“We’ll never get out of here alive, YOU KNOW THAT RIGHT!?”
“Are your screaming matches lethal? Maybe you should yell at the bombs, eh?” he said as he clamored over debris in front of the rusty train car’s once decorative front door.
Never, was I going to be able to live up what I’ve lost. Soon the city will fall anyways. The rust beneath my fingers grinds my skins just like the voices carry from friends and neighbors I’d so recently made and lost. But I’ve got to run! There’s a piece of me, sure enough for the rest of me, that tomorrow is outside and alive of here. Still, I can make something of this. There is a way to create from this rubble and with their memories honored.
“You look so lost in thought, youngin’. DOBRORO RANKU, jump on the train to life!” and he toppled what his jump was to his newly christened ship.
Each step was made flawlessly but had a vigorous struggle that seemed to intimately communicate his joy through his moves. The inside of train cars in this country make for a great theater to the damage done and being wrought outside the windows. Its as if we’re running through a commercial for the Ukrainian revolution but-
*Geeeerpow!!
Part of the train blows up
As splinters fly of what was my next step the taste of blood rises to my throat. Its just a smell though. I can get through this, even if my face and the hairs on my neck and body is stuck in shock. And as this strange man laughs through the blood that is clearly his own.
“Nema za Scho… now what do we have here?” He jests.
“How the fuck can you so goddamn jovial, you fool!” I spit with more of my anger and fear than saliva in the air chasing my words.
“Because I ended up here, so I must have asked for it. And I’ll be damned if I don’t enjoy it” he replied with the only stern expression I’ve seen him make in three hours of running.
“You’ve been complaining about your lost loves, missed jobs, and won but undelivered trophies. The world is not out to get you, you tiny, silly pup. The world is a story you’re writing and if you ended up here, something of you asked for it” he said to me in a graven tone almost outweighing the certain coming explosions.
Then he pointed to the hole the blast had made. The blood off his leg seemed insignificant not from his leaping into the hole but for the great escape it provided. The underground station cars would be the best way out and safe us from the coming air raids on the standing buildings. He told me that if I didn’t stop stopping to step on the roses that I might be able to smell them for a second before they died. And he laughed as he said but they might try and kill you, makes it not a lesser scent.
“My name is Peter Hainsworth. Who are you sir?” words that escaped seemingly pointless in this run but meaning the world now that we have broken the silence. As it was, we were rats scrambling to get out but now we are people. And people have names.
“My name is Alfred but you can call me Alfred” he said in one breath, toneless and trite.
Then we disappeared into the tunnel beneath the recently blown upon train car. I missed my father but not for means of sadness of guidance. He was a daft brilliant spelunker. Each tiny step was slippery. Simple placement could have led me down much faster with a thud somewhere in the darkness and a lack of math of steps for my feet.
“What in the fucking layers of hell are you doing?! Jump, its five goddamn feet, you fool, hahaha” Alfred said with glee and blood on his steps.
He was right and I had already counted the step. Sweat ran down my back as we wandered down the empty railway to outside the city’s explosions. Outside of the reverberating amphitheater we have unearthed. Alfred told me that he knows it was an accident the explosion that hurt his leg and freed us but he didn’t care. His words told the story of living like a play and he was going to act like it was a gift given to him until the scene forced him to change.
“We’re all just pretending anyways. What were you before you started to pretend to be Peter?” He said to me as he shoved me forward over a broken piece of the tunnel that neither of us could get over on our own.
As the sounds shook our home’s walls harder than ever yet, I pulled him up over the rocks and tried to listen to his penny-theater cliff notes. But all the smells of my sweat just made me think of how if I had sweat harder in training, I’ve have been elsewhere. Shit, I could still have been playing football if I sweat hard enough. And this is where I end up.
“Trick is to not stick to any scene too hard, or at least not as hard as you beat yourself—” and another boom, louder than the previously loudest boom ever had been, chimed in over his words.
I wanted to tell him that nobody cared or ever would. But his eyes glittered, almost asking for exactly what I was about to say. When a person lets a stare linger, so much more is said and no Ukrainian slang or British phrase could have asked harder.
“We’re probably going to die down here, I came not for your autobiography highlights or parabol. So many people we could have brought with us are still back there” I screeched higher than I knew I could speak but suited to my word’s heart.
Then he stopped and turned about face. He looked me up and down and snickered. The words that left his mouth about how my death would not be anything but an answer to the question I’ve been posing my whole life while his would be a transition to another adventure. He talked about statistics and that for every thing I bitch about there are a good few hundred other ways to see it and other wars to fight but I stick to a pattern. People work that way, he said.
“The smartest thing anyone can do, is admit they’re wrong. Because there’s more to see, not more that we know” Alfred jest at my tears and he pushed me ahead of him.
“I haven’t an idea of where we’re going but since I decided to play lead role, we’ve been going limelight forward ho. Take my footsteps and leave yours behind” he did say to me.
And so I pushed on, in the steps of a man looking to write a play of life and not caring if he was wrong. Lost in the folly of enjoying a moment. My mother and two of my ex’s would have loved to critique his cliche` words and misappropriated use of character definitions for theatre. And I wish, I could have understood him. But the next bomb didn’t care.
We made it out of the city, a blast taken away a wall right by cliffs from giant debris and cutting our long venture a shortcut to safety. I tried to smile but I knew everyone who had died. But I knew that Alfred knew everyone who lived and he smiled for all of them. His silly smile, that missed the point. Such blind optimism, so sure in his ignorance that he even acknowledged his folly.
He looked me deep in my eyes, the way someone does when they don’t see you and are looking past you. A five thousand mile gaze but not to anywhere but my eye’s midpoint. He told me that I asked for this. I asked him what he meant. The bombs, the death, the revolution, the people we should have saved, the sense of despair he tried to cure me of? And he said no, then called me stupid. He said that I had asked for him. And if I hadn’t then I would be seeing him differently.
“Your play isn’t written over and through but you’re always acting. Stop second guessing lost lines.” he said as he walked off with the same smile my last lover had given me. One of pity, admiration seen through the weight on the ridges of each eye and sour wishfulness bent with muscles of a smile that wanted to burst but hadn’t the ground to stand on.
