Sand Angels

THE PRISONER

“I have a mouth ulcer.” Stanley suddenly whined.

The sound of him tonguing his ulcer had been a constant for the past hour, every so often he would hit a really raw patch and hiss a little through clenched teeth. We all thought he would stop after his little confirmation, but he continued for another ten minutes before speaking again.

“It’s real bad.” He sighed. “It’s right at the bottom, in the little fold. It hurts to talk.” He continued.

I looked up at him, wanting to make some comment telling him to shut up, but I couldn’t muster the energy to speak. In San Pajora, the temperature rests at a consistent rating of blistering, and our captures only brought us water when they remembered to. I hadn’t drunk for twenty-six hours by that point; my throat was so dry that swallowing was becoming an actively strenuous task.

I focused on the wall, the dark grey concrete that was every surface, and scanned it for a crack or a small hole or just anything that could have started an escape plan. I’d seen all those Alcatraz documentaries as a kid, I saw how they did it and imagined I could probably fashion a fairly realistic bed dummy; better than those waxy looking freakshows those guys used. It only then dawned on me that they had workshops, and tools, and regular quiet times to plot their escape and we, well we had nothing.

The cell which was my home for so long was an old holding cell in a now abandoned police station. The number of rusted bedframes around told me that it was probably built for six people, so the nine of us in the confines of the four walls was tight, even if one of said walls was entirely made up of bars. There was a window, but for all the fresh air it let in it also let in the scorching heat and the insects. They were the kind of monster insects that I could never have pictured in my worst nightmares; I had these nights where I would wake up frozen, feeling something touching me and then seeing some winged monster the size of a golf ball drinking the blood from my inner thigh through a needle-like mouth. I would try to move or scream, but all that would happen is I would lay there motionless waiting for it to go away.

“Seriously, this is really bad.” Stanley reiterated, another half an hour had passed, and I had almost forgotten what he was talking about.

Stanley was a good guy, even if his mind often focused on the little things too much. There he was complaining of a mouth ulcer, completely unaware that he would be dead in the next four hours. In five hours, he would just be another body found by the side of the road. In eight hours, his body would finally be identified from a list of missing persons, and his death would be reported to someone from the American embassy in town. The next day, it would make local news in his hometown. In a week, his parents would throw a funeral for what was left of their son. In a year, he would be all but forgotten.

For a time, I was jealous of him for dying; I would have done it in the cell but I either lacked the energy or the commitment to go through with anything as serious as that. I knew I was meant to die there, in that concrete box, but a part of my brain was flipping the bird to fate and telling her that I was meant to get out of here. But where would I go? San Pajora was surrounded on every flank by the boundless horizon of desert, no other civilisation was visible pass the point where flat earth turned to the faces of those unforgiving mountains off in the distance.

I knew that if I followed the main road I could probably get around five miles before I collapsed, but the military patrols would catch me before I even reached the outskirts of the city. If I stuck to the open sewers on each side of the road I could at least use the shade to keep out of the sun and the view of the military, but who knows what’s down in those rivers?

By this point, I had resigned to fate and my eyes drifted lazily to the join between the top of the wall and the roof. Back came the voice, not of Stanley but the one that told me that maybe there was a way out. The corner, the one by the wall, had been knocked in a recent skirmish between Spanish and American forces; I had never noticed it before, but there was a crack through which I could see sunlight. I plucked up all the energy I could and rose to my feet, my bare soles cringing slightly at the feeling of the sharp floor under them. I grabbed the bars and looked off, there was the American outpost about five miles out and just a blur in the heat-soaked fields of sand.

I lean down to Stanley and, for the first time ever, I talk to him.

“Do you have a lighter?” I asked.

Stanley’s vacant green eyes shone with confusion; the question hadn’t just baffled him it had almost made him shut down. He hadn’t been spoken to by another human since the guard came by and told him to stop whining about his ulcer; it was like he’d forgotten how to talk to anyone, let alone a woman.

“A lighter.” I repeat, attempting to gesture one by repeatedly raising and lowering my thumb over a clenched fist. “I have an idea, but I need a lighter.” I tell him.

He doesn’t say a word; he just shuffles uncomfortably and pulls a silver lighter from the back pocket of his sand bleached jeans. I thank him and snatch the pair of long abandoned glasses that had belonged to an old man who died a month earlier.

Through the lens of an American’s pair of binoculars, the glint on the glass must have, as I expected, looked like the glint from a sniper’s scope. Suddenly, I was ducking behind the wall as four or five bullets cracked into the suspected sniper, and when I looked back the hole was so much bigger. No longer just a slit in concrete, it was now big enough for me to fit three fingers through.

“I knew it.” I smiled. “There’s soldiers closer to us than we thought.” I looked back through the bars and scanned the bushes.

They probably had the city surrounded with snipers, and without a doubt there was some heavy artillery ready and waiting to be taken in should the order come in to launch the attack. The Second Mexican-American War had been going on for three years longer than the first by this point, and the forces of America knew that taking San Pajora wouldn’t win the war, but it sure would turn it in their favour. Off the high of winning The Battle of Austin, forces had made the first march into Mexico and taken territory all the way down, taking this would mean taking their first city; even if it was miles from anything, it would still be a perfect place for them to consolidate power for what would likely be a final push.

When I looked down to tell Stanley my newest plan of escape, I realised he must have died sometime in the time I had been looking out of the window. I checked his body, willing tears to come though they never could for lack of water in me, and didn’t see any wounds; he had just died, seemingly from nothing.

There wasn’t time for mourning, not now. There were eight of us left in the cell, and I was the only one with an escape plan complete enough to be feasible. Before long, Stanley would start to smell, and the insects would be back.

I went to the new found hole in the wall and began fingering the jagged bore, clumps of dusty rock began to come off in my hand and within the hour I had made enough room to get an arm through.

In that time, another one of my cellmates died. I never found out her name. Sometime after she died, the guards came around again and asked what happened. I took to the front of the group and explained that The Americans had fired on us, but two of us had died of probably dehydration. The Captain, the man who I had worked out to be in charge of this prison, thrust his canteen into my hands and ordered me to share what was in it amongst the others so it wouldn’t happen again. He ordered his men take Stanley and The Woman out, and then locked us back up once he took back his canteen.

Alone again, I went back to my plan. I needed to send a message to those soldiers, just something to make them launch the attack sooner. If I’d had access to something explosive, I’d have made the sound of a gunshot in hopes that the implication of active Mexican retaliation would trigger the battle, but with what I had my escape ended up being a lot less dramatic.

I had arrived at the San Pajora a year and two months earlier, and I still had with me all of the clothes I had been wearing when the military took our bus hostage. With my belongings was a white shirt, I had soon learned that the vest I was wearing under it was all I needed, and the shirt only ever saw use when the desert nights got too cold to deal with.

I took in a deep breath and closed my eyes tightly, the fingertips of my left hand sitting shakily above one particularly jagged tooth in the hole and my right hand clenched around the shirt so tightly that the knuckles were almost as white as the fabric they held. In one jab, I moved the skin of my middle finger down and the flesh was torn almost instantly by the bite of the rock. I bit my lip to muffle the pained groan that spilt out from inside, and looked at it. I had hit bone; it was just visible in the slowly pooling red that was coming up above the skin and trickling down into my palm like water from a leaking tap.

Somehow, seeing I could still bleed made me smile; it was a word of vindication to the voice that proved, without any shade of doubt, I was still alive. I put that raw, newfound relief into ignoring the pain as I painted my masterpiece onto the back of the white shirt.

THE SOLDIER

I’d been a soldier for ten years, and when I fought in what they called ‘The Second America-Mexico War’ I was made a Desert Rat. My job was to lug a ghillie suit and a rifle into the sands surrounding the desert locked city of San Pajora and keep aim for anything unusual. We took ten-hour shifts, the night watchmen would keep watch through thermal vision and usually jump at birds swooping down; our one order was to only ever fire when we saw a threat, and they had a lot of explaining to do when reports showed they were shooting at vultures. We used to have a joke in camp, that this was the first war where a soldier’s fate was worse than death; sure, dying was an inevitability for all men who walked the front lines, but us men there on the desert floor suffered sand in our pants that made us wish for death sometimes.

In all the hours I spent on that desert floor, I fired maybe ten shots before the actual battle. It was four shots I fired on August the third that I would never forget. I was watching an old police station said to be holding hostages. Obviously, from where I was, I couldn’t see through the cell’s one window; but one day I saw that telltale sign, a scope hit sunlight as it lined up a shot, and I was the first to spot it. I released four shots into the wall and waited.

Nothing.

For hours longer, nothing.

I must have waited there for another three, maybe four, hours before I saw new movement behind that wall. What I saw got me a medal when I got home. A tatty old shirt with ‘SOS’ printed on it in blood fell through the hole and hung there like a flag. I radioed in, confirmed that it was the evidence of hostages we needed, and we launched. When all was said and done, we saved eight souls from that holding cell.

THE FREE WOMAN

What I had done may have seemed obvious in hindsight, but it saved all of us. All of us in that San Pajora police station understood fate had picked death for all of us, but by the time the battle for the city ended we were spared what was almost an inevitability.

When I came home, I was welcomed with open arms. My family met me at the airport, and we went straight home from there; every day I would check the news to learn more about what was coming out of the war. One day, a small local piece made national news, and I finally learned Stanley’s name. Another day, I learned that the sniper who took those shots at me had launched the attack and lead his men into victory. He was to be given a purple heart, and it was being delivered to his parents as the nation sat, numb to the footage of combat in those far away sandy lands that were my unwilling home for so long.

I wonder how our fates aligned like that, and if all of them were served correctly. That soldier’s name was just another on a list of dead from that war; Stanley’s name is just seven letters chipped into a stone in a graveyard in Hawlins, Nebraska; and my name was said a few times on international news, but we’re all lost in the wave of war and the statistics that make up its legacy. All of us are sand angels now, imprints of people slowly worn down by the winds that have removed out mark on history; there was no stopping it, there was no fighting it, we just lay down and try to leave a new one and hope this time that the winds stop for long enough for someone, anyone, to see us.