A Day At The Office

         Five, four, three, two, one....


         The hajji. They have hunted me, wounded me, taken my spotter from me in a storm of shrapnel, and yet not finished the job. I’m not leaving; not just yet, not without making that prospect a plain-hard chore for the men before me.

         Five ticks of the clock that lives in your head, five seconds in time. Two good measured breaths of life in this world, but the time in those five ticks stretches out in front of you like a ribbon of far-seen shimmering road leading away across valleys and over the crests of a distant line of ancient burnt-ash hills.

         Numbers Four and Three.

         Down.

         Four, on his back, eyes wide to the washed cyan sky. I guess he didn’t know that staring at the sun was bad for his vision. Look too long, and you can go blind, I heard when I was young, but I guess he didn’t care any more . . . about what might have been said that one time, or the sun beginning to scald, or anything else at all in this troubled world that he’d just left behind. One second he was here, the next second, gone.

         And Three, the surprise he showed at the crimson-petaled roses that bloomed and then burst on the chest of his woolen vest. Like he didn’t see how they could have been planted there, nurtured, risen, and then died before he had a chance to savor them, to taste the tears of dew that fell red and pendulous from the blossoms, to take in the smell of old earth clinging to the roots, to know that there was still time to touch, to hold. Too soon letting go.

         Then, there were two.

         Oh, I suppose three altogether, but I don’t count me; me here on the end of an arcing filament that reaches from the tip of my first finger to the curved metal trigger that is the first domino to tip in the line that marks the beginning of eternity.

         Since the first of them couldn’t do it, the two still fighting the gravity of the infinite have their eyes searching to my going, but not just now, not just yet.

         In this moment, they must first glimpse me, find me, see my face, my body, my uniform, a glint from my hide; to know me and make me break on the rocks and shoals of this desert sea. Now, I am the wind around them, in the cover of sand blowing with the sharpness of knives, deep inside the waves and bound to the bed of a millennial sea of the biting crystals, hidden in the plain sight of broken and bent grasses and twigs, ragged ghillie cloth and netting, my oneness with the elements of this harrowing place.

         The rifle’s suppressed ‘shpffft’ just a hint, only now the first tiny echoes, like puffs, of the shots that came before beginning to vibrate the tympani of their ears. The full measure of these two beats yet to make itself known to them; the senses yet to collect and comprehend the extent of their comrades’ posture, their repose, their escape from the here to the forever.

         The optics of the scope bring the two that are left in close. Though they stand off at six hundred yards, they are near enough to reach out and touch in this taut world of mil dot and reticle. And as prelude to their last two ticks in the cradle of time, they begin the Danse Macabre with looks of something that approaches bemusement, or perhaps just a closer scrutiny of the ultimate truth; that no man born of this world ever gets out alive.

         They look upon each other, then down again, then seeing the other as half ghost; settling on their spot to lie down with their friends, to rest, to sleep, to dream the long dreams.

         My finger begins its travel to the cool metal, the tipping of the first domino, again. And once again.

         Then there none.

         Except me.