mad whatcha come up with after a few beers...

....think I posted this somewhere here before....but not 100%...just found it on my laptop in any case and thought I'd stick it up here. Shur tis writing and tis creative and isn't that what it's all about....?!

Here we go - have an ould read if you feel like it...

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This is not what I expected. This is not it at all. My God, the ground is dry and arid. The dust swirls in the air and catches in my throat and makes me cough. Over and over. A rasping, pointless, useless cough. My lungs are filled with fire and pain. And every step I take is an agony beyond compare. I stoop down to stop myself from falling. My head is spinning, my body weak. My palms press against the brittle surface of a dirt track beneath me - tiny, sharp stones piercing into the weathered skin on my fingers. I am gasping. Gasping for air, for water, for anything that can bring relief. But there is nothing. Nothing. Just an endless horizon, drawn straight between the intense heat of a colourless sky and the desolation of a barren land.

I am nowhere.

This is not what they promised with their prayers and their incantations. This is not what they said awaited the righteous. This is not it at all. How could they have got it so wrong?

I force myself upright and I stumble on. I have no choice.

In the distance I see a lone tree. It points towards the sky like a crooked finger. It is leafless and lifeless, a mere skeleton of a thing, silhouetted bleakly against an endless grey-white curtain of light. It is, however, the only point of reference in an otherwise deserted world. It is where I feel i must go. I walk. I crawl. Sometimes I give up and I let gravity pull me to the ground. I lie for minutes at a time on my aching back and wait for my heartbeat to subside, for my wretched muscles to recuperate. And then slowly I try to stand and walk again.

The tree is closer now. And at the base of its weathered trunk I see roots that have erupted through the ground. There they lie like thick tangled ropes. Mottled with moss. Cracked with age. Silent and still, yet insidiously imposing. Like the barbed wire we once used to fortify our meagre defenses. Our buildings. Our outposts. Our country. Our people.

Against the enemy.

For that was what they told us to do.

‘Defend our people against the enemy’

For that we would be rewarded, they said. We would be respected. We would live in peace and prosperity, and when we died we would be seated at the right hand of our Lord God the Father. Amen, they said. And we all repeated the word. Amen.

I died a relatively old man. Seventy-seven years to the day since I’d first been held in the arms of a midwife and tasted the freshness of the earth’s blanket of clean air. And when the moment of my departure came, I lay silently and comfortably in my hospital bed. Surrounded by family. Some of whom wept. Some of whom didn’t. My wife had long since passed away. My final thoughts in life were of her. Indeed as I floated above my own deceased remains I genuinely relished the prospect of seeing her again.

She was the only one I’d ever truly loved. And, I believe, the only one who’d ever truly loved me. She’d given herself to me, body and soul. And in return, I’d done all I could to make her life a comfortable one. She was the only one who saw me laugh and who saw me cry and who knew exactly the reasons why - the real reasons. Who listened to me when I spoke about the ugliness of war and the horrors of combat. Who accepted my weaknesses for what they were. And my strengths for what they could be.

Yet here I am now. In this barren wasteland. And she is nowhere to be seen. My love, my dearest, most precious love, is nowhere to be found. This is not the heaven they promised. This is not even the purgatory they spoke of in their sermons and their readings and their cryptic gospels. This is nothing and nowhere. This is death.

The roots of the tree are not roots.

I see that now.

They are limbs.

They are the limbs of men. Broken and twisted. Wrapped in grey and tattered clothing. Torn and stained with dirt and blood. They are the arms and legs, the hands and feet, the hips and ankles of men. Dead men. Where skin is visible it is stretched like a thin, muslin cloth, pulled tightly around bone, ancient and pallid, anemic, bloodless.

My rational mind tells me to turn and flee. But I find that I can’t. I am instead drawn closer. Something is drawing me closer. Something in me that I can’t explain. A need to know. To understand. I stumble to within mere feet of the tree. And I see it all now. I stare in slowly dawning dread and disgust. The limbs are attached to torsos and the torsos to heads. And from the mouths on the heads emerge sounds. The sounds of pain. The sounds of suffering. Sounds that swirl above and around me in the dusty air. Guttural, rasping and inarticulate. Together the sounds merge to form a tuneless, constant groan. Harsh and grating. Delivered to my wearisome ears on an undercurrent of seething, threatening anger.

I am fearful. Terribly so.

More fearful than I’ve ever been.

Suddenly there is movement. Eyes spring open. I have awakened the beast. The beast of limbs and torsos and heads and anger. It rises before me and dwarfs the burnt husk of the tree. It looms over me in the grey sky, swaying violently in a gust of hot, dry air. I fear it will collapse onto me, burying me in its mass of bone and dead flesh, crushing me under its skeleton of fused men. Of dead men.

Of men I now know I killed.

For I see for the first time the emblems on their shoulders, dotted about the upper half of the massive beast. Broken, disfigured crosses set in white circles. Swastikas.

All of a sudden the groaning sound intensifies, transformed into a high-pitched scream, an inordinately loud, distorted scream. I lift my hands to each side of my head, trying desperately to block my ears. But it’s no good. The sound is already in me. Growing ever louder within my own being. Piercing me from within. Filling my head and my body. Sending spasms of pain through my entire person. I stumble backwards. I have to get away from this thing. But there is nowhere to get away to.

‘We are the ones you killed,’ the scream seems to say. Articulating what I already knew. ‘We’ve waited so long.’ The words - if they are words - reverberate with malevolence. Resolute, tangible malevolence.

I turn and try to run but instantly I slip and fall to the ground. I lift myself breathlessly into a crawling position and scramble forward in the dust and the dirt. My fingers dig into the dry, scratchy soil but already my body is being pulled back. Something has wrapped itself around my foot and is hauling me backwards. I imagine a giant tentacle of molten, disfigured bone. I feel a vice-like grip on my ankle first and then my shin. But I don’t turn around. I cannot afford to turn around. Instead I try to dig again into the ground. Try to anchor myself in place so I can somehow gather enough strength to pull my flailing body forward.

But it’s pointless. My attempts to escape are futile. My arms are too weak and my fingers too old and frail. The screaming is louder than ever now. I can’t hold on. I am succumbing to the beast. I am already being consumed by it. It is above me. It is all over me. Its longed-for vengeance is about to be realised upon me. I cannot help myself any longer. I let go. I am too weak. I stop trying to pull myself away.

I give up.

‘We’ve got him,’ another voice says now. Different somehow. ‘He’s back.’

A white coat. A single human face. An anxious expression. A blurring of florescent lights and a hushed, expectant murmur. The scream is fading. The grip of the beast is weakening.

‘Okay, okay, wait for it to steady.’ More faces now. All looking towards something. A monitor. A screen. A regular spike in a green horizontal line. A beep. And then another beep and another.

I know where I am now.
I am alive.
Again.
I am back.
Like Lazarus. Returned from the dead.
To the relief, I sense, of those around me.
But I feel no relief. Only desolation.

Why did they bring me back here? Why did they not leave me go? I am old. This serves no point. No purpose. What are they trying to prove with their medicines and their machines and their degrees? Why did they let me taste the afterlife only to bring me back to earth?

Because taste it I did. But like the taste I most certainly did not.


And now the prospect of dying fills me with more dread than I could ever have imagined.

Because now I know what awaits me when my time comes in ernest.