It's a Pity

It is springtime in this littoral wasteland. Heavy Gulf weather, having relieved itself over the Mesopotamian Marshes, hangs oppressively upon these blown-up shores. The midday atmosphere smothers every cooling breeze whispering off the recumbent sea.

As war machines desolate this slip of land, the writer seeks shelter in metaphor. The birds in his rafters shuffle, and sigh. The sun’s first rays have awaked them. Hunting drones predate above his creaking attic. Their sites have discovered his aerie. Like the pity in his rafters, distractedly fluttering, waking his small family with their whistles and muttering, his metaphors persist through the irredeemable; establishing an interstice in the ceaselessness.

The attic will eventually be exploded, along with his children, and a dozen other people besides. An errant bomb will blow them all up, sending the writer carking for better metaphors.

The drones in their logic, demanding life be understood through their pyrrhic audiation. Their broadcasting permeates every space of this blown-up place, forcing all yearning and grace to burrow far underground. Further underground than the tunnels regime forces have dug, from which they emerge with an Iranian IED or a Chinese submachine gun, lashing out at the invaders, or killing a collaborator, before cowering among the dusty, ruined people. So far underground that the sun in this place may never again rise on yearning, or grace. 

Inexpressibly powerful war machines, blasting absurdly into a sea of troubles. Bombs destroying apartment blocks. Tanks treading over old dusty autos. Shooting shells that could explode an armored division, or the dirty legs, the dusty arms of doomed children. Most of all the drones, the hunting drones. Operated by kids behind joysticks and viewing screens. Targets materialize, which cues the AI. To kill or not to kill. To ennoble ourselves by allowing the children on the viewing screen to live, or to blow them all up before they can grow into death cult zealots. The AI has scraped all human wisdom into proprietary, referenceable stacks. It queries the data in a way the kids' conscience cannot comprehend. It executes the decision again, and once more, and again. Another flash, another explosion, another digital divot. Making cowards of us all.

Dust is the constant here. Dust, and the dry-sterile, ubiquitous thunder of war machines. Droning through barren skies, unleashing a thousand-thousand dusty deaths. It is the dry thunder of sound and fury, signifying nothingness. Pervasive dry heat. Dust weighted with the toxic detritus of a pulverized society. Land incapable of bringing forth even dull roots in this bitter spring. Throats too parched to swallow. His daughter drags the suitcase through the dust while the writer pushes the shopping cart before them.

Now night is rising, cooling sea breezes stealthily infiltrating the gaps in the writer’s ceiling, through which some stars are appearing. The breeze carries Sleep into his listing attic. She comes in a mother’s form, wrapping her soft abaya about his little boy’s body, folding this demanding belly into her tender embrace, filling the empty space with her nourishing love. She soothes the searing pain in his nostrils. She binds the deep and painful wound, sustained when he leaped from the shopping cart. The child ignored his father’s warnings to stay, stumbling over a broken cinder block, a jagged piece of rebar gashing his leg. A ghastly tear. Sleep presses her abaya against the supperating wound, and her penetrating love soothes its bitter recrimination. She holds the boy's dusty feet, relieving them of their burden to carry. Her embrace relieves his arms, and dirty hands, of their duty to hold. His eyes close, he sleeps in a mother’s embrace.

Then the girl’s eyelids grow heavy. Perhaps she still thinks of her mother, disappeared in an explosion half a block from her eyes, a kiss yet moist on her dusty cheek. But if so, the climate has so parched the moisture from her body that tears no longer flow. No more uncontrollable giggles. No more mother whispering in her ear about her father’s hapless antics, trying to convince her dad, the scion of an old and wealthy family, that although he had no marketable skills, the writer could be a worthy suitor of his daughter. If she does still think of her mother he cannot say. The myriad ways their lives have changed since her mother was exploded, fleeing one home and then another, and then another, have made it hard to communicate. Their life is now a ceaseless search for sustenance, one wary eye cast toward the sky. His daughter’s intellectual stream, once overflowing with questions and observations and declarations so keenly carbonated that an entire family’s emotional life could grow in the floodplain, has burrowed so deeply underground that he wonders whether it still flows at all. Peering at her through the minefield of inescapable noise, her face obscure in the darkness, he imagines her eyelids growing heavy as before, when she could not keep them open despite every effort to share one last giggle with her mother, or to soak in one last, embarrassed smile from her father. But they are now the heavy, dusty eyelids of one too exhausted to protest her empty belly or parched throat. Sleep will come.

And then it will be the writer alone, relieved that Sleep should do for his children what he can no longer do himself. His eyes shut before the birds begin again to mutter and coo, their gentle stirring smothered beneath the predatory audiation. The pity rustles, and flutters and softly moans in the cool morning light. They persist through the squall. They care only for this family seeking shelter beneath their rafters. They are carried above the forsaken land on a sea of destruction and creation. They absurdly survey the exploding horizon for any simile of a safe port.