In a war-torn region of the Balkans. Esma weaved around the fly-blown corpse, hand-flipped out. Like she was a model on the runway. The other hand carried a bouquet of blue and yellow wildflowers held up to her face. She breathed in the fragrance like perfumed death.
New tight heels clicked—too loud on the cafe’s sidewalk. Esma had looted her mourning clothes from a little shop called MIZ. The black skirt was too short, too sexy for the occasion. The green silky blouse showed too much cleavage. Her nipples were hard like the end of pencil erasers. Esma looked more like street meat than a mourner. She supposed all the women in town were street meat or dead meat now, no matter what they wore.
The shattered Cafe tables glinted like free diamonds and jagged glass daggers on the sidewalk. The last one was perfectly intact but covered in congealing sticky blood and the buzz of blow flies. The UN arrived in their powder blue clanking convoy of heavy diesel stinking trucks and armored troop carriers. They were supposed to make things safe. Esma knew she would never feel safe again.
Kushnir’s blue helmet hung over the Cafe’s second-floor iron railing and he called out in English, which Esma couldn’t understand, but it was obvious. “Ooh-ooh-Baby!” Kushnir jumped back when a flush of gray pigeon wings lifted from under the stone balustrade toward the sun. Dust and feathers curled in the air. “Crazy damn birds! Hey look Mulder. She brought me flowers!” Kushnir put two fingers in his mouth under a heavy black mustache whistling the universal language of the catcall and said something like “Mamma Mia” in Turkish.
Esma felt an involuntary and perverse thrill surge through her, red lips—too red, curled up, showing a beautiful smile, so incongruous with her errand, and her hips responded in the black skirt. They responded like a woman. She couldn’t walk any other way. Her traitorous female form and hormones brought too much attention, but she reminded herself. See the blue UN helmet—that means I’m safe.
“Forget, Kushnir. Damaged good.” said a thick Dutch accent, Mulder, the other UN soldier. The supposed peacekeeper, Mulder laughed, flipping ashes over the railing. He almost dumped the half bottle of Metaxa Greek Ouzo they looted from the cafe, sitting it under the rail. The morning sun shone onto it making a bright gleaming circle on the glass nozzle. His breath smelled like black licorice and alcohol. He donned his blue helmet over a blond crew-cut, which supposedly kept away sniper fire. Mulder picked up his camouflage green rifle that he constantly cleaned and dry fired, like he was going to war instead of keeping the peace, and clicked off the safety.
“Did you see! She smiled!” Kushnir turned and his gleaming teeth vanished. “Hey, what the fuck are you doing?”
“I put out misery. Give her NATO 7.62. She be good dog, then.” said Mulder in his lousy half-drunk English. The gun lazily tracked her. His form was loose and unsteady, aiming at something insignificant like a beer can. Deep acne scars dotted his ugly face especially thick under his ear and down his scabby pink neck. His jaw tightened, and his left eyelid slid down over a sleepy red-tinged blue eye, but his shooter’s eye came alive and blazed with a thrill! The convulsing hot blood of an erection bumping his combat trouser zipper outward. He loved killing women, and “Making the dog” as he liked to say, to their dead corpses. Something about a silent-silent face staring at nothing, objecting to nothing—made him nearly…
Esma felt the gun on her, and her legs were shaking like they didn’t know how to work. She looked up and saw him sighting on her. The big blonde one that never whistled. Her feet felt like they weighed a thousand pounds. She looked at the beautiful blue and yellow wildflowers. Her time on the Earth all came to this thin sun-shiny moment. Like she had been born into it—carrying her own funeral flowers. She thought about the man her mother called, “Mr. Flowers.”
It shocked everyone when Mr. Sobieski brought Esma flowers. Usually, undertakers receive flowers, or at least the funeral home does. Esma thought they were for Mirjana, her older sister. Who all the boys and men were after. Papa, a loud, large man, who supervised men at the brickworks, grabbed the skinny undertaker by the scruff of his suit, nearly dragging him off the porch steps to the side of their modest Chardaklia and roughly explained to him that Esma was only twelve. Esma didn’t understand the loud voices. The pleading undertaker, crying almost yelping like an animal. She never heard a man cry. An awful sound and her father laughing rounding the corner—seemed worse. Showing them his bloody knuckles with his shiny silver spoon ring glistening in the sun.
She watched the undertaker limping down the same brick street, where she stood paralyzed, blood dribbling from his bloody face. Papa said, smiling in pure happiness. “I knocked the hell out of that dumb bastard, undertaker.” Esma was terrified of the hulking man that was so quick to beat people in the street and sometimes her mother. Four years later the soldiers came, and now Esma was Sweet Sixteen. She learned there were other big men in the world.
Mr. Sobeiski buried her father, but he seemed afraid that the hulking corpse with a hole in his chest might rise and beat him again.
“Get that gun off her! Come on Mulder, don’t do it.”
“Fuck you Turk this my war. Target in sights.” A shot rang out echoing over the street. The first one of the day. Like christening the air for the daily death march. The bullet whined over Esma’s shoulder. Red dust puffed off the brick street and the bullet zinged and ricocheted in a deadly scream! “Next through head.”
Esma couldn’t move. All she wanted was to put flowers on her father’s grave. She thought, maybe I deserve to die, dressed like a whore. The moment stretched out and urine ran down her leg yellowing her new white Bobby sock. Another gunshot rang out! She turned and saw the big blonde UN Peacekeeper falling from the balcony. She fled down the street.
Kneeling in the fresh dirt. Esma laid the flowers down on Papa’s grave and asked God to forgive her violent father. She studied the homemade cross and its upside down shadow. A sparrow landed on the cross. Its glittering black eyes were so innocent it made her want to cry. What did a little sparrow know about war? Today felt like the longest of all the days that ever existed.
Esma thought about her mother and sister. She would have to put flowers by their burned-out house, then find something to eat. She might go back to the cafe. The dark-haired UN soldier saved her life, or did a sniper kill him? He might help her. He might make her do things, too. Voices startled her.
She crept up behind a huge mossy mausoleum and looked over the hill. The skinny undertaker Mr. Sobieski dug a grave, while soldiers sat in an army truck pointing their guns at him. He started begging and crying. The soldiers laughed like they were in the best of times. The same cruel laughter of her father’s. It felt like Déjà vu. She could see her father’s triumphant face and bloody knuckles.
They saw her all at once, a squad of ethnic cleansers, like how a pride of lions sees a baby gazelle taking its first steps. Then the shelling started, again.
Image by dae jeung kim from Pixabay. A small bunch of blue flowers with yellow centres growing wild.
literally stories 
A terrible account of man’s inhumanity and the horror of war and all that it means to the innocent. Even in times of peace life is hard for many people add to that hot blood and a killing urge and see humans become less than animals. A chilling story very well presented. Thank you – dd
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Thanks so much! Glad you liked the story!
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Brutal and unflinching. Not a comforting read but definitely one for the times.
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Thanks for your kind words! Glad it came across like that.
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Christopher
The human race has yet to shed the behaviors of the pre-humans in 2001 A Space Odyssey. We are still a bunch of apes swinging the bones of the dead at the “Others.” It’s a good thing to be horrified by, yet it still exists. This points the fact out brilliantly.
Leila
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Hi Leila
Great description: “We are still a bunch of apes swinging the bones of the dead at the “Others.”
Groups seem to be a major fallacy of this human experiment–mostly gone wrong.
Thanks for your excellent comments.
Christopher
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A tough read. And an instructive reminder that less than 50 years after the WWII gas ovens, ‘ethnic cleansing’ reared its head yet again.
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Yes, since the gas ovens–and the war crimes trial… it just seems like the play book. Thanks.
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The war setting feels genuine — the fly-blown corpse, shattered cafe tables, congealing blood. And Esma’s inner monologue in the gun-sighting scene is excellent. The line about her time on Earth coming to “this sun-shiny moment” is heartbreaking
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Hi David
Glad it came across as real. I was hoping that moment might connect.
Thanks!
CJA
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Christopher
This is a timely and timeless war story. You manage to dramatically present a sickening aspect of war that is not covered even by a lot of great war stories. That is the actual sexuality of war, the fact that it becomes so sexualized by so many of its participants. The way the human race creates and recreates itself (love and sex) also infuses the way they torture, rape and destroy themselves. This is so deeply horrifying and yet totally true on all levels that most writers have no idea how to even deal with it. Hemingway created many realistic scenes of war, and a few that were not so realistic. But I do not think he ever exposed this horrifying aspect of war to the level that you have here. This story has a sympathetic brutality to it that is truly Chekhovian.
I truly admire how your LS stories are branching out into different genres. First the Western (in a truly hallucinogenic Ananias way) and now the war story. This piece is realistic, but it’s also mythic in the way it’s so atavistic, reaching back down into the darkest depths of man’s inhumanity to man, and specifically here, man’s inhumanity to woman, which is instinctively even more horrifying for most right-minded humans, if that is possible, which it is.
Among your many other talents, you truly are a horror story writer. But your stories are far more horrifying than the average offerings in that mixed genre, because your tales are so REALISTIC in the Hemingway/Chekhov mode. You are a truth-teller, which goes beyond mere tale-telling and on into mystical and mythical realms. The fact that you can present the horror of it all while remaining so empathetic and realistic, without even a tiny trace of sensationalism in your worldview, is well nigh a miracle.
The mass media is always telling the tale of war and they are doing it from a great distance for monetary and commercial purposes. War has become entertainment. One can see this when we hear our so-called leaders say things like, “Watch what happens today.” Your kind of story, on the other hand, is telling the tale because you are a tale-teller who tells the truth first and foremost. The same reason why they wrote the Bible, which contains many horrible ancient stories that have a similar resonance as this story.
Dale
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Hey DWB
I’m not sure the comment I left for you is under your name. It might be further below.
CJA
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Hi Christopher,
Some brilliant images within. Mentioning ‘Perfumed Death’ made me think of overused lilies.
There is irony within this due to Peacekeepers and what they do. This has been poignant in every war. We are told a side to trust and that is what we do. How much of that becomes abuse and how much of that will we ever know.
Everything that has been put in place throughout time to ease suffering and abuse is probably bombed out with a very old thought that should NEVER have been coined – All is fair in love and war – I wonder how many times that has been quoted by who and to what means??
This is excellent my fine friend.
Hugh
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Hi Hugh
Yes, peacekeepers kill, religious people turn into devils, warmongers usually stay true to their directives.
I agree, never really thought about it, but it always sounded brutal and wrong. All’s fair, isn’t fair in either love or war. Especially since war is hate. Then turn love into war–Yeah, sure that makes sense. But given the species–who knows what people might run into the ground and not even know what they’re saying. Idioms for idiots.
Thanks for your comments!
Christopher
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Hi Dale
I have to say, even though this is a terrible topic, your words make me happy!
Such a generous and detailed review.
To hear it’s Chekhovian is wonderful to hear, since as you know he’s one of my heroes.
Yes, when the leash comes of civilization–the element that wants to do anything–will do anything–especially to women.
I have been writing different things… Not sure why exactly. I don’t really set out to write in a genre but sort of fall into one. Like with each detail, a cloud thickens, materializing into something solid.
Great point about the media sensationalizing war… I think around four hundred thousand Iraqis died in that sham war. This new one feels like an un-thought out catastrophe.
“Watch what happens today.” I could just hear him saying that. Our allies, that he alienated, are taking a giant step backwards. Israel feels like our little vicious proxy. They are fighting for their lives, though… Don’t mess with Israel is all I can say.
The Bible does have those brutal stories… King David sent his man out to the front line to his death, so he could get his woman. That one sticks with me.
Thanks for the great comments!
Christopher
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CJA
It appears that right now we are embroiled in one of the most unrealistic wars of all time, unrealistic in the sense that the incompetent people who started this thing had absolutely no idea what would happen when they started blowing things up. Such is always true in war of course, every single time, but this time we pulled an about-face and started attacking them right in the middle of negotiations. And then announced victory before the night was over. And then said we were on top of it all even though the whole global economy was rearing out of control. And now still say we’ve won even though the whole thing is still going on, hotter than ever before. The absurdity has reached proportions that match Alice in Wonderland and the Queen crying out about chopping everyone’s head off. It’s an unrealistic war with little support but it certainly isn’t unrealistic to the families of all those little girls who were murdered, for example.
Your simile about how a cloud thickens in the creative process is perfect. When it starts happening naturally in such ways, one knows they truly have found their creative voice. And that is when the real magic starts to happen.
Yes, the Bible is filled with horrors, like God purposely drowning the entire human race except for Noah and his family because of how useless, horrible and corrupt they are. Or what happened to Jezebel, beautiful, wicked Jezebel.
Dale
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Hi DWB
Yes–it smacks of the Japanese attacking pearl harbor.
Indeed, the whole global economy is affected by this insanity.
At least G. W. B. (who is pretty much a semi likable war criminal–quite a good painter, too) consulted congress, and had the allies lined up. Now we have lost our allies. It’s not inconceivable for some of these fringe countries like Spain or even France making alliances with Russia. Hell, Canada.
Great comparison with “Alice in Wonderland” this dude is nuts! Crazy amoral people are not suited for public office.
God does not mess around. People think we are in Revelations, but they always do… The evidence is strong, though.
Thanks! This voice deal is tricky. Kind of like being tone deaf but gradually being able to find the right cord.
CJA
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War is an ugly, ugly thing, so your story doesn’t flinch from that at all, but nor does it ‘use’ war as a sensationalist topic. This is deft writing, showing the horror and repulsion in the full light it should be shown in.
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Hi Paul
Yes it is ugly… Hollywood has turned it into something it’s not. Where there is killing it’s hard to find any heroes.
Thanks for your excellent comments!
Christopher
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