story out of time

United States
December 2, 2006 3:50pm CST
here is a short story i wrote and i would like to hear your opinion on this story out of time She uses the same closing line every time she tells us the story, the same thrusting motion with her hand, wears the same grim expression. It was her mother's story, and now it's hers as she tells her children after dinner. It was during a time of war. She tells us the story without a sense of specificity; the war has no name unless we ask. Her mother was walking down a road one day, an ordinary day. Perhaps it is the main road in their part of town, which is a dirt road, wider than most, pasted down in flat, shaven fields. I imagine she was returning home with bundles suspended from her hands, trudging slowly, but with steady steps. In the bundles were probably the week's groceries, the few fresh vegetables available during those days of inflated prices, and maybe an older sister followed behind, carrying small containers with a weekend treat: sweet sticky buns with fruit filling, golden in color and of great value to the children. The soldiers were so horrible, my mother would shake her head. Your grandma saw them doing all sorts of evil, evil things, in all sorts of places. On the road that day, soldiers walked too. Not the soldiers of my grandmother, but soldiers who had similar eating habits and a similar language but foreign intentions and a foreign understanding. Civilians shared the road – it was their road, the same one they used as children walking with their parents, as young people, as parents with children running along ahead of them. That day, there were children playing on the side of the road, my mother says. Laughing, perhaps, a break in the dusty gravity of war. The soldiers walked together, watching them, smiling at the familiar scene in an unfamiliar place. Some walked with long, slender swords in their hands, used to slice off bits of vegetation to cool their mouths. A child ran along the side of the road, in pursuit of something – a ball, another boy, a scampering critter, maybe. A soldier watched the boy run towards him. He held his hand out – the sword in his hand, the blade tilted and waiting. The point of the sword met the belly of the child, it slid into his soft body, it ran through. The soldier lifted the sword, now measuring the weight of a child. He waved the sword in the air, a small body skewered precisely on the blade flashing in the sun, like a slice of summer honeydew set on a toothpick. At this point, my mother nods slowly, with eyebrows raised like dashes above her eyes, her mouth flat, its ends turning neither up nor downwards. Her hand thrusts upwards, at an angle, in rhythm, and she nods to confirm our expressions. It's a story with no background, no sequence, no time frame. It sits on its own with nothing to attach it to other events, no trace to remind us of other stories she told.
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