque shower. They would get used to it. It would become reflex. The dirt under their nails would harden, and they would learn to sleep through the night again, one way or another.
Far above them, watching over them, the tiger of war stretched and showed off his stripes, but never his scars. He was a fat cat, well fed throughout the years, and when he awoke from his rock in the sun, he always wanted more. From his post, he leaped up, swallowing a butterfly or a bird whole — swallowing happiness and hope whole. As he landed, the thud of his paws shook the Earth; he left a print in the mud that was never able to be washed away. The cat enjoyed all nine of his lives. The boys he terrorized barely had the chance to begin their one and only.
Still, they fought as they always had and knew they always would. Mothers and sons traded hope that neither had, but the feeling was enough to overcome thought. It carried them through their days and helped them sleep amongst the sound of screams and stench of sewage. If conditions got bad enough, if enough died, one day it would stop. Until then, they bathed in blood and choked down lies.
Even as they raised their guns, one could see them tremble. Their lips quivered and their arms, frail with weeks of malnutrition, shook under the weight of the machines. One boy wiped a fraying rag over the barrel of his gun. As he worked the fabric back and forth, the boys rushed through the trench, their bodies packed within the walls like flowers crushed beneath a glass pane. A deep sigh shook the boy’s body. He was small, drowned in his fresh green uniform.
Putting the rag down, he raised a slender hand to his breast pocket. His fingers undid the little button, and he pulled out a square photograph. He scanned over every inch, first to the blurry garden in the background, then to the tea set on the left, and finally to the little girl in the center. She wore her school uniform, and as he went back to polishing his gun, he imagined he was polishing her shoes as he once did not long ago.
The rattle of a bomb overhead shook the boy. He snapped his neck up, craning it toward the sky. Somebody clapped his shoulder, their laugh just as deep as the trench they inhabited.
“Good thing it wasn’t headed this way. You’d be long dead with those reflexes!” The other boy smiled, his hand still grasped around his shoulder. He was missing his front tooth. He smelled, too, like dirt and smoke.
Henry shrugged, looking to the side to avoid the other boy’s face. “Dunnit matter now, does it?” He mumbled under his breath.
“One day it will,” the older boy chuckled, releasing his grip and stomping off. The thud of his boots echoed with shouts and laughs of the trench.
Henry looked down, but just because you couldn’t see war didn’t mean it didn’t touch you. He raised his head, gripped his gun, got his helmet, and followed the older boy’s footsteps. Pushing past other soldiers, he glided between their bodies in the heart of the trench.
There is no difference between a trench and a catacomb. Soldiers fought in the graves they would be left to rot in. He saw it. Skin peeled away from skeletons as the boys grew thin, and when he bit into an apple, it cracked like the sound of a bullet on bone. He had been there four hours. In four hours, death had stolen hope from the sky and crushed its wings beneath his scythe.
Henry took his place on the wall, lining up with the other boys for their attack. He didn’t know why his body fought his mind, why his eyes welled with tears when he knew this was right, that this was the only way to keep her safe. And yet, as he put one foot upon the ladder, he slipped. With a deep, shaking inhale, he tried again. His heavy boot hit the wood with a splintering thud. One hand reached for the next rung, and he pulled his other leg up, his stick-thin body suddenly heavy with the weight of the future. He sucked his lower lip in; he bit down. He needed to get used to the taste of blood.
His hands slapped each new rung, wood cutting into his soft skin, tears sliding down his pink cheeks. At the last rung to the top, he pulled her out of his pocket. He looked down, looked at her young face, looked at the wave she gave the camera. A tear dropped on the paper, and he nearly fell as he took his hand off the rung to wipe it off. He caught himself and shook it off instead. She was blurry, but he was sure this was right. He had to protect his little sister. He faced her toward him and returned her to safety, to blindness, to her spot next to his heart. He closed the pocket.
When the signal came, the boys shot. The sound was unlike any other loud they had heard. It was loud, but it wasn’t an external sound. They were part of the gunfire; they were part of the war. The sound broke their ribs and crawled up within them, finding and squeezing their heart, its tentacles rough and spiky like barbed wire. With every shot and every squeeze, blood left the boy’s brains and bodies. They weren’t thinking; they didn’t even know what they were doing. The trigger pulled itself, and it wouldn’t stop.
Henry was falling. All of the air left his lungs, and he was falling. His limbs flailed around him, and he was no longer in a trench. He was in a pit, sinking through the darkness. The photo lifted out of his breast pocket, and he was alone. He watched it raise up to the sunlight like a feather, and he felt his bones compressing under the weight of the darkness. He could not see, but he knew he was falling on his back; he knew he was facing all that could be one day and falling away from it at a pace he could not control. The land around him had been grey, but now it was nothing. He was in nothing; he was nothing. His gun was no longer on his back. He was naked. He was cold, and he was ashamed of his frail, skinny bones. He was only bones. The skin had peeled off of his body, sunken to the bottom of the pit, sunken to Hell. He was bound to it, falling, being pulled as though somebody had hooked him with a curved blade. It cut through his skeleton, and his bones fell apart, each hitting the dark bottom with a cluttering sound, like a million tiny bugs.
They were crawling all over him. He couldn’t shake them off. He brushed and he clawed and he had fallen, but not into a pit, to the bottom of the trench. Somebody clapped his shoulder. He shoved them off, scooting to the wall.
He had killed.
The land had been grey, but he set off an explosion of red. Across the mere feet separating them, there was a boy. There had been a boy. Now, there was a corpse and a man.
Henry’s weapon was far too powerful for him. The pull of fate was too powerful. It had a wicked way of linking people and never telling them why. They were part of destiny, part of the stars, part of the stories told long ago. A shared life or the ruthless ending of one, it did not matter. The tie was cut. Maybe Henry could have known this boy, seen the same flicker of gold in his eye or went home to meet his sister. Maybe he could’ve traded a cigarette with him, maybe a talk, maybe a tear. Maybe he could have loved this boy. Henry patted his breast pocket, patted the photo, and knew that he would have to grow to hate him.
Isabella Burns is a senior at Amador Valley High School. Her prior publications include Malu Zine, The Weight Journal, and Metanoia Lit. She is also the Editor-in-Chief of The Lighthouse Literary Magazine. Greek mythology and Metallica are just two of her many inspirations. When she isn’t writing, she volunteers as an English tutor and carves soap.