Through Her Lives

Your Son

He lay on the bed, arms hanging loose, bringing a cigarette to his mouth and blowing the smoke above him. The men chatted about going home, having children, seeing their children, kissing their wives, building a future away from war. He didn't take part.

 Sometimes someone would ask him about when he gets out, or when this war is over what he's going to do. He would look them straight in the eye and tell them he was going to die either way so what's the use of planning ahead for the future he couldn't have. They stopped asking him after a while. Some of the men were similar to him but they were all going insane, shell shocked out of their brains. Lost their hearing, lost a limb, seen a best friend die, they all had their reasons, he didn't really have one.

A man opened the door to their area, calling to someone and walked out. He sighed, standing up from his bed and closing the door before returning. He didn't look around as he lay back down and went back to smoking but it didn't take him long to notice there was no more talk of children or wives or homemade food. There was nowhere he could hide from the mass of staring people. People that were bluntly staring at him, he didn't put photos of his family up because he was at the age where he knew he would not be returning to them. He didn't constantly write home, some of the boys claimed they did once saw him writing a letter home to his mother. It wasn't too long until they all went back to their previous conversations. The combined noise of all their conversations proved too much for his frustrated mind and he stormed out. Opening and closing the door as he did.

 They were back at their base camp, trees surrounded their buildings. He walked slowly up to a tree that was further back and stepped on its lowest branch. The bark peeled of and stuck to him as he did. The area around him was damp, the air thick with fog. He climbed the tree anyway, his head still throbbing.

He would have had to have been the highest person in the area at that time. Looking at the thick green leaves of the trees around him, basking in the beauty of the open sky, he loved it. Reaching into a nearby branch he brought out an album. It was plenty dirty, the leather growing old before his eyes. He dragged from his pocket a picture of himself in his military clothes before they had left and inscribed his name and the year on the back in neat copperplate. Opening the album he didn't need to look at the other pictures, he knew them by heart.

He slipped his photo next to one of a girl dancing on a street in Venice with a mask on. He flipped back through the pages, coming to a halt at the first picture. A saddened black slave girl, looking deep into the camera, his heart thumped harder.

"Boo!" He slammed the album shut and lost his balance, almost falling out of the tree. There was a round of laughter and the rustling of leaves as the person that had scared him ran off. He looked back down at the album, running his thumb over the soft leather again before putting it back on the other branch.