On the Battlefield

by Rufel Ramos, 5/13/2006

When the woman woke up, her cry for the joy of being alive lasted only a second. The knifeblade-thrusts of pain shooting throughout her body cut short her cry for joy. The smell of rotting flesh, mingling with the numbing damp of endless mud, cut short her cry. The fear that THEY were still around cut short her cry.

And, in truth, her cry for joy lasted only a second as she remembered what she had lost. Home. Community. Family. Her children….

Her mind clamped down on that last thought. No. No no no.

But her children –

Godammit, NO!

They were alive, they were alive, they were alive. The words came to her like a mentra, like a litany. She lay broken on a battlefield of churned up mud and corpses so that they would be alive. And so, they were alive. That was not the miracle.

The miracle ws that SHE was alive.

How the hell could that be?

Nothing in her training prepared her for that possibility. In protecting the children, in ensuring their safe transport during the seige and battle, her training prepared her for honorable martyrdom, for death in the present. No time for grief, no time for mourning, no time for regrets over the past and hopes for the future. The enemy was inhuman, merciless; the enemy killed everything it touched. The enemy touched her, and she should be dead, blissfully dead, numb to the outrageous fortunes of being alive, of being a mother, separeted from her children, aware that she had lost.

Godammit, stop it!

She was bit and bleeding, but she was still herself. Why she wasn’t infected was a question she had no time to waste wondering about. She had to get out of that field, or all those corpses around her would infect her the old-fashioned way. But that wasn’t as important as this: Her children were out there, and she must find them. She rolled onto her side and unfurled like a delicate shoot, buried alive and struggling towards the sun. She was not destined to be one with the strengthless dead. Sitting up, she saw the battlefield in its entirety, empty of the enemy, littered with the still bodies of the fallen. Safe — for the moment, she was safe. And the cry she gagged back into her throat burst forth in ragged song.

In joy, she was alive.

In grief, her fellow mothers and fathers at arms were dead.

In joy, no children were there.

In grief, her adult family was there.

In joy, she found herself agan. And in joy, determined joy, she would find her children again.

They were alive.

The woman rose from the mud, a lone warrior. Limping, she made her way through the silent battlefield, the wind as her sole companion.