Читать книгу Slow Recoil - C.B. Forrest - Страница 7
ОглавлениеA farm field outside
Kravica, Bosnia-Herzegovina
The men—although to say “men” is inaccurate, for many of them are just boys—stand in rows, stripped to the waist. Their flesh is stark white except on their faces and arms where the sun has touched. They are terrified of the unknown—or worse, the expected—their chests working like bellows as they try to sort out what comes next, how this works. As though the logistics matter. The bus ride offered time to think, too much time, and it seemed it was true after all, how your life really did flash before your eyes. Or at least these bits and pieces. Moments of happiness, tears, first sex and first cigarettes, the simple pleasure of a smile induced at a moment when needed most, a bottle raised in celebration. Sons, daughters, wives. Fathers, mothers, holidays, and smells of cooking, of home. All of the small gestures we take for granted across a lifetime.
Even as they are coming off the bus, they hear the gunshots. The crack that breaks across the skyline. Pungent cordite hanging in the air. The stink of death is unmistakable, sweet sickness wafting in the light summer breeze. For they all know what death smells like after these years of war, neighbour to neighbour, street to street, house to house. My god, the things we have done to one another…
This one thinks briefly of trying to make a run for it—perhaps there is something nobler in being shot while attempting to flee. But there is no time. Their captors are efficient, mechanical, managing this as though it were a line in a factory. Drill here, move the thing down the line. Drill. Next. Drill. Next…
The shots report, and the men jump, expectant. Tense. Blindfolded. They wait. Hear the jagged breathing of the men in front and behind, the whimpering of these big men you schooled with and lived with and drank with, and the shots make you jump, and there is no dignity to be salvaged in this place, not here, not now.
Hear the bodies folding to the ground like dropped bags of chicken seed.
You’re crying, too, and you don’t want to give them this final piece of your possession.
To face this chin up, shoulders back, is all you want to do. But it is hard, the hardest thing you have ever done in a life that has never been what you would call easy—though right now you would trade the worst day of your past for one more tomorrow.
Even to will your legs to move ahead takes energy, focus.
Crack!
And it will be your turn now to anticipate the slow recoil of the final shot.
