Look to the Sky
Jerry laid facedown in the muddy blood puddle. He wasn’t sure if the blood was his, but he knew the mud wasn’t. It belonged to someone he had never met, but who he was fighting a war against. Jerry was shot in the stomach a couple of minutes earlier. It didn’t hurt at first, and really now it was just a hotness in his stomach that made the rest of him feel cold.
In reality Jerry was in a rambled city blanketed with gunpowder, but when he closed his eyes he was somewhere else. It wasn’t real, and he knew it. Jerry knew he was imagining it all, but that didn’t stop it from being real. He remembered having dreams this real, but this wasn’t a dream—a hallucination, maybe—but not a dream. He could see everything perfectly and his sense of touch was heightened to the place he was in. He was standing on a hillside. The smell of spring was all around him and he could feel the breeze flirt with his skin. The sun was setting just to his left and it made the shadows of the blades of grass on the hillside stretch and yawn. There was someone standing at the top of the hill. A woman. His wife.
Somewhere off in the distance someone was screaming in a foreign language—a gunshot—the screaming stops. Jerry opens his eyes. He is sure the blood he is laying in belongs to him now. It covered his fingers as he held his stomach closed. There was still no pain, just warmth. Jerry, still lying facedown, could feel his life draining out of him with each stream of blood. Now that he thinks about it, he never really thought about how he would die, but this surely never crossed his mind. A thousand miles from home and no one to tell him he was going to pull through or lie to him about how good he looked for someone who has been shot in the stomach, he began to crawl.
He closed his eyes again and tried to focus on his wife at the top of the hill. He began to walk toward her to get a better look. Now ascending the hill, he realized she was farther away than he thought. Without shoes on, the thick grass hugged each of his toes with every step. The amber sky held the warm smell of his mother’s kitchen. Now, closer to his wife he could see her face. There were no tears and no smile, just her face—the one he fell in love with.
Now out of the muddy blood puddle, Jerry stopped crawling. It was a clean place, and it was brighter than where he was before. He remembered his first dog, Max. When Max knew he was dying he went and laid under the porch. When he asked his dad why Max was under the porch, his dad told him that when dogs know they are dying they find a clean place to be alone and die. Jerry wondered why he had to be alone to die.
Closing his eyes he saw himself face-to-face with his wife. Her sandy hair was tickling at her milky cheeks and her eyes were the kind of pale blue that makes you wonder how to make a color like that. Jerry concluded a long time ago that he probably couldn’t.
“Does it hurt?” she asked.
“Not at all,” he said, “I’m sorry I left you.”
“I’ll miss you,” she said as she reached her hand out to touch his face. A swift pain hit his gut like someone kicked him. Then, remembering something he heard in a song once, he looked to the sky knowing it was the last time he would.
His wife touched his face in front of that sunset.