One Last Bloody Sunset (Flash fiction of a WWII survivor)

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The desert sun had dissolved the clouds, sucking wind into the valleys, and turning the dunes into a broiler. The rattle-rasp his of breath brought visions of autumn leaves scraping stones in some forgotten ossuary. Rollin stared at his shovel, the hole half-dug beneath it,  bordered with clay middens the color of flesh. And though he didn’t want to—he never wanted to—he found himself imaging this spot of land back through the ages, the tribes that had fought here, the wildlife slaughtered, the scrub brush that had stretched green into the monsoon months only to be curled and black by summer's end.

“So much death,” he whispered. “And what’s one more?”

In a not so distant time, Rollin Thompson had been an icon. Men had swelled when he'd sat at their table for a beer. Women had stood poised and breathless as he'd recounted his bloody funeral march up the blasted face of Mount Suribachi, the Japanese soldiers prepared for death, while the Americans screamed for their mothers, packing their own intestines into their wounds. They had called him a hero, sat him on floats, holding signs and shouting praises, as to some vanquished God returned. Mothers had held up babies, and when he'd kissed them, Rollin had tasted only ashes, the chalky burn of cells predestined to decay. When the soft warmth had touched his lips he couldn’t help but lament their innocence, to be dropped into a world that would force them to understand its madness; how, in the end, when they were old and riddled with opinions, the time they’d wasted attempting to understand would be moot. He'd wished there was a way to keep them ignorant, safe from that last moment, when they'd be urged into the cosmic forge. To be unmade. And remade. To try again.

And fail again.

Rollin looked back for the water that wasn’t there. He’d poured it out, just in case he lost his nerve. He’d thrown his car keys into a  draw four miles back, marching through the dunes with his flat green officer’s bag slung over one shoulder, and a palm leaf dragging from his belt, erasing his footsteps before the wind could do it for him.

He’d walked off Iwo Jima understanding the truth of nature. That it had teeth. That it tried to eat you. That it chewed through bone and flesh with the relentless grind of time. The Einsteins and Hitlers were nothing next to the earth’s great appetite. Democracy and art? Garnishing on a plate.  

More than anything, Rollin refused to let the earth erase him. And so he’d come here to erase himself. The hero on one last sojourn into the blasted desert rock.

By the time he finished digging, the sun had westered, throwing its nuclear glow across the mountains. Pinks and reds and purple twisted in ganglias of light. He sat down in the hole, thinking of the boys they’d buried in Japan, the virgins, the Christians, the Jews, the braggarts and the meek, all equalized by a final gasp for air. He remembered women he’d loved and lost, the amores intrigued by his acclaim, and their invariable disappointment after they'd glimpsed his hollow center. He stared into that orchestra of light, and like before, like always, saw forward to the end, where a cold dead world without its sun drifted aimless through the vacuum of eternity.

He threw his Medal of Honor into the dunes, calling the names of dead friends, calling the world’s own secret reality, nothing and empty and void, refusing to be robbed of his livelihood, to wake up one morning only to discover he couldn’t move, and his life would be forgotten like the rest. This was the only way to beat mediocrity, to take the chalice in his hands and drink! 

"I sit at the throne of Death and toast glasses with the black," he whispered. "I make my own destiny. I'm better than they are. Braver. I take when it pleases me, and give the world nothing." 

Rollins pulled his Colt pistol,  polished and gleaming in the blood of sunset. He kicked the bag into the hole and sat down beside it, scooping the dirt in over his knees, then his chest, then his face, holding his breath and letting the cold earth settle into his creases. He held is breath until the hole was almost full, then sunk himself down into the soft clay, wiggling like a grave worm, pushing the Colt up toward his face until he could feel its oily steel against his teeth.

He squeezed the trigger slowly, like a lover, and heard the whisper of his heart, thrumming up the pipeline of his veins. The words were so pure, so honest, Rollin wondered if ever in time a truer prayer had been uttered.

Release me.      

In the desert there is a place where nothing grows. Between two dunes, it stands barren through the rains and droughts alike. It repels bugs and scavengers, and coyotes whimper to avoid making contact with its rippled clay-glass surface. It is a timeless patch of land, the only place on earth where nature has been robbed of its right to conquer.

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