The Soldier (Flash Fiction to blow your mind!)

(Note from the Author: I was sitting in the scuffed linoleum meeting house from which my spiritual bread is dolled. The topic of God came up, and man's oldest volley began. Is it real? Is it fabricated? Was it designed to control us, or is it inherent? Is it man, woman, or pantheonic? Does it wait for the well-behaved in some distant geography, or has it already forgotten us? Does it have a mind, or is it as Lovecraft's blind god, chewing its tongue to the fluting of pipes in some cosmic bowel of the universe? I found myself wondering about these things. And this morning, I wrote this story.)

Hendersen pushed through the church doors, his pack an aching burden, the pilfered German pistol clattering against his belt. There was still blood on his face from the peasant boy he’d shot by mistake, and the outraged father who he’d likewise dispatched of necessity. Standing still, he’d listened to the Luftwaffe pass outside the warehouse flat, a torn green settee cushion still jammed to his pistol barrel. The fading crunch of boots, the ribbon of deathsmoke uncurling from the cushion’s stuffing, the fist of pulsing nausea, and the boy's cold doll eyes, as blood-red wings spread beneath his shoulders: He would dream these things for the rest of his life.

The church was empty, though his heart was emptier. As in the towns before Poland, the tabernacle was in ruins. Winter light slanted through the roofless nave, the stained glass a fractured river along the rugs. The church's eastern wall had collapsed. He spotted an arm beneath the rubbled pediments. A child’s arm.

And that was the final pressure that undid him.

He flung his pack into the pews, threw the pistol across the aisle, where it went sliding through the glass, a thunder of sound rising on the air, rebounding from the forgotten pockets of this corridor still soiled by the ache of unanswered prayer. He fell to his knees before the altar, the thunder drawing to a whistle, the echo swallowing itself.

His scream unsettled pigeons. 

They flapped above the rafters, until the ash and dust fell in a fine snow. Hendersen held his palm open, knowing what dust was, where it came from, the smokestacks of Kulmhof only six kilometers east, vomiting clouds of human exhaust. 

Someone had replaced the cross behind the splintered pulpit with a Swastika. He looked up, the image doubling in his vision, tripling as the bending light breathed upon his tears. “Love? You call this love!”

Hendersen fell  onto the glass in supplication, begging the IronGod of mechanical progress, the WarGod of razorwire and artillery cannon, the BloodGod of wailing men pushing their last breaths into the mud, the SmokeGod of evanescent life. He begged the gods that had eaten the God of his childhood.

And heard nothing.

Hendersen screamed again, his body curling to protect the soul, seeing the Panzer tanks, the thunderous erosion of his company vaporized beneath a single shell, skeletal Jews calling from behind electrified gates, abandoned there to starve, bodies piled with flies, virgin men holding limbs chewed off by the device of human madness; and amid it, within it, the sweeping fields of Kentucky, his mother calling supper from the porch, his dog smiling beneath the table, waiting patiently for a ration. He saw the birth of his son, and the proud tears of his wife waving as he boarded the train; he saw the death of his father, and photographs of the ancestors that had eked a living from the land; he saw the rubble of Poland, and refugee children running through the streets, kicking a defective hand-grenade like a soccer ball, untouched by death, their threadbare shoes a clattering stallion charge. He saw the evil stripped next to the good, both corpses pervious to decay, chewed by time, a temporal demonstration; and beneath it all, a web of nothing, arcing out into the void beyond all clocks, the breath beyond lungs, an aching hollow of potential.

And there, heaving on the floor, his elbows imbedded with glass, he glimpsed the emptiness of reality, a white land of fever and cold, a black land of laughter and silence.

Henderson glimpsed God in all its truth. 

(Thank you for reading! Comments are appreciated! Find Novelist Carson Standifer on Facebook!)