Prokop Comes Home

“So, is this everyone?” Prokop inquired, wiggling her nightstick.

The people arrayed in the snow choked square pretended to search further, their breaths piping into the devouring white sky above. They began gesturing, visibly wondering, counting, when a man began to shake his head vigorously. 

“Where?” She stalked toward the man as he began to clutch his head and chant. 

“On the north flank of the livery, there be the Brechts. Do not harm them. Do not harm them.”

She’d already begun in that direction, snapping at two of her men to form her flanks. The pasture had a heavily shaded path beneath its awning that saw her and her two soldiers into a realm of hastily erected domestic battlements. Her sharp boot punctured the thick mud that formed the outer entryway of the Brecht residence as they came upon the face of the makeshift home. She approached their door, a rickety amalgam of wooden boards, and gave it a knock. A man’s voice could be heard recognizing the knock and saying that he would be there soon. As she waited, she observed the little shack’s face, marred and stuffed into a hole as it was, and wondered sincerely if the house represented the people who lived within. The door cracked open, and a diminutive man’s face showed through, shorter than her by a solid chunk of centimeters. His round glasses reflected the piercing reflection of the sun off the snow, right into her vision.  

“Hello.” He said, word seemingly itching as it slipped off his tongue.

“Hello sir, my name is Captain Prokop with General Gordich’s Army, and I’m here to make sure your town is following along with the party’s recommended state of being. Your house stuck out because you were the only ones not in the center of town to watch the display scheduled to take place there.” 

“Well…” he slithered through the gap in the door, “My name is Arnold.”

He coughed, but it kept slipping from him, and he kept coughing until Prokop laid her hand on his shoulder and something about her uncanniness righted his fit into something manageable. 

“I’m not the type to keep close marks on the status of the government. Perhaps that is a failing of mine.”

“A failing indeed sir, for the hordes of change have arrived at your front door, and you are seen as nothing more than a mite in my hair this moment and the next.”

“I’d hate to be a mite. Mites disgust me.”

“Exactly my point sir. It would be unfavorable to tread that path. And so I stand here before you offering you a hand, one that could carry you into the future on gilded gossamer wings.” 

“Now that sounds closer to what I would expect for a dedicated citizen. I’ll retrieve my coat.”

He slipped back into the entryway for a moment.

“Is it just you in the home sir?” Prokop touched her helmet to the door as she leaned into the gap in the door. “Wouldn’t want to cause a stir, you know, sir.” 

“Certainly madam!” He returned from the inner sanctum of his shack, where the squat stairs crowded the place where they dropped their boots and hung their coats. “I live here with my wife and two daughters, the latter are within now, doing their homework, and my wife is in the countryside visiting her brother.” 

“Very neat sir, very squared away. Please, retrieve the two of them and we’ll see about locating your wife.” Prokop knocked her sheathed nightstick against the heel of her boot, making eye contact with the towering soldier that hung his receded eyes over Brecht’s tiny form.

“What is it that you do for a living Brecht?”

“I make moving pictures. If you could spare the time, I could show you.”

She was unconvinced that such a thing would attain any significance, as experimental as it was and how the man appeared before her in that moment. But she thought it might draw everyone out in the open if word got around that a captain of Gorich’s guard was engaged in the viewing of an experimental artform. She agreed then, and Arnold rushed them to a tent sitting just beside the town, licked by raging winds, but rooted to the earth firmly with iron rods. Prokop sat at the center of a long pillowed seat, set into thick grass, surrounded by her men, staring across an installation of a mountain hewn from the rock of what appeared to be another planet. For a moment she imagined what it would be like there, what kind of wars they would start in the absence of all the conflict spun into the fabric of human history. 

The man to her right moved in discomfort, trying to find bodily peace within his carapace. Finding none, he contented himself to widdle his teeth down by grinding them together. She offered a curse, and he ceased, grumbling almost imperceptibly. She ignored him, returning her attention to the installation which folded into itself and became something new, a field occupied by people who sprouted from the soil, forming the bulk of a hill of shimmering green grass. Then, suddenly, an enormous boot came and flattened them in a swathe, burying them firmly within the mud. She shook her head, deciphering the art’s message until the information she conjured disturbed her enough to cause her to stand and rip through the tent, forming her own exit, and causing the projector to collapse in tandem. 

The sun lay behind a bulwark of thick white clouds which, upon observation, served merely to obscure the true state of being in the world rather than cause a change to affairs. This, again, caused Prokop to want to rip the town asunder to see what lay inside. Some people huddled in the stark frigid air beneath the second storey awning of a shoe store, playing cards and drinking on a barrel. Prokop snapped, calling her men to attention, and pointed at one, the most grizzled and lifeless of the bunch. She watched every man’s breath fog in stuttaco unison, sending life to the realm of the spirits by her eye, and giving a visualization to the perilous nature of life. She shook her head at how the art installation had made her doting and cerebral, quite the opposite qualities needed to command a squad of long coated killers from the heartland, come to reacquaint these fringe dogs with the true nature of life.  

A host of homebodies dragged themselves from their domiciles to show their faces to god and Prokop, nearly one and the same then, to them at least. They buried their necks in shawls and scarves, blowing warm air into thick gloves, and while it kept the cold at bay, it could not ward off the brutality which was endemic to life, and in wartime, was common as dirt, scalding their minds of entire countries with Gorich’s acrid truth. Prokop meant to make it clear what the situation was, and so, as the old and young gathered around and beneath the awning of the shoe store, she offered them a line of thinking they had perhaps not considered in their ragged and presumably too long lives.

“Cherish death the way you cherish life and you will understand why it is that the reaper dwells in graveyards and the altars of human achievements both. It is because we are rooted in life at both ends.” 

Prokop felt their eyes on her body, clawing at her neck, pouring into her own eyes. Once, such a feeling would’ve disturbed her enough to seek shelter from their collective gaze. But now, she stood emboldened by it, clutching her gun like it was the key to tartarus, and she was handing out tickets to the best ride in town. All they’d have to do would be to kneel in the mud and let her deliver them. The people were one unified thing then, infecting her mind with their expressions of grief bound together with common gaiety. She covered her eyes with her left hand, and with the right, leveled her gun at the townsfolk. Her gun barked once, and for a long second afterwards there was silence, before the people fell to going rabid for the sake of their wounded or dead compadre. 

Her soldiers kept them cordoned in the town’s square at the ends of machine guns. Arnold was among them, and he shouted for Prokop’s attention, still lucid in spite of the sudden death which could potentially have been inflicted on him just the same. 

“What exactly are you trying to accomplish?” He shouted to Prokop. 

“Calm the masses first.” 

Arnold managed to convince people to stop shouting at the side of the wounded old woman and placate the raging fear and anger which poured forth so that he might be able to reach a conclusion with their captors. 

“That’s enough.” Prokop said. “I want to impress on you how death is not an ultimate end, but a mode of transition to another state of being. Gorich is a buddhist at heart, and hence, he believes in life cycles. Once one life ends, you are saddled by your previous life’s burdens until you can break free, spiritually, from that which keeps you enslaved, physically, and reach nirvana, which is a transcendence from the system of cycles in which we are confined. This is my understanding of Gorich’s teachings that I have come to bring to you.”

Arnold cleared his throat as some people had looks on their faces like they were experiencing the agony of an epiphany. Many still stood unconvinced, pushing the cold away by their breath, staring down the military woman clad in deep gray. 

“What is your purpose here?” He reiterated louder, so everyone could take part in their conversation. 

“Great question Arnold. We’ve come to introduce you to what life under Gordich could be like.”

“What does killing us prove?”

“Primarily that the choice whether to follow us or not does not rest with you. It is out of your hands. Our first and perhaps most important test will lie in your ability to choose correctly even with your lives hanging in the balance. You do understand, Arnold?”

“Yes, I understand but--”

“Great. Commensurate to that, those of you who want to die, stay where you are. Those who want to live, enter the barn.” Her nightstick was leveled at the old barn molding to bits adjacent to the shoe store. She dropped it, and it swung on the leather strap around her wrist as the multitude became divided then subsequently devoured by what they would do. The majority of the group herded to the barn, as the remainder shouted after them, and a few people stood cradling themselves like they were absolutely ready for the encroaching oblivion. When everyone who wanted to live had filled the barn, Prokop’s soldiers closed the doors, then barred them with a thick oaken beam.

“Those who wished to die will live, and those who wished to live will die.”

She motioned to her men, and one produced a small flamethrower and began to set the barn alight. Screams became the town’s new background noise in that moment, setting the stage for even more perilous discussions. A man started to run toward the soldier pouring the flames and was swiftly cut down by another soldier wielding a machine gun. 

“Prokop! You know not what you do!” 

She heard Arnold’s words, and approached him, brandishing her nightstick, then struck his knee, which caused him to writhe on the ground in agony. The host of people burned as the remainder watched. Even the old woman with a bullet in her guts leaned against the porch and watched the flames consume most of the people she knew. The fire really took after a time, totally engulfing the barn in a raging burning entity only isolated by a few feet of snow-clod mud. 

It was this memory that stayed in the town’s remaining consciousness as Prokop took up shop in wait for Gorich’s orders. None came, as spring transformed to summer, then summer to fall, and finally back to winter. It was in that winter that Arnold and Prokop had a conversation in her stateroom in the bar, if one could even call it that, and they sat across eachother as a phonograph sang softly. Arnold produced a bottle of cognac, and began to pour her a glass as they relayed to eachother how their days had gone. Arnold had a certain twitch about him that she noticed on this occasion, and felt it was relevant to point such an irregularity out so that they might discuss what was really on his mind. 

“Are you feeling feeble?”

“No, not particularly madam, just nervous.”

“Why is that?”

“I’ve got something to tell you.”

“Unspool thy mind.” 

“Back when you came here, last winter, I had my suspicions, but failed to gain confirmation as of last night. It’s really a serious mystery why this played out exactly how it did.”

“You’re speaking in riddles Arny. Just lay it out for me.”

“One of the men you sent to the barn… he was…”

“What? Anemic? A coward? I could’ve guessed as much.” 

“Your father.”

She shook her head and smiled, but on the edge of her lips a titanic frown pulled at the corners of her face like the weight immense anchors. 

“No, that’s not true. My father lives in the heartland with my mother and younger sister.”

“Your mother was a widow when you were born, no?”

“Yes, that’s true.”

“And she traveled rural countrysides as an itinerant nurse?”

“Yes.”

“She was impregnated by one Harold Sinskey, a lanky fellow who often featured a long mustache.”

“That’s false.” She stood, leaning over her desk toward Brecht. 

“There’s records of it, along with anecdotal evidence provided by the…” Arnold coughed. “remainder of the town’s residents.” 

Rage spread across her face in an instant, and before Arnold realized it, she held a combat knife which she swiftly plunged into the desk in front of her, shattering the flimsy extension that allowed them to deliberate almost professionally. Every cordial pretense was splintered with the wood, and Arnold stood to leave.

“Where are you going Arnold!” She turned to face him, the picture of hatred.

“I think you have something to work through.”

“Stop.” She said resolutely. “If you leave without explaining yourself I’ll put a bullet in you.” 

She held her Luger in her left hand, and her knife in her right, pointed down. Like a trench raider, Arnold thought, eminently prepared to end the life of another. And so, recognizing her power over his continued existence, he sat on the armrest of the couch against the outer wall and splayed his hands in deference. 

“If this is the burning truth, why did you not tell me sooner?”

“I didn’t want you to kill me.”

“That’s fair.” She relented, flopping back into the large stately chair, weapons still equipped, but rendered largely inert by her seated position. 

“The question is now, what will you do with this information? You’ve converted our town to Gordism, in spite of the brutality that followed your arrival. Quite the achievement, in my eyes.”

“We’ll see how long it takes. But for now, thank you for bringing this to me.” She nonverbally ushered him out with the barrel of her gun, and he left the room. In the hallway he heard a single gunshot resound throughout the building, and knew in that moment that Prokop would never leave home again.