Mud

Mud. That’s all that I knew during the war: Mud in the food, mud in the trenches, and mud on the corpses. On good days there was no new mud, on bad days men died in the mud, not even from a shell or slug: they just drowned in it. If you could swim you had a chance, a chance to stay above long enough for someone to find you. If you couldn’t swim, you died without question.  I think I lost more friends and brothers to mud then to slugs or shells or gas. Blood on the mud almost seemed like a miracle, a little color in the dull world we now inhabited, until they eye followed the flow to the wound on a dying man, convulsing on the ground, in the mud.

There was never this much mud, this much water or clouds before the war, only now did some sadistic entity look down on our land and decide to drown it. Now there is less rain, in fact no rain. Peace came in the form of a fireball in the sky, and then a dead world. We came here united, built this place from nothing; then we drove each other apart and reduced our Utopia to dust and ash. The world may be dead, but now at least the inferno is gone and we can rest our weary bodies. We can rest and be silent and help one another without thought or speech. We are not ready for speech again. Speech lead us here, to this place, then speech lead us to the destruction of this place. As it had the last in the last place, and the last before that, but I was not there for those places, anymore then I am here now, in this ash-land, this land of the numb and dyeing.

Maybe instead of speaking, we will sing. We will sing only of tragedies and horrors and demons and mud, and then our lives will be full, full of the good and the kind, and to be sung about would be worse than death. But this is fancy, hope, fantasy, nothing more.  I can hope and fantasize for the rest of my life, but I can’t tell anyone. We are in a land of the silent now. No one speaks, we are hurt, in our minds and our bodies and our health. Some of us, like I, have mud in our throats and mouths and noses, and no sounds can escape us. We have mud in our eyes and ears and on our skin and all we sense is filtered through mud.

Maybe mud is all we will ever know.