a short story written by Arhan Deshpande, Y12
“This war’s never ending, is it?”
Resting his back up against the cragged hand of the cave, he adjusted his weapon, pulling it’s strap by the side, drawing it closer.
The other, older, man rested gently upon the crevasses of the palm of the cave’s other hand, letting his hand loose in a ratlike scamper across the olive-green pockets in his uniform, pulling out a pack of dusty, beaten cigarettes. Whether the maroon of the banner across the top of the packet was it’s original or not yet remained a mystery.
He offered them across.
“Mayhaps it won’t. That be for us, of course- I’d have said that we’re but insects to those swine above us. Pigs, I tell you.”
The smoke of the cigarette seemed to camouflage itself amongst his soot-stained beard, wispy and windswept. He turned his neck, facing the starry abyss, his world-worn parchment skin glowing with the heat from the fire. Each crease morphed into words and stories animated with a life of death.
“Ants are we, marching for whatever greater good exists beyond us. We protect and defend lives through our own deaths.’
A puff of smoke exits out of his drought-cracked lips.
“You and I are fractions. Little slices, insignificant in our remote isolation. But together, we mean so much more. Take a…”
He gestures to the air.
“A bunch of tiny…slices, I say, of colour. More distance you take, more obscured it gets. You could change any colours within those slices, but the colour from a distance wouldn’t change a bit. Expendable.
The brazen skin of the younger man lit. He clutched his weapon closely, cold metal resting upon his cheek.
“Expendable? My father, his father, and his father have fought all in this ceaseless war. Don’t we mean more? Don’t we have a life to save? Our lives?”
The old man’s face remained unfixed.
“True… we each have our own talents. I myself painted in my own time.”
A thin smile crept upon his face.
“Suppose my talent with the paintbrush ended up being quite useful. In the end, I did manage to paint a lot of red, didn’t I?”
He let out a staggered, weatherworn laugh.
“You say that we have a life to save; so you speak a truth as any oathbound man. But as bloodpainters, our life is ne’er but lives of the lucky rascals back home. Without them, the blood our metal drinks has no nourishment- no reason to fight no longer for us. Tell me, son. Who were you?”
The younger man’s worn, rope-like brows unwound.
“I…was to be a priest. A few years ago, during that breath of peace we had, my father had come back to our village.”
His eyes darted to the fire, taking out a small, gnarled branch, blossoming with red leaves, lighting another cigarette with it. Raising it up like a torch, his eyes seemed to focus upon them as rays from the sun.
“He never was the same. When he wasn’t rocking in his chair, he’d shake and rattle me, pleading with me to repent for his sins, eyes aflame.”
The smoke from the cigarette masked his eyes.
“Few days later, I’d never see life in those eyes again.”
His eyes gazed distantly at the stars. A valley of silence crept in to the conversation, punctuated by distant sounds of war; the cold, desolate air seemed to lap over the ever rolling desert dunes, flowing like a river through the wide cave entrance.
“My abbot once told me that the stars above were the souls of the people close to us that had died, always watching over us, protecting us.”
He looked downwards.
“I…don’t know if that’s true anymore. I’ve seen brothers and sisters be crushed under the boot of the world around us. Drowned and mauled like animals by these sands.”
A sliver of a grin flashed across the old man’s face.
“He was right. They are souls close to us that have died, and they will protect us.”
He chuckles a raspy, phlegm-peppered laugh.
“But remember- our life are the lives of others. We are close to the souls back home more than their own family. We’re all doomed to die- either our souls, or our bodies. Look at the stars- soon enough, you’ll become one, lad.”
He crushed the burnt cigarette into the cave’s floor. He stared up into the roof of the cave, a smoke-clasped breath spiraling upwards.
“This war’s a cancer. It never began and never’ll end. It grows, it does, from a crucified mass of wretched people and only grows and grows and grows from there. It’s the sum of generations of cells of humans, their fathers and their fathers and their fathers.”
A scowl clawed it’s way across his scar-streaken face.
“It…“ He gestures towards the air, clutching a ghost of the past. “…metastasizes to different lands, different organs, different peoples; setting aftershocks into places for years beyond it’s ‘quelling’- nothing but a bright, burning, glowing splint of wood, bursting into flames with but a nudge. It’s a parasite- a parasitic tree, and it’s leaves are a hot crimson.”
The younger man stares back at the lights above. A red-leaved tree blew in the wind.
“So, what are we, then? If this war being waged is ultimately only a curse, then what are we?”
The old man stares at the ground below him. The tree shook incessantly.
“We? Why, we’re the cells that die. Sacrifices. There’s no original body. Just a layer of never-ending cancers, new cancerous cells- the people we save. Doomed to die by inevitable fire.”
Then, the trees blossomed, and their voices became silent, for the flowers had fed off their speech, and grew in an eternal valley of silence.