Donbass

Scattered glass sharp sharp sharp, building blocks as bright lights flash and the soiled colour of red is no longer there. Bricks as sharp as knives. I open my eyes to see what shook the building, the explosion shut down by the dreaming and

I’m awake.

I look down at my nightgown, yellow, they’ve left me behind.

Three days ago. I stopped counting. The silence came, my veins were peaking out of my hands, my bones going outside. The sense of dread had come and gone. My thoughts were no longer my own. They would focus on the outside when I would sit up and look around, my head spinning, the IV no longer connected since yesterday and the wound had healed with bandaged ripped bed sheets from the empty bed besides me.

I could see the outlines of people if I walked, I would see limbs. I had heard a nurse scream and crush a man’s head just for him to die after the explosion. But I was left… Barely moving. Memories fading, winter coming with steam out of my mouth. Maybe I had died, but God had no mercy.

I turned around… I saw her. The outline… She was sitting there, hands crossed as if in an appointment with a patient.

She had said something and I had forgotten.

She spoke again, in my memory this time, her mouth closed as I would feel my teeth ache and a dull dryness consume my tongue. I kept looking at her. She sat in the outline… A much bigger outline than her, which would shrink shrivel up and burst in flames. Cremation.

Was the outline cremated?

I held my head with one hand, the other paralysed and the IV was dripping on the floor suddenly with the liquid I hadn’t consumed… But it had been days. I gasped.

Two portraits.

I hadn’t seen them. She showed me a picture to keep as we were in the cemetery. As if she knew I’d want it.

The picture was stolen. Taken.

I could hear missiles in the distance, some other house was a target. Which one was a ground target? Which one was a bomb? Which one was a plane which got shot down? Which one was a grenade? Or were the only planes in the sky birds? Would they turn into vultures?

I coughed as I heard more.

No one would move a patient like me. Paralysed.

But the nurse didn’t break my head to save me.

He begged to live and I begged to die.

He was gone.

He had stood in front of me.

I could see his short hair, his arms had the veins sticking out for other reasons and he was different.

I couldn’t recall his face if I tried, if he’d shave, I’d forget and if he’d have a beard I’d forget. Even if it was me.

I looked down and vomited. I looked up as he tilted his head and leaned down. His face. His face. I couldn’t see it. I coughed. He had died.

When I had asked to live.

“You’re not here.” I had said, my hand going to my chest and feeling nothing. A weak beat. One which would end.

“You…” My hand was trembling with my bony fingers and I could feel the wind from the hole in the building. The abandoned hospital. She had sent.

“The nurses… told me that he’d be like that forever.” Her piercing gaze had faded from green to gray. Then she spoke again. “If God existed… He doesn’t. There is warm famine, death…And you.”

She turned to him, even if he was no longer standing there and tears were going from her eyes, as I blinked my own away, feeling the weight of puberty on my chest as the rise of my demise. I was crying with one eye.

“You were worse than my parents dying.”

I screamed at her, my hair shaking and she looked at me.

“War.”

And she stood up, leaving… Just like she did then. Just like I did. I closed my eyes and held my breath… My heart weak… Footsteps, climbing, Ukrainian and Russian mixed depending on which Nazi spoke what. They stopped to see my empty bed, me close to my abyss as I stared into the streets, seeing buildings with holes and others untouched.

“Why were women innocent?” I asked them in Russian and they looked at me, focusing on the starved, paralysed leg.

“Because men have more blood on their hands?” I couldn’t see as bullets went through me from old pistols… Bullets were so precious to them now, but hatred moved forwards, to hear this from me was treason.

I fall down to my knees and blood mixed with saliva pools in my mouth. I grin, spread my arms like Jesus. They think I’m crazy. I close my eyes.

I could see him, I could feel him, I could feel stones under his feet, a wind sweeping through the hair and the same vomit I had from anxiety. Generations, generations. He’d live. I coughed and another bullet was shot, my arms falling, barely holding the position of a cross.

“God… Is not the one you and I believe.” I move my knees towards them and they keep their aim. I recognize one young face. My classmate.

Full of everything when you summon a devil from playing cards and you look into the abyss of the core of the earth and hear it’s sounds. When you close your eyes and imagine. When hallucinations take places.

Where there is chanting of a name which I no longer believe in.

He says it. As if he will be the one to shoot me.

“God… Is not yours.” I smile from tooth to tooth. I haven’t brushed my teeth in months. I can’t swallow blood without vomiting and each bullet is wasted on me, until I do a snow angel and then I cross, facing the city and I cry.

Crying is weak.

I hear more bombs. More bullets. I will be picked up one day, maybe by him and he won’t hold me tight… He’ll light a cigarette… I’ll see the identical face to mine and then he will know what I had feared of the most… Fire. What created humanity and what I was afraid to die to.

And he will burn me alive. I won’t scream, even if my body will and he will sit next to me, as everyone who knows us will sit in a prayer circle.

They don’t want him, they want me, so they will throw sand to tame the fire as he will walk around, throwing matches, ignoring the curses, the tears, the burnt hands of mother, father, sister, brother… Who else? Who else would try to save…

A losing war?

A girl that never existed. The cocoon they had wrapped me into, so that I could tear apart from my flesh, open my eyes and see the surgeons do their incisions. Remove, remove, remove whatever shit was given to women that I’d didn’t want.

And I would wake up. The cocoon left so far away. I would shake my head, to see the hair gone and I would see

The Nazis retreat and pray to the same God who had burned me. Made war. Take lives. Make tears dry and leave corpses with broken faces, he wouldn’t even lift them up when I’d see the city… An echo of death would be heart and my heart would beat

Every second for things I’d bend my head down to, when I’d walk into a Catholic church. An Orthodox cross around my neck. 10 cents an electronic candle. Those who died

They wouldn’t accept.

God had killed.

He never answered why-

A questioned raised by so many, at family dinners.

And I would look up, choose a seat and pray, eyes closed to a murderer who had never given me an easy life and death when mother had said “you’re like dad”.