Five Miles to Epworth
By Zack Harmes
There are things he knows.
He knows the call to prayer echoes through the city at dawn.
He knows it is safer to move during the hours they hold sacred.
He knows that’s not always true.
The stench of rot and decay is normal. The scent of garbage, diesel, and gunsmoke are familiar and comforting. But when he wakes to the hint of lavender in the air, only a whisper on the morning breeze, he knows he is starting to slide again.
Lavender fixes purple in his mind. It makes him think of dark brown hair, wet after a shower, that tingles against his face. The shampoo that she uses is on the other side of the world, tucked into a corner of the bathtub. To find that smell lingering here, woven into the stench, is an omen.
Her ghost, a spectral memory on this empty street, means only one thing.
He dreams of cool water on his skin. He dreams of summer days spent on the river, of turning over rocks, of yellow bikinis and the smell of coconut lotion. He dreams of rainbow Cokes, popcorn, and carnivals.
The priorities of work are simply that: priorities. Weapons maintenance. Security. Scanning sectors of fire, he forces his focus on the bland emptiness in front of him. The desert is always the same, some invisible line drawn across a map, the names of the countries never really matter. He’s here, again, and he has lost track of how many times he’s come back.
The desert is an ocean of sand that floods the city. The sand is a constant reminder of where he is and what he’s doing. It wriggles into his boots and gathers in hard clumps between his toes. It bites into the pores of his neck beneath the collar of his armor. It crackles between his teeth with every sip of water, burrows into his scalp, and hides in the folds of his eyelids. No matter how long he stays, the sand is always a part of it that refuses to be ignored.
When they stop, he takes a knee on the broken pavement, fingers hovering over the trigger. They are facing out towards the edge of the world. On the horizon, the sun climbs steadily into the sky and brings the promise of heat and pain.
He knows the men on the rooftops behind them murmur into cell phones.
He knows they are studying his routes of movement.
He knows the rules of engagement.
He knows a firefight is nothing more than a conversation between soldiers, and there was a lot to discuss. Death is a universal greeting, and only a few sentences would be needed to bridge the divide between their worlds. He knows he is fluent in the language of violence, that to speak its harsh vowels is as simple as a flick of his thumb, a snap of his finger. He knows he needs to speak only one syllable of five-five-six and the debate would rage.
But what he doesn’t know is if anything would have been different, even if he had.
#
The walls of her cage are pearl white.
She has tried to cover them in framed photographs. On the mantle rest neatly arranged pictures of the two of them sitting on beaches, in Ferris Wheels at carnivals, standing on the streets of Chicago. On the bedside table, their wedding announcement.
There are paintings of the Eiffel Tower and of red trolleys rumbling through the hills of San Francisco. There are vibrant green waterfalls in faraway jungles. She’s tried to fill the empty space with memories, because a house is not a home until it is layered in time well spent, time well lived.
But the sunlight catches the blank spaces between and litters her world with sharp edges. If she focuses on them, she’ll slip on a jagged memory and hemorrhage on the kitchen tile, her face a twisted mask of smeared mascara. She decides she is finished with bleeding out.
Paint, she thinks. And lots of it.
She tears everything down in a frantic storm. She moves the furniture to the centers of each room. It takes her six rolls of masking tape before the house is ready.
By nightfall, every wall is washed in Forest Green, Marlboro Red, and Starfire Yellow. She steps back to admire her work as the sun sets on another day. She takes it all in and lets out a sigh.
It’s not working, she says to herself.
She skips the wine and goes straight for the vodka.
When the liquor dulls her to the point of bravery, she picks up the phone and calls her father. He answers on the first ring.
How are you holding up? he asks.
It gets easier every time, she lies.
When’s the last time you heard from him?
Three weeks ago, she says. He was in the desert. Said he was doing fine, and he’d call me when he could.
Well, her father says, no news is good news, right?
She rattles the ice in her glass.
Baby, her father says, how are you really doing?
She sighs. Every day feels exactly like the day before. Wake up. Clean the house. Mow the grass. Find more things to clean. Go to bed.
Maybe you should come stay with me during this one, her father says. It might do you some good to get out of Epworth for a while. Give you things to do.
I have plenty to keep my hands busy.
Darling, he says, it’s not your hands I’m worried about.
Truly, Dad, I’m doing fine. This is our home. I want to keep it perfect for him.
But you have. It’s the same thing every time he goes. You stay and try to make it perfect, and you get so upset when it calls to him. Baby, he’s a soldier. He can’t ignore it.
But maybe this time it’s different, she says. Maybe this time he’ll see.
Some people don’t realize they missed their exit until they’re in the wrong town, he says. You can’t steer his car for him, baby. People gotta wind up in some place they don’t want to be before they realize they were driving the wrong way the whole time.
I can’t remember why I called you, she says.
Over the line, she can hear her father grind his teeth. She drinks the last of her vodka.
Listen, you know I’m always here for you, he says. You can call me anytime, for any reason.
I love you, Daddy, she says.
She hangs up the phone and watches the ice melt in her glass. When a watery pool is all that remains, she looks around at the newly painted walls of the house. The furniture still sits in a chaotic mess. She lies down on the couch.
Tomorrow, she decides, she’ll paint the whole place in a coat of Coyote Tan.
#
They taught him to close his eyes and see the attic of his home, layered in dust and shadow. They taught him to stack towers of cardboard boxes with words scrawled in black marker. The corners of the boxes are frayed and torn at the edges from use. As he walks through, he passes row upon row, and reads words like “LOVE” and “MOM” and “DAD.” His fingertips trace the edges and leave tracks in the dust as he looks for the one he needs the most.
Behind the optic of a long-barreled rifle, he opens his box marked HATE.
They told me I could do anything, he tells Sergeant Johnson. I had scored high enough on all the tests. But all I could think of was that video. You know the one. Where they killed that little girl. Cut her head off. I couldn’t stop thinking about it.
Next to him, Johnson stares through a pair of binoculars and says nothing.
I told them the only job I wanted was the one that would put me face-to-face with the man who held the knife, he says. He reaches over his optic and clicks it twice. A group of men swim into his vision. They cradle bundles of cloth to their chests. The black barrels of rifles poke out of layers of burlap and cotton, glinting in the sun. He can see the sweat stains on their clothes as they shoulder wooden crates of ammunition. They move their cargo into a small, windowless house made of brown adobe-style bricks.
Johnson lies next to him and mumbles quietly into a radio. The voices crackle back in answer. He speaks without turning his head. I used to be as stupid as you, Johnson says. But if you keep coming back here, you’ll learn that it always ends the same. Their side or ours doesn’t matter. A bullet or a heart attack. There is no difference you can make that matters.
He adjusts the position of the rifle, sucks it tight into his shoulder and watches the men continue their labor, unaware of the eyes watching them, unaware of the death racing towards them in the sky.
I keep telling myself, he says to Johnson, one of these guys out here, just one of them, has to be the one that killed that little girl.
You think that makes you special, Johnson says. If you weren’t here, someone else would be.
A short while later they hear the approach of rumbling thunder on a cloudless day. The sweat stings their eyes and greases their hair. The sand clings to them like sugar on frosting.
He turns away from the blast and looks at Johnson, who keeps his binoculars trained on the house. He can see the reflection of the fireball on the smooth glass ovals.
Go home, Johnson says, and dedicate your life to forgetting this.
#
She considers getting a dog, but it is too much responsibility.
She considers getting a cat, but it isn’t enough.
Time is measured in seasons. Every day is a lifetime. The grass grows long and thick and she cuts and trims, precise and neat. The sunlight shifts from sharp winter slants to long, drawn-out days that never end. She does her best to pass the time with routine. Yoga in the morning, coffee, errands, and shopping trips.
The calendar on the fridge is tattooed with black X’s.
It’s the stillness, she tells her neighbor while watering the grass. The waiting. It never gets easy.
Well, I’m just so thankful that men like him stand ready to defend this country, the neighbor says. Please make sure to thank him for his service.
She drives the countryside, as far out of Epworth as she can get on one tank of gas. The rivers are filled with laughter. She explores the dirt roads that have been carved into the surrounding hillsides. She searches for somewhere that doesn’t remind her of something else.
She plans vacations as she drives. This time, she knows, she will take him out of the state. The kind of place people dream about.
On the television one night, she watches a documentary about veterans who have lost a limb from the war. Life is a series of holes, one man says. They talk about phantom feelings. An itch where my arm used to be. Sometimes I reach for something that isn’t there anymore, and I have to accept this reality all over again.
In the kitchen, the sink drips. The water collects into a single bowl that holds a single spoon. Upstairs, the king-size bed sits empty and perfectly made.
She walks to the kitchen and leaves the television on. For the thousandth time that day, she opens the door to the freezer. Lined in perfect, spartan order are boxes of single-serving macaroni, Salisbury steak, and mashed potatoes.
You wake and face this reality again and again, every day, the man continues. All these jagged pieces where it was ripped apart. Eventually, you start to piece it back together. You adapt and survive without them.
The sink drips. She glances at it and considers buying a sledgehammer. She will smash the faucet into tiny pieces, let the jagged metal crunch and shatter.
Honestly, the man on the television says. I don’t even know what I would do if I were whole again.
#
This country is a minefield of doubts. Is the kid on the corner a lookout or is he walking home? Is that truck driver running a checkpoint, or is he lost? But he knows Doom lurks in the trash people leave behind. A shredded plastic bag could hide a 105 shell. The carcass of a dead dog, swarming with flies, could be stuffed with ball bearings and plastic explosive. He knows the sand shifts and changes like the tide. It conceals tire tracks and footprints, water bottles and cigarette butts.
He knows that the hot air blowing through the window shouldn’t smell like lavender.
He knows that they like to plant bombs on the side of the road.
He knows that it is hard to see a wire at sixty miles per hour.
But what he doesn’t know is if anything would have ever been different, even if he had.
Just before the fireball blooms and eats Johnson’s truck, he sees a road sign. Puffy white letters against a background of neon green - at home on the American interstate but alien in the desert - reads 5 MI TO EPWORTH.
It’s enough for him to question if he saw it, this specter from someone else’s life, this sign he used to pass on his drive home to her. This sign that shouldn’t be here. The question leads to a pause. In the space between one thought and the next, Johnson’s truck is gone in a flower of flames and smoke and dust.
Hot brass shells clink as they rain from the turret above him.
Black smoke fills his view. Gone are the thoughts of her. There is a second explosion, but it’s too fast to register. He sees no smoke from this, only a cloudless blue sky.
His nostrils fill with the scent of lavender.
#
Time is relative to the rate of suffering.
Under the scorching sun, he’s lived and died a thousand times in a day. Every firefight an eon. Every rocket attack a millennia. But in air-conditioned comfort, on pure white hospital sheets, days pass by like muzzle flashes in the dark. Like after-burns on his eyelids, he sees the warm ghosts of these memories after they pass. He remembers only echoes of comfort. Good food, ice water, and people commenting on his luck.
He blinks.
There’s an airplane ride. A welcome home. A row of flags down a long hallway. There’s a general he’s never met who slaps a metal coin in his palm as they shake hands. After the car door shuts on his ride home, he finds a complimentary salted peanut packet in his pocket with an American flag painted on it.
He blinks.
The days stolen from the two of them are recovered in pillowed and scented blankets. Two lovers separated by oceans, sand, and mountains become so deeply entangled that it is difficult to tell where she begins, and he ends.
The frictions of their desperate passion are a wildfire that could burn the world to an ember if they only will it to.
An eternity of days spent counting down to this kind of love is measured in minutes. They don’t last. They never do.
He blinks.
He’s drowning in the deep pools of her eyes as he lies shirtless on a riverbank under the summer sun. The war, the bombs, Epworth, and Johnson are on another planet.
The sunlight flashes on the splashing water. For a moment, and only a moment, he flinches at the sight. He checks the treeline for movement. On the drive home, he snaps at her to slow down every time he spots a plastic bag on the side of the road. He watches the flat rooftops for silhouettes as they roll down Main Street. Sorry, he tells her. I wasn’t myself there for a second.
It doesn’t bother me, she says. He knew God never made anyone perfect, but with her He came pretty damn close.
He blinks.
#
The ghosts of his friends visit him at all the wrong moments. They don’t speak profound thoughts or help in any way. Johnson waits for him at the end of a grocery aisle. Harris, who took shrapnel to the eye, crosses the street while he waits in traffic. Kilroy, who stepped on a mine and was suddenly everywhere and nowhere at the same time, gazes at him from a bus stop. Adams, shot while he slept by a man he trusted, walks past his house on Tuesday afternoons, when the sunlight falls at all the worst angles, as he sits on his porch and listens to the cicadas.
He knows what they are waiting for him to do.
He can read it in the dustmotes that hang in the air just below the rafters of his garage ceiling. A coil of nylon rope stares back at him from a shelf, the two-dollar price tag still glued to the twisted end. He can hear it in the rumble of his engine on the highway entrance ramp. Steel cages full of families glide past him as he worries about razor blades, frayed seat belts, and the fine print of life insurance clauses. He can smell it in the gun oil when he cleans his pistol.
One day he wakes, alone in a bed, on sheets scented with lavender. His body is coated in a sheen of sweat, but he shivers uncontrollably. His bare feet touch the hardwood floor. It is pure ice.
Outside, he can see the blazing sun. But inside it is freezing. Like cold and dreary January. As he exhales, he’s sure he can see clouds of his own breath.
He forces himself out of bed and heads to the thermostat. The clicking of the knob reminds him of his rifle. He moves to the closet. Wool socks. Sweat pants. A hoodie. His skin ripples with goosebumps.
The house is silent. He moves between the rooms and can’t remember what he is looking for. In the kitchen, she left fresh coffee. It tastes like plastic. He swallows and feels a crackle. There is something lodged between his molars.
In the bathroom, he digs between the enamel with a toothbrush. After a minute he pries it loose, and spits it into the sink.
A single grain of sand.
When she comes home, the heat of the house steals her breath. She cranks the knob down and finds him in the living room. He sits on the couch, elbows forward on his knees, his body turned towards an empty chair.
Who are you talking to?
No one, he says. I was thinking out loud.
She tilts her head to the side and looks at him. He knows she can see through the layers of his armor, down to the bare gunmetal of his soul. She knows he wants to say something, and his teeth chatter as he holds it all back. All the things he wants to say stand on the ice as it cracks, ready to fall, ready to drown.
He had made promises while he was gone, spoken under a full moon, confessed to the shadows. He had vowed that this time, when he had the chance, he would tell her all the things he kept hidden from the light. He’d promised that he would open every box in his attic and, piece by piece, show her what he really is. He’d sworn that this time he would hold onto her forever, and ride whatever wave came their way. But all those desert thoughts flee his mind, all the promises he made to himself of what to hold, where to kiss, and what to say crumble to dust.
Don’t you feel hot with all that on?
I don’t feel anything, he says.
He knows that a wildfire is supposed to consume a forest and spur new growth from the ashes. From the smoke of the past emerges new life. He knows there’s supposed to be a change. But he’s seen the damage a wildfire can do and it’s a lie.
Nothing grows back.
#
Small things between them become hills to die on. Everything she makes for him tastes foul and plastic. The colors on the walls give him headaches, and he makes sure she knows. He searches for things, rummages through cabinets and drawers and closets, and scolds her like a child for not leaving them as they were.
He may play with guns, but she is deadly with words. Each one carefully chosen from an arsenal of refined edges. She, too, had sworn many vows to the barren walls around her, and she keeps them. People change. Life goes on. Nobody will wait.
A ceasefire is agreed upon without surrender. The cannons of the heart fall silent. It is better not to speak than to drip poison from their tongues. Each of them knows this. The casualties are far too high. They search for distractions. He looks to the future. She looks to the past.
The silence between them becomes a sandpaper wheel that erodes their foundation, shaving the edges into smooth emptiness. She can hear them crumbling between the pauses of his breath while he lies awake at night, pretending to sleep, staring through the darkness at the ceiling fan that turns like the rotors of a helicopter. She can hear them when he rises to greet the dawn in stillness, all the things he wants to talk about but never does get left in the space between them on the bed.
The frictions of these silences sit between them like hot embers, waiting for the sweet spark of relief. At night, the daily news anchors speak of death counts like numbers on a scoreboard. It’s a slow attrition, body by body, that kills the beauty of the summer around them. The flowers in the garden wilt under the anger of the July sun. The grass burns into yellow strands. The dogs of Epworth lie motionless under shaded porches, trees, and dumpsters. He shivers like winter, she smolders like coal.
And when it strikes, it is rage they sing of, of wrath, of sacrifice. A barrage of ugly words kept hidden from daylight, locked in crypts, explodes from their mouths in wild fury. Frenzy consumes their beauty. They retreat to their trenches and struggle to name the distance between them. He calls that emptiness Duty. She calls it Time.
Neither yields a single step.
When the order comes down the channels, he sleeps like the dead. The rat wheels of his mind stop spinning and he sleeps through alarms, through the dawn, regaining his strength for the appointed time and day. I have to go back, he says one night. They need people with experience. If he doesn’t go, someone else will go for him, and they’ll die. Can’t she understand that?
One night he reaches out to grab her hand. He nuzzles her neck. She lets him, not out of love, but for lack of knowing what else to do. It helps to pass the days.
When he leaves, there are tears and broken glass on the floor. She sweeps the shards into little piles in silence, the long summer days cool back into fall. A new calendar is stuck on the fridge with one single X crossed through in black marker.
When the glass is swept and the sun is gone, she sits at a table and writes a list. Paintbrushes. Masking tape. Canvas cloth. Tomorrow she will go to the store and she will coat the entire place in a new color.
A color she likes.
#
They sit in ordered rows on the jet, like cigarettes in a box, each of them ready to burn on command. Only the faces change. Sometimes, even the names recycle. Here are Harris, Moore, Adams, Johnson, and Kilroy, reborn with bright eyes and slick sleeves. They hunger for seasoned wisdom and war stories, purchased with patches and rifle badges, to be worn as testament that they were there and they suffered, too.
The kid next to him chatters and hums with possibilities during the entire flight. His ideas spill from his mouth in a landslide of confessions. When I get back and this is over I’m going to college and marry my girl and buy a house and get a job. They say deployment looks good on a resumé.
He knows he should tell the kid that those things will never shine as bright as they do right now, as the door to the jet opens and floods the compartment with crushing heat and the smells of diesel, garbage, and a hint of lavender. He knows he should tell the kid that the sun will take these dreams and burn a hole through him, which he will stuff with gallows humor and vulgarities that are impossible to translate. He knows that he should tell him that he will drink too much and sing to the full moon. That at night he will dream of the desert and that no office job will ever give him the sense of purpose that floods his veins now, right now, in this very moment. Nothing will ever compare. He knows he should tell the kid that the genesis of this grand adventure will be frozen in amber and buried in his skull, and he will spend the rest of his life trying to dig it out.
These are all the things he knows he should tell the kid.
But what he doesn’t know is if anything would have ever been different, even if he had.
~~~
