Brian Turner

This is called Two Thousand Pounds.

It begins simply with a fist, white-knuckled and tight, glossy with sweat, with two eyes in a rearview mirror watching for a convoy, the radio a soundtrack that adrenaline has pushed into silence, replacing with a heartbeat, his thumb trembling over the button.

a flight of gold that's what cephalon thinks as he lights up miami draws in the smoke and waits in his taxi at the traffic circle he thinks of summer nineteen seventy four lifting pitchforks of grain high in the air the slow drift of it like the fall of shotha's hair and although it was decades ago he still loves her remembers her standing at the cane break where the buffalo cooled shoulder-deep in the water pleased with the orange cups of flowers he brought her

he regrets how so much can go wrong in a life how easily the years slip by light as green bright as a street's concussion of metal shrapnel travelling at the speed of sound to open him up in blood and shock a man whose last thoughts are of love and wreckage with no one there to whisper him gone

Sergeant Ledoux of the National Guard speaks but cannot hear the words coming out.

And it's just as well as eardrums have ruptured because it lends the world a certain calm.

Though the traffic circle is filled with people running in panic, their legs a blur like horses in a carousel, turning and turning the way the tires spin on the Humvee flipped to its side.

The gunner's hatchet was thrown from a mystery to him now, a dark hole in metal the color of sand.

And if he could, he would crawl back inside of it.

and though his fingertips scratch at the asphalt, he hasn't the strength to move.

Shrapnel has torn into his ribcage, and he will bleed to death in minutes.

But he finds himself surrounded by a strange beauty, the shine of light on the broken, a woman's hand touching his face, tenderly, the way his wife might, amazed to find a wedding ring on his crushed hand, the bright gold sinking in flesh, going to bone.

Rashid passes a bridal shop on a bicycle with Sefa beside him, and just before the air ruckles and breaks, he glimpses the sidewalk reflections in the storefront glass, men and women walking and talking, or not, an instant of clarity, just before each of them shatters under the detonation's wave, as if even the idea of them were being destroyed, stripped of form.

the blast tearing into the mannikins who stood as though husband and wife a moment before who cannot touch one another who cannot kiss who now lie together in glass and debris holding one another in their half-armed embrace calling this love if this is all there will ever be

the civil affairs officer lieutenant jackson he stares at his missing hands which make no sense to him no sense at all to wave these absurd stumps held in the air or just a moment before he blown bubbles out of the humvee window his left hand holding the bottle his right hand dipping the plastic ring in soap

filling the air behind them with floating spheres like the oxygen trails of deep ocean divers something for the children something beautiful translucent globes of their iridescent skins drifting on vehicle exhaust in the breeze that might lift one day over the Zagros mountains that kind of hope small globes which may have astonished someone on the sidewalk seven minutes before Lieutenant Jackson blacks out from blood loss and shock with no one there to bandage the wounds they would carry him all the way home

Nearby, an old woman cradles her grandson, whispering, rocking him on her knees as though singing him to sleep, her hands wet with their blood, her black dress soaked in it as her legs give out and she buckles with him to the ground.

If you'd asked her 40 years earlier if she could see herself, an old woman, begging by the roadside for money, here, with a bomb exploding at the market among all these people, she'd have said, to have your heart broken one last time before dying.

To kiss a child, give him sight of a life he could never live.

It's impossible.