A Beautiful Paradise. nosleep

You look at the beach and wonder how a war could ever reach such a beautiful paradise. The beach is dotted with craters where missiles wearing your country’s flag fell and detonated. You walk along the pale yellow sands among the bodies. You’ve seen it before, but it still gets to you. Children ripped apart by shrapnel. A young mother holding her three children, but the lower half of their bodies is missing. Another man paralyzed by shock as he struggles to stand but doesn’t realize his legs are gone. Some are still breathing, but they won’t be too long. You tell your men to leave them alone. Save ammunition. The blood of the bodies begins to mix into the crystal blue water, washing back up into the beach in waves.

A young lieutenant approaches you. The air raid was successful; we’re one battle closer to winning the war, he says. You notice his boosted morale. Good, you reply. You tell him to prepare second squad for a search party. He acquiesces.

You walk towards the farther end of the beach, with three men on each side. You walk over the dead bodies, but you do not make any remarks when some of the squad spit on them and bashes their heads in with the butt of their rifle. Stupid filth, they say. A young petty officer notices your disgusted face, however, and tells the rest of the squad to shut the fuck up. Again, you say nothing. Seagulls caw in the sky above you.

The beach seems to be clear. You order the petty officer to return and to organize the entire platoon for a search.You tell the rest of the squad to break formation and to search the bodies for anything useful. Any ammunition is invaluable. Food is a priority. Leave any jewelry and personal items on the bodies. They can’t carry all of it.

They disperse evenly away from you, walking from body to body. You walk away form the beach towards the tree line to piss. As you walk through the trees, some devastated by the missiles you ordered, you see a small pale hand on the floor. Curious, you walk towards it to see the body the hand is attached to.

Your heart begins to pound in your chest. You feel the heartbeat in your head. A sharp pain and moisture forms behind your eyes.

You remember the first day of first grade. You remember that you cried because it scared you to leave your mother, and you remember feeling embarrassed that all of the other children saw you crying that day. So you laid your head down on your desk so that they couldn’t see you.

You remember how the bell rang, and how you heard fifth graders read announcements through the intercom. You stand only for the national anthem, still covering your face with your right hand, because your left hand is on your heart. You hold your gasps in during the moment of silence. After the announcements are over, you lay your head down on your desk.

You don’t remember how long it was, but you remember feeling a tug on your blue polo shirt your mom bought you because your school required uniform. You look up to your side, and you see her. She has the biggest brown eyes you’ve ever seen, slick black hair, and dark eyebrows. She’s wearing a blue skirt and a red vest over a white shirt, and polished Mary Janes. You notice the red ribbons holding her pigtails together. She’s smiling at you, with a beauty mark on the left side of her upper lip, and she asks, “are you okay?”

You remember how embarrassed you felt, but you remember how you suddenly felt an awesome wave of relief wash over you. “I’m Natalie,” she had said, holding out her hand. “What’s your name?”

You remember her telling you how she was new. She’d been in a private school until her father passed away over the summer. But you couldn’t tell. Her smile lit you up that morning.

You remember how over the next few days she sat next to you again. You remember talking to her every chance you could, and how she never came across as anything but nice. You didn’t know it then, but she was your first crush. She played tag with you and your friends during recess, and you noticed how beautiful she still looked with her cheeks red and the top button of her shirt unfastened, even though she was sweating. Everything seemed to be okay for her. And you remember feeling like you had a real friend.

You remember the time you went to her house over the summer to her birthday party. Less than half of the kids showed up, but you remember the big smile on her face as her mother walked the cake over to the dining room table. You remember her embarrassed face while they sang “Happy Birthday” to her, and how she closed her eyes to make a wish.

You remember staying after the party because your mother was running late to pick you up. She sat in her living room with you as she opened the GameBoy she received as a present earlier. You remember how she went the kitchen to get you grape juice, but when she took a long time you got up to see if everything was okay and you found her crying as she looked at the picture of her father that was on the refrigerator. You wanted to comfort her, but your home life was perfect and you didn’t know how. You remember you left because your mother had arrived and didn’t know how to say goodbye.

You remember how on the first day of second grade your face lit up when she walked into your classroom, and how her hair smelled like cherries when she gave you a hug. She was wearing the same clothes that day, and she did as the school year carried on. She went to the library with you during lunch and read “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” with you, instead of playing near the swings at recess with the other children. You remember her asking you why you didn’t go to recess, and how when you told her you liked to read, she said, “you’re so smart!”

You remember how when your teacher, Mrs. Alcala, called for the class to line up, Natalie would always be right in front of you. You remember how she would flick her hair into your face playfully. You called her “the Devil” and you remember how she turned around, shocked, but simply replied, “no, you’re the Devil!” And laughed.

You remember how Anthony Mead would pick on her. He liked her, you could tell, but you remember when he shoved her playfully on the staircase and she had to get stitches on her head that day. But the next day she wasn’t sitting next to you in class. She wasn’t there the next day either. You remember feeling worried, like she’d left a void in you that you didn’t even know she filled.

You remember when she came back the next week, she was more quiet. She didn’t flick her hair in your face anymore. She smiled at you, but during the moments she spoke you felt how she was putting distance between you. You remember how every day after that she looked sadder. She sat at her desk, resting her head on her arms, staring at her worksheets. At recess she sat on the sidewalk next to the teachers by herself. She didn’t show up to school at all for Field Day, and you remember how eventually you began to pretend not to notice her absence when Anthony Mead called her “your little girlfriend”. You remember how her eyes were red constantly. You remember how she didn’t wait for you after the last bell anymore. You remember the last time you saw her, on the last day of second grade, holding her notebook against her chest as her mother picked her up. You remember how you through away the card you were going to give her, that told of how you hoped you would see her again next year. You remember how you threw away the daisy you had picked from the edges of the playground, that you knew she liked because you remember how she’d put them in her hair.

You remember how you waited and waited on the first day of third grade for her to walk into your classroom, with her pigtails, her Mary Janes, and her uniform. You remember looking for her at lunch, thinking she had been assigned a different homeroom. You remember looking for her at recess, but Gabrielle Newman told you that she’d moved away over the summer. You were too shy to ask anybody else, until Anthony Mead came up to you at recess in November and told you that he heard Natalie had gotten “something called ‘luke heema” and had moved to Mexico to receive treatment. You remember this was also the only time Anthony Mead was nice to you, because he moved away to South Carolina two weeks later.

You remember how you grew up, but you never grew out. You remember your first day of middle school and your first day of high school, and every phase you ever went through. You remember how your music taste changed, you wanted to watch different movies, and how you constantly begged your mom to buy you new clothes to keep up with trends. You remember how you gained a lot of weight but lost a lot of it your junior year of high school. You remember how your family kept reminding you how much taller you were getting, and you remember Maryela, the girlfriend you had in high school, and how she followed you to college. You remember how Maryela supported you when you decided to commission in the military, even though your father was upset. You remember how sometimes when you were alone you’d wonder if Maryela was the one, because as lovely as she was, and as much as your family loved her, you never felt the same as you did with Natalie. You remember all the changes you went through, the friends you made, and even when you started to accept that maybe your memories of Natalie weren’t as glorious as you thought they were, you still though of her every once in a while.

You remember coming home from Officer Candidates School. You remember your commissioning ceremony and how proud your parents looked when they saw you uniform. You remembered how beautiful Maryela looked in a white dress she’d bought for the ceremony, and how beautiful she looked under the string lights as you danced. You remember how tears rolled down her eyes when you broke up with her later that night because you thought you deserved better, because you thought you deserved Natalie.

You remember feeling foolish, and how by the time you came to your senses, Maryela had married someone else. You remember being at Camp Lejeune and receiving a phone call, and how that phone call told you that your parents, your only living family, had been killed in their home by an illegal immigrant, although you didn’t realize why that detail needed to be said. You remember how you were angry, and how that anger motivated you, and how that motivation allowed you to quickly rise up through the ranks. You remember how you never made any more meaningful relationships with anyone, how you never had the children you dreamed of raising.

You remember you were at the military ball when the television displays suddenly tuned to an image of your leader, and how your leader announced that your country had just entered a state of war with another country. You remember the chaos that followed, and how everyone at the Officer’s Club was so drunk they hardly remembered it the next morning.

You remember leading your men to victory after victory. You remember how you were assigned to the southern beaches a few weeks earlier, and how the young lieutenant had told you about the civilian village ten miles south. You remember ordering the air raid. You remember hearing the missiles exploding, sending fire, flesh, and sand into the air.

And now you’re standing at the foot of a tree, with a lifeless body in front of you. Her beauty mark is bigger, and you realize that her hair is different, but her dark eyebrows and mousy little nose is the same. For a second you try to convince yourself it isn’t her, until you find her wallet on her breast and you open it.

NATALIA DUERRE VILLASEÑOR

She’d gotten married, you realize, because her maiden name came after Duerre. Perhaps he was French. You notice she has light scars on her wrist and you wonder what she went through after she left you on the last day of second grade. Her eyes are still open, so you close them.

You heart beats harder. Natalie. Your Natalie. After all these years…

Natalie.

You hear footsteps behind you, but you don’t pay attention to them. You stare at her lifeless body, watching as blood begins to pool on the soil to her right. You hear the voice of the petty officer behind you, as he asks you if everything is alright. You simply nod without turning around to face him. You close your eyes. They’re burning now, as you hold back tears, and hope that you can control yourself so your men do not see you as vulnerable. You hear a young soldier walk up next you. “Shame. She was hot,” he utters.

You don’t think about it. You punch him in the gut. He falls to the ground and struggles to catch his breath. His surprised eyes try to fixate themselves on you. After a few moments, he begins to get up. When he’s on one knee, you take out your revolver and unload six shells into his head. His body takes a while to fall backwards. You look towards the rest of the squad, who looked scared, but you put your revolve away.

You walk back out onto the beach and tell the squad to go back to the base. As they leave, you find daisies growing in the grass a few feet away. You pick up the prettiest ones and lay them next to Natalie. For the first time in ten years, you begin to cry.

You think about the first time she smiled at you. How she hid her sadness under a smile everyday. How she had fought cancer and survived. You realize that she eventually fell in love and got married, but you’re confident she remembered you sometimes. You think about how years of dodging death had been rendered pointless because of the air raid you ordered. Because of the false power you had. Because you wanted to win a war.

You look back out towards the beach as the sun begins to set. The glare illuminates the sea in a bright yellow color, and only by standing in it you watch how the blood washes away from the bodies, but keeps washing back. You contemplate how a war could ever reach such a beautiful paradise.

Submitted January 12, 2018 at 10:41PM by danieldlp http://ift.tt/2qWFkjf nosleep