The Collection: Short Stories, Misfits, and One-shots

The Sniper

Brief, but cool look at the thought process of a sniper as they are waiting.  I've always been fascinated by their sheer patience as part of the job.  It's scary that they can wait as long as they do, and succeed with no one ever noticing a thing.  Try out the song by the way, when it hits 4.00 minutes it gets good.  The song is from Enemy at the Gates, which is about a soviet sniper in WWII, Vasily Zaytsev, who didn't have military training for sniping but quickly rose in the ranks during the battle of Stalingrad, which was a rough battle for both the Soviet Union and Germany at the time, and a battleground for snipers.   Check out the movie and the historical figure.  Truly, an interesting and sad story on its own.  

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Waiting is the hardest part of any task, but somehow that is always forgotten, shadowed by the brief, but flashy action.  No one ever writes of the slow, heavy wait one has to endure in order to reach that climax.  After about an hour the excitement and jitters of anticipation fade, leaving in their wake a bored silence.  The cold air begins to seep into your pores, deadening limbs, and numbing the mind.  You no longer think about the glory of the result, but just to simply be done.

He had gone through this so many exhausting times, but it always happened the exact same way.  There he would go getting excited, thinking of the sheer wonder of it, and then almost like a curtain being pulled, it would all leave him.  Once it was gone he would be left with nothing; just a man freezing in the snowy bushes.  He couldn't move, couldn't make a sound.  Even a freezing kid at a bus stop had those luxuries, but he did not, and even the thick uniform he had been handed did little to block out the cold that seemed to find every crack in his armor.

Soon, the clock would tick down another hour and there would still be nothing.  His target was due to arrive in the vicinity within the four hour window he had been informed of.  Four hours though was a long time, especially when there would be no way to pass said time; well he could but then that would be the end of him.  He liked himself a little too much to die because his boredom got the best of him.  He adjusted slightly to look into the scope of his gun, scanning the small park for signs of his elusive target.  For such a simple mission this man was torturing him.  It sounded cruel to wish someone to simply walk faster to death, but when your mind numbed well over an hour ago, mercy is a hard thing to come by.