Before and After: Burn Wound
The tears in the earth were like a burn wound.
They opened in a blaze of war when the soldiers ran through the village, slashing and tearing the people and houses open. The oozing of life is so clear in my mind.
I remember how the village looked as a child: if you squeezed through the busy market where people yelled and pushed and grabbed, and the smells of stinking dirt roads mingled with the fragrant wafts from street food all at once, you found yourself in the open expanse of countryside. That’s how it felt when I was younger, anyway. When you entered the fields, you dunked your head into a perfectly serene pool, away from all the noise. The sun shone over the rolls of green hills and rows of farmland and you would run until you reached the barn.
I spent my time there with my brother, our summers hiding from the sun’s heat in that abandoned barn and, in winter, sneaking off to try in vain to find warmth. We would climb in the rafters and tag each other, going back and forth from the hay loft to the front and only stopping when the sun went down. Until the war came. When the scab filled up with clear yellow pus, it sealed itself seemingly inside that barn. I keep coming back to it.
The first time it was desperate. An unbearable itching on my skin took me there more than my legs did.
After a few months, I could not walk down those streets or see the people still lying where they were killed in the village. But the magnetism of that location pulled on me, and it seemed in an instant I was in the ruins of the barn. Peaking through the dilapidated roof was that orange-red sky created by a sun being choked out by smoke. It seemed like an admonishing glance from high above to let mortals know what happens when they set themselves on fire.
My mind was spinning with hotness and impatience. It was as though there was something I couldn’t bear to wait for, as though I had walked all this way without water and I came to find an old river completely dry. I couldn’t make sense of that feeling, then. How could I wait for something that’s already happened? What was I even waiting for?
I wanted to wrap my hands around the disaster and guide it away; I needed to reach my will to the far off rulers who used their people as a tool, like those unwieldy muskets lugged around by boys just old enough to be sent off. They would know they protected their family and village and marketplace and barn with every hasty step they placed over mine. They would know that the guilt found after the stark smell of gunpowder and the hush after the ruins were clear could only be soothed by the idea of their own kind protected and at home. It’s only fair, I decided.
The last time was different. That crawling feeling became more of a silence, with the same ease a hand can run over a callus or an old mark left over on skin.
The village is alive. Not with the same life as before, but plants and animals and people that need a lean-to to sleep under. Moss speckles the cobblestone and foundations and deer and rabbit graze where people used to live. The travelers and permanent wanderers passing through take shelter in old door frames and children’s bedrooms. I guess it’s easier to sleep under a roof that has already been burned away than one that could, at any point, fall in. I had waited and life had returned.
The barn doesn’t have the anger it did before. Among the vines and creatures that reclaimed the building in the wake, a spider moved in and built its home in what remains of the ceiling of the barn. A small and wretched thing, it makes a web. Maybe it’s drawn to intersect the points it has walked on before. It looks like it drives itself crazy up there.