Weekly Creative Writing #9
The day was bleak and cold as the bitter wind from the steppes swept the streets of the war-ravaged city. The enemy occupied every street and policed every corner, and the steely men terrified the citizens. But one young face did not fear the enemy, for when greater foes prey upon the doorstep of one’s home, the lesser enemies fade into the grey. She watched, helplessly, as her grandmother slipped further and further from the warmth of this life and into some other. Slowly it went by, an agonizing day coming upon the heels of an agonizing day. Silent days, of course, apart from the occasional tramp of a company of occupying soldiers outside the windows. Naturally, her father had gone off to war and she knew not if he would ever return. Her mother, too, was gone forever. She gazed out the window at the colorless twilight, thinking of how soon she would be alone, when she remembered. There was a doctor, of sorts, but two or three blocks away... two or three blocks of ravaged street and tattered façades, filled with soldiers... It was not a matter of should or shouldn’t, it was a matter of necessity. Out the door and into the wide, new, frightening world. The deserts of the world combined couldn’t have been more quiet than that street. And so she started. But the world grew dark quickly, and she could hear footsteps behind her, like some specter of her worst dreams. Quicker and quicker her pace increased until she tumbled, with a terrified shriek, into a shallow dip made by some shell. Gentle hands closed around her arms and lifted her to her feet, and she saw the specter... a young man, perhaps twenty or thirty, knelt there. Dressed in the uniform of the enemy, he looked up at her, and, for a moment, some point on the edges of the wheels of their own, respective, separate lives touched. His bright blue eyes in the moonlight could have been her own father’s, and perhaps her young face brought back memories of a sister or sweetheart in his past life. Either way, he hovered next to her for the remainder of her journey, past other soldiers and through what was now a moonlit night like an ironic guardian angel, until she reached the stoop of her own hovel once more. And there, a little ways off, he stood as she went in the door. She turned for a second, for a last glance, and saw a tiny teardrop, like a sparkling little star in the moonlight, fall from those blue eyes. She would never know why. We will never know why. God and the man himself alone knew the reason. And then he, too turned away and she saw him no more. The doctor would come. Her grandmother would survive, the city would revive, but the one thing that lasted throughout her life was the memory of a single, incomprehensible tear from that bright, bright blue eye.
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