A Fresh Start

A new page, a clean slate, something pure and white; intangible, unimaginable, unexplainable—for how can one express it when once we posses it, it is corrupted? Once we get our new immaculate sheet, we write on it, leaving our mark. It can be a thing of beauty, a depiction of cruelty, a picture of pain. Yet the mark is made and when we are through, we want a new one.

Funny, that.

Why flip the page at all? There is plenty of room, over there. In the top right corner, down on the left side. There is beauty in the chaos, each image coming together to form something, with meaning, without meaning, it matters naught.

And so you tell me that there is no more room, that you could not possibly make another stroke. Why are you afraid to draw over what is already there? It would be ugly, you say. Who defines ugly? It is beautiful.

At last, when you have nothing left but blackness, be at peace. That blackness is pure as well, the opposite of the long forgotten white, but pure all the same. How deep the darkness, how far the abyss. You could fall into it, that abyss, and drift—for that would be all you would know. But, if you feel your tale has not been told, your fable unfinished, you may want a new page.

No need.

Scrawl in white.

God

The dust blue sky filtered in and out of view from behind the rustling camouflage nets draped over the monstrous artillery gun. He sat with his back to a wall of rust brown dirt and marveled at the rays of light that danced an endless waltz across the flattened soil floor. His ears still rung with the thunder that rocketed out of the colossal weapon each time it unloaded its payload towards the battlefield. Looking down at his blackened hands, streaked with dirt and thick grease, he tried to imagine the blood which flowed from them. He did not know his victims. He couldn’t see them fall, hear their screams. Yet, he killed them, by lots—reduced them to disembodied extremities.

He had vomited earlier near the ground where he now sat, and the smell was strong and sharp.

Bracing himself against the earthen barricade, he rose to his feet, quivering. Passing through the roughly designed tunnel, he gripped the sides of the trench until he found his way to the ladder. Gripping each of the wooden rungs with cold, slippery hands, he ascended up towards the heavens.

Resting his arms on the palisade of sandbags, he laid his head on his forearms allowed tears to leak from his reddened eyes. Before him stretched the decimated landscape, dense with razor wire and craters. Strewn in and amongst the holes and hung upon the wires like wet cloth were bodies and pieces. Birds bustled about the carnage like an ever shifting shroud of black.

Had he anything left in his stomach, he would have emptied it onto the stained dirt below. Yet, nothing remained. He was nonbeing. So, he adorned himself there, over the encumbrance—like one of the many corpses he had created.