One-shot Wonders

Lying in the battlefield, looking up at the sky I know my life is ending. My head is filled only with you; your smell, your silky pale hair, your baby blue eyes. When you first smiled at me before the fireplace, the flame caused your skin to glow gold and one could no longer see the adorable freckles sprinkled across your cheeks that I love so dearly.

The sky is growing dark now, the stains on the grass tussocks almost indistinguishable. Not that I ever saw the battlefield for what it was, I paid no heed, not today. Merely your hands clasped in the folds of your white cotton dress, and delicate face a product of imagining, covering the lifeless features of the dead soldier not two feet from me. I cannot tell which side he killed for, not for all the guts and blood spilled upon his uniform. Not that it matters anyway. I must try not to think of you now, your soft mouth, nor the curve of your shoulder, for I do not want you here with me. I cannot stand to have you here in this terrible killing field, for you would weep, and the blood stains never leave the hem of your white, white dress.

I pray to our empty God that you remember me. For the man I was, the man I could have been, not another broken corpse a thousand miles from home.

It smells of gunpowder, of rotten flesh and the shit of dead men, of grey smoke and mud. The pain from my stomach has died down some, almost numb now. I do not think I can move my legs. My own blood has mixed with the dirt beneath me and has formed a sticky paste, gluing me to the shelled no-man’s land. So much death. I am alone out here in silence save the cawing of the carrion crows. No more gunshots. I’d be surprised if there were enough of us left to carry on. From this angle, I can see every mound representing one of the fallen. Bloody, mangled and sightless, stretching on up to the barbed wire there they hang like grisly scarecrows.

One of the circling birds swoops down and perches upon one mound, eyeing its next morsel hungrily. I want to tell it to be off, to let the dead rest in peace, but the only sound to leave my mouth sounded like one of the crows themselves. Once again I tried, and pain went ripping through me in blinding flashes. Lungs heaving, I watched through blurred vision as the bird huffily took wing.

I left the ring you gave me in the trench, I hope one of the boys finds it and brings it home. I can no longer picture your face, nor remember your smell. I have forgotten the colour of your eyes. I have a song stuck in my head, and the only lyrics are the last words you spoke to me repeated over and over.

Notes

This is actually my homework, but I thought it made better fanfiction than an English assignment.