The First Casualty (standard:other, 1499 words)
Author: Gavin J. Carr	Added: Jul 15 2005	Views/Reads: 3204/2200	Story vote: 0.00 (0 votes)
The first casualty of war is innocence.

She was still dead. 

He had to keep that in mind. 

It didn't matter what they did to him. 

She was still dead. 

And that wasn't going to change. 

He awoke to the wan flush of the florescent light, high-up on the
ceiling of his cell.  A heavenly host of desiccated flies looked down 
on him, trapped in the artificial amber of the plastic shade. 

He had no idea how long he'd been a prisoner.  They'd picked him up
early one morning, snatching him naked from bed.  The rough embrace of 
a hemp sack as it was pulled over his head; the probing steel of 
fingers grasping his arms; the needle kisses of pebbles as they dragged 
him over the ground– all this he remembered, was scored on his body 
like etching on a wax tablet. 

She was still dead.  He had to keep reminding himself.  He felt
instinctively that he could bare anything, endure whatever they did, if 
he just kept that one unalterable fact in mind: that she was still 
dead.  He embraced the thought, pushing it down deep inside of him – a 
burning ember which he could fan into an inferno if the need arose. 

He raised himself up on the foam mattress.  The paper overall they'd
given him was damp with perspiration.  It stuck to his back like a 
newspaper on a wet city street. 

His cell was tiny, three paces by five, with a metal-framed bed bolted
to the floor and a bucket for a latrine.  There were no windows, and 
the only light was the fluorescents, burning constantly, melding the 
hours into a single continuous day.  The door was steel, an inch thick, 
and fixed by large rivets.  On the chipped and pitted surface there 
were two small hatches.  The bottom hatch was long and narrow, like an 
elongated letter box; the other, square shaped and eye-level. 

He didn't mind the bottom hatch.  It opened once a day, during what he
thought of as morning, and ejected a plastic bowl, filled with oatmeal 
or thin stew.  When he wasn't asleep he was hungry and he welcomed the 
sound of the bolt being and the scrape of plastic against the stone 
floor.  The other hatch was different.  When it opened it meant they 
were watching, and that meant they were coming in. 

The thought was enough to start him shaking.  He got up and unzipped the
overalls, squatting over the bucket. 

His bowels had turned to water.  He'd read the phrase before, in
paperbacks he'd bought from the market.  But until this moment, until 
his captivity, he hadn't fully understood it.  He'd thought it an 
affectation, a stock-phrase writers rolled-out when their imaginations 
failed them.  Maybe so, but still his bowels had turned to water. 

What would she say if she could see him now? he wondered.  They'd been
married for nine-years.  The honeymoon was past and they'd survived the 
mire of domesticity; the cloying quicksand of routine that smothered so 
many marriages.  She'd always thought him a fool, ever since he 
proposed to her, driving to the desert, to the table waiting on the 
plateau of a rocky outcrop, and the table-cloth, the napkins and 
candlesticks, the waiter that'd cost him a week's wages.  She'd called 
him a fool.  But she'd accepted.  He'd been a happy fool. 

She'd be ashamed, he thought.  For a moment he could almost see her. 
Standing in the cell with him, shaking her head, the dark tumble of her 
hair moving softly. 

“Oh, Naima.” 

His voice was foreign to him.  Her name both frightening and frightful. 
He closed his eyes and spoke under his breath: “She's still dead.  
She's still dead.  Dead.  Still.  She's dead.  Forever.  There's no 
coming back.  They lied.” 



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