Some Vignettes

We were eight years old that summer, Nicole and I.  We used to ride our bicycles every night after dinner.  We would ride up and down that dead-end street with my grandfather watching from a wooden rocker on the front porch.  That was long ago, when we were young and innocent, when we were children.


Two lovers walked hand in hand down a dark, snow quietened street. The girl jumped as lightning streaked across the night sky. She had never seen lightning in a snow storm before. The boy had and he knew what it meant. It snowed the rest of that night and all the next day. Hard and fast. Seventeen inches in all. We spent three days making love by the fire. That was when we were young and still believed in love.


We were in a room somewhere, close and warm.  So close I could smell her perfume and feel the heat of her skin.  There were other people in the room, but they did not matter.  I asked her if I could some see her sometime and she said yes and I was happy, happier than I could ever remember being.  I tried to ask her something else, but she was gone.  I suddenly woke up and felt very empty.


It was a perfect spring day.  The dogwoods along the drive were in full bloom, their leaves a brilliant mix of white and pink.  Caitlin's cat was lying in the April sun, watching two robins pecking the ground by the front door.  That was the day we buried Caitlin.  Three days after she slit her wrists with a straight razor.


It had rained during the night. The ground was still wet and he could feel it soaking through his shirt. He could smell the damp earth and the oil on the gun. His stomach crawled as he watched them moving through the trees, still out of range, but coming fast. Let them come, he thought. Let them come.


The early morning sun was very bright, so bright it hurt my eyes.  A warm breeze blew against my back.  It was the kind of day that's so beautiful it makes you glad just to be alive.  We were upwind from the dry riverbed, so we didn't notice the smell until we were right on it.  There had been heavy fighting in the town two days earlier.  The retreating guerrillas had stopped at the dry riverbed long enough to bury their dead in shallow graves.  Many of them had only been half-buried and you could see their legs jutting up from the ground.  Others had been dug up by wild dogs.  One of them was just a boy, maybe fifteen or sixteen.  He'd been hit in the chest; his face was frozen in shock.  Two dogs were eating the boy's leg.  One of them looked up at me.  Its muzzle was covered with blood.  I felt the bile rising in my throat.