Candle in the Attic Window(91)
The voice of the medical officer was then smothered by a rattling noise coming from behind the line of soldiers. An enormous machine that crushed everything in its path appeared from the shadows.
– The T-34![5] We can say that they haven’t slacked off with reinforcements! Iliev cried, delighted.
– With that, we will polish our friend’s scales! cheered Simonov.
Solotin, alone, remained silent, as if absorbed in internal, abyssal meditations.
The chariot came and stood with them, the barrel aimed straight at the shadows, where hid the man-dragon. His growls were now interspersed with ferocious outcries.
– Come on! Finish it! Fire! cried Iliev, dropping his arm.
And the tank fired at its mark. An explosion took out almost all of the pile of stones left over from the school. In unison, the machine guns began to vomit their deadly poison. The wounded creature could not hide and, with the energy of despair, tried to force a way out of the blockade. His flames carried off some unfortunates, but his body was soon riddled with bullets. Too handicapped to advance, he stopped and continued to defend himself with his hard skin. While his scales were now purple with blood, the beast still gave some blows with his claws until, in a last rattle, he sank into the fresh snow, lifeless. Iliev immediately ordered a ceasefire.
They all approached with extreme caution, before realizing that their adversary was definitively no longer a threat. A circle was being formed around the body when Iliev spoke:
– Comrades, look well, because you will never again see anything like it … Needless to say, what happened this night must remain between us. Anyway, who would believe you? No one! They’d send you directly to the madhouse. In the meantime, I can guarantee you that any tattletale will have to deal with me. Any questions? All right, burn that!
Without a word, the troop obeyed and, when all was finished, the men dispersed. On the horizon, bursts of artillery streaked the sky, as if the war wanted to recall their good memory.
With heavy steps, Iliev, Simonov and Solotin reentered the hospital together. Silent, grave, they thought back to those moments they had just lived through. Simonov decided to lighten the mood.
– And what do you say to a little vodka to celebrate? he asked.
The laughter of the three companions went up into the starless night and resonated until dawn.
Meddy Ligner was born in 1974 in Bressuire, a small town in the western part of France. He spent his first 18 years there. He goes back frequently to see his family and to play baseball with the famous Garocheurs. He studied history and afterwards, he taught French abroad in Finland, Russia and China. Since 2003, he has worked as a teacher of history and geography in Poitiers, France, where he lives with his wife, his daughter and his son. His website is: http://meddyligner.blogspot.com
[1] The secret police of the USSR, who purged the Soviet Army repeatedly through the 30s and 40s.
[2] A semi-nomadic Mongolian group of tribes from southeastern Siberia. They are the largest surviving Siberian ethnic minority. The actor Yul Brynner was Buryat.
[3] The Gulag prison system made famous by Alexandr Solzhenitsyn.
[4] The signature instrument of the Siberian shaman. The NKVD murdered shamans throughout Siberia during the 20s and 30s, taking special care to confiscate and burn their drums.
[5] A Soviet medium tank, the most common design produced during WWII.
The Ascent
By Berit K. N. Ellingsen
Some say screaming is embarrassing and shameful, but under the right circumstances, or perhaps the wrong circumstances, screaming is actually very liberating. Because there are times and places when you would really like to scream, when you would absolutely love to scream, and feel a great and pressing need to do it, but you can’t.
One of those places is at the bottom of the swimming pool, when you’re lying there behind the wetsuit that’s too tight in all the wrong places, and the round, white swimming goggles that make you look perpetually startled. You’re trying to relax, trying to stay calm, trying to maintain that delicate balance between the need to breathe and the greed for another breath-hold record. All while your lungs ache for air, your throat swallows for the same, and the muscles in your body, down to tiny little flexors you didn’t know you had, burn from lack of oxygen, and the only thing that’s silent is your mind. Because this is mind over matter, brain over muscles and you over water. After the initial few minutes of hypoxia, the acute need to breathe vanishes, and you enter a free-floating state where it feels like you can go on forever.
Of course, you can’t; it’s just a question of how long your body can remain conscious on the small amount of oxygen you brought with you from the surface. In order to stretch the breath-hold time as far as possible without fainting, you have become intimately familiar with the signals from your body that say it’s about to black out: the pins and needles starting in your fingers and toes, like cruel little whispers, like the warm sun being momentarily obscured by a cloud. The prickly sensation invades your hands and feet, and slowly creeps up your wrists and ankles. There’s a round orb pulsing behind your eyes. For every contraction, the sphere changes colour, from deep electric blue, to warm glowing gold, back to blue, again. It doesn’t go away, even when you blink. The edge of your vision is framed by a moving spindly black, like a mass of dark spiders crawling around your eyes, only you can’t feel them. As the blue orb pulses slower, the black cloud starts to eat its way towards the middle of your eyes, the spiders multiplying. That’s the true signal, the body’s black flag of unconditional surrender to oxygen deprivation. You know exactly when to break off, when to push hard away from the blue tiles at the bottom of the pool and stick your head out of the water and breathe.