Here's Nikola again!
***
Outside of Sarajevo, Bosnia
The air was pregnant with water.
As Nikola ran through the field – each step stealing acetic tears from his eyes that burned invisible tattoos down his face – bandages of gauzy mist enveloped him. The horizon whirled in front of him like a carousel and little nodding heads of wheat shared jewels of dew with his clothing.
The gun in his hand was heavy and hot, even though it had not been fired. It was heavy with Dmitry's lead stare and the rigor mortis of the department store dying behind him in Sarajevo. Somehow, the gun was the only thing on Nikola's mind. He couldn't think straight anymore. All his thoughts – like radio transmissions – were suddenly interrupted by a jamming signal of gunshots and images of Serbian soldiers clutching their helmets like hats in the wind as they ran towards him against the backdrop of a tank.
He should have stayed.
He should have used the God-awful gun.
He would have inevitably died, but at least he would have died with his hands warm. Warm with the blood of one or two bastard Serbs.
Now, running through a wheat field, they were like bricks of ice, petrified around the superheated body of his AK-47.
Nikola clenched his jaw and tears committed suicide off of the bridge of his nose.
Useless.
He was completely useless.
A helpless adolescent suddenly transplanted onto the battlefield. Grafted out of his home, like a picture cut out of a magazine, and sewn into smoke corrupted buildings and next to bodies dabbed with bullet holes and shrapnel wounds. If only Ana was with him. If only she was running beside him, her hair bowstrings, her eyes like frozen raindrops. Things would be so much better, things would be so much warmer.
Instead, she was decomposing on linoleum. A snow-colored seraph crumpled on a kitchen floor.
And so the air condensed around him, as cold as liquid nitrogen.
Gasping, he tripped on the loose black dirt of the field and stumbled for a moment, his arms like windmilling scythes. His left arm smoldered, glossy with blood. Lightheaded as he was – with defibrillating grenade concussions and the smell of firework sulfur and barbershop quartets of screams – the state of his arm wasn't helping his condition. It felt like all his energy was painting his arm raspberry crimson. His legs were aging pistons. His arms pumped the air half-heartedly.
Nikola had to find help.
His vision was corrupted by flashing roses, as if someone had smeared lipstick all over his retinas.
In the distance, he could see a forest, naked and dejected. The trees – like crouching black men – watched him with heaven stretched arms. As if they were trying to perform cesarean sections on the pregnant sky like sad looking obstetricians. If Nikola could get to those trees, he could find help. There had been rumors tossed around ruins of Sarajevo that there was a UN outpost near the city. But at the moment, Nikola could have cared less who found him, who helped him. He supposed he didn't even mind if he was found by Serbians, because a last meal was always a possibility.
And besides, he imagined that when death came, it would be carrying a wool blanket. Carrying something warm. Something like a mother's embrace.
“Come on, you little bastard,” he whispered to himself. “You can make – ”
The field suddenly disappeared from under his feet, breath was ripped from his lungs, and his legs churned empty air. Beneath him a pit, scarred and coagulating with mud, came up to meet him.
He landed with a gasp.
A gunshot ruptured from the mouth of his gun like a titan snore and bread dough mud suddenly consumed his arms, legs, chest.
Paralyzed for a moment.
And then, breathing heavily, he tried to push himself up – mud corrupting his mouth, bleeding through his gums like gingivitis – but weakness stole everything from his muscles. Swearing, he tried again. The mud was concrete. Above him, the mercury sky bulged and danced and spun.
The walls of a neatly dug pit rose five feet on either side of him.
The AK-47.
Wheezing, he groped for his gun, found its neck and pulled up weakly.
It slurped through the sludge.
But it wasn't his gun.
It was a human arm. Birch-white. With fingers that looked like wilting cigarettes and skin that felt like sour cream. Nikola stared at it dumbly for a second and slowly the smell of decay crept into his nostrils and he could taste it in the mud between his teeth.
An arm.
And then his eyes traced down the corpse attached to the limb – a woman in a blue dress that looked like a copper nitrate sky – he screamed, dropped the arm, and scrambled backwards, bile rising up his throat. His hand slipped on something that felt like a stone, but was actually a crumpled face submerged in the lake of mud like a forgotten party mask. Its glue colored skin came away like spiderwebs.
There were bodies all around him.
Broken mannequins.
Nikola threw up.
His throat was burning, as if someone had shoved a handful of matches down his mouth and his vision rippled, as if the pit had been sprayed with mustard gas. And through the urine-yellow clouds – through the blotchy roses corrupting the sky – all he could see were the hollow, mud-bruised faces of a hundred bodies piled on top of each other. Like the victims of a bubonic plague filling an unfinished mass grave.
He could practically smell the posies.
They smelled like rotting meat.
Nikola heaved again, but nothing came out. Only spaghetti strings of spit. He cried. He tried to scream, but he felt so weak, so crippled. He tried to move, but it was as if someone had ripped out his spinal cord like a broken guitar string. And all the corpses looked like Ana. The woman in the blue dress. Men with steel wool bristles. Children whose mouths were open, singing like silent choirs of angels.
He realized they were probably all Muslims. The faces of quiet genocide.
Men and women and children crumpled into mud-spattered fetus positions, kneeling in prayer. Praying towards mecca. Nikola wouldn't have been surprised if Mohammad the prophet himself wasn't drowning in this soup of blood and decomposition and vomit underneath them all, his eyes closed peacefully as he was surrounded by desecration.
Choking, his own eyes swollen shut, Nikola could have sworn he heard morning salat being recited in tones like church bells. Forgiving the Serbs. Forgiving them for raping their women and killing their men and poisoning their children. Nikola couldn't stand it anymore. He couldn't stand the deafening whispers. The whispers that condensed as mustard gas and filled his eyesight, floating like mist off of a lake in the morning.
Keep running.
Keep moving.
But he couldn't.
Because he was going to die there. The prayers would lull his heart to sleep, they would pass hands over heavy eyelids, and he would recline with them in a mudbath of decay. And death would be waiting with a blanket, instead of a scythe. To mummify him.
To wrap him into a gently heated cocoon.
He felt his lips moving.
They were praying.
Voices – real, tangible, heavy things – fell into the mud like bricks. He could hear people around him, above him, dropping accent-bloated words down to him. Little verbal life preservers. Nikola drew every droplet of strength to his eyelids and opened them to see who was watching. To see if it was Death with his warmth or Muslim souls with their prayer rugs.
But they were men. Soldiers with blue UN helmets that looked like pool cues. It looked for a moment like they were reaching out to him with hands, but instead they were aiming at him with guns. Pointing barrels. Pointing fingers. There was a camera flash. They were photographing the unfinished mass grave filled with broken puppets, butchered pigs.
Someone asked. “You OK, kid?”
But Nikola couldn't understand English.
And then in Bosnian, “Hold on, kid. We're coming down.”
Nikola replied, “I think I'm sitting on their prophet.”
They laughed. Thin, anemic sounds.
But it wasn't funny.
