Home’s a shed and wood-pile. Home is bones. It might travel with you, if you ask it to, but you rarely ever ask it to. Home is a dog you love because it’s a creature on four legs, a dog who cocks its face to look at you and beg. Home lies upon the island groaning with trees—and the island itself lies upon the mud-green lake that swells with each hard rainfall. You can see home in the forested island’s ruptured leaves, in its tree trunks which ache into the soil. You can see home in the island’s shadow washed across the cement surface of the water, cast down in the unsaturated light of a sun borne by a sky of clouds which shatter their raindrops to the ground.

Home is the quiet pain of being in your head, the average pain of living in your own head for seven moments chained to one another by the torch of welder. On the forested island, watched by unsaturated light and ruptured light, you are chained to seven moments in your head by the torch of a welder, and you find that home can’t quiet the quiet pain in your head, the average pain in your head. You murdered and conquered home, built it as a rock castle upon a hill of grass clippings. You devoured home in insect mandibles, gorged upon it and loved the rock castle you ruined even as you laid down each of its stones. Each of its stones is a quiet pain, an average pain, laid down by your weathered hands aged with their cumulative weight.

Its stones are as porous as the bark of melaleuca trees and inside each one lingers the coiling smoke of your countless cigarettes. Your face has been aged with the cumulative weight of all that cigarette smoke, the cigarette smoke caught inside the aerosol cans you have sprayed upon the tulips growing just a few yards back from the edge of the lake, its surface broken by the forested island that loves to ingest the grass clippings you have thrown and scattered to the trees. Your face is aged, wrinkled, folded over upon itself within the plumes of cigarettes. Home is cigarettes. Smoke has always been a bad omen, or at least the absence of good omens, and you are at home in the absence of good omens. You are at home sweating under limbs of dense sunlight and tossing to the dying grass the apple cores whose absent flesh you have ingested. You have spent so many happy days wandering in potato fields, wondering if the tubers lying therein want to be unearthed. You always keep your face to the earth, looking for the spuds to climb up from their fertile coffins, waiting for them to break apart the soil upon which you stand and throw you eleven feet into the sky. Once thrown there, and perhaps asunder, you will be unable to see the island upon the lake but whereat you will, nonetheless, see towards the end of the vacuum of space that casts itself outward in the knowledge that it must, always, contract.

You’ve seen the cosmic solstice brought on by winter in space, seen snow drifting in its places and known that the universe never stops walking, and in witnessing its walking, its ever-repeated contraction, you’ve become tired of living and dying the same way a million times, of reenacting birth, of always pissing, eating, shitting, wailing, loving, fucking, hating, fucking, and dying. You’ve become tired of the iron drainpipes with which you’ve flagellated yourself, tired of their rust that has oxidized and corroded your skin throughout the repetition of lifetimes that has not ceased. You know that cosmonauts are at home climbing gymnosperms, but you have never found, as they have, that home is something tangible, like twigs in your hands are tangible, like the powder of moth wings is tangible; you have not found home in space nor in heaven, nor in moths beating their wings to break the sky.

Perhaps you found home once in viewing mountains, where you knew, if you could get high enough, you would eat snow every day and your lungs would spew forth from your lips due to the lightening of pressure. Perhaps you thought home could be in the mountains, or in the rivers that spill down from their crags. You thought home could be in the hills dwarfed by the mountains, or in the flowered vales that puncture the earth between the two. But then you knew, when turning your eyes away from such vistas to your hands upon the steering wheel, that home could be in these places or it could be in no places. Perhaps, you think now, that one of these places, one of these spots in which home resides, is in the pulchritude of the irony in its inherent ugliness.

Home is beneficent, you know that; at the same time that it is ugly it is beneficent. It is also a cracked road of five miles from your house to your village, an aged street across which lies tangles of pith-vines pointing barbs to your ankles and wrists as you swing your limbs by, a brick wall which leans outward and crumbles cement and begs to be set upright. It is your fingertips upon the gravel of your driveway, your flat fingerprints upon its sediment as you take breaths from your cigarette and kneel to slide your hand into its depressions that have, from season to season, been refilled. Yes, home is beneficent and only three generations old, angry that you rarely ever ask it travel with you when you take steps to leave it behind. Home mourns in your absence, erects gravestones next to its walls, shivers as icicles slough down from its gutters, aches as you walk outward through rusting leaves and mutes its cries behind its windows, knows that you know it isn’t really here, in the place it says it is, in this place you’ve lived for one of three generations, in this place where it seems it has always, always, been. Home is not in this place, nor is it in one place, but it is in some place or in no place, depending on who you are and who you’ve thought yourself to be.

In traveling outward from this place through rusting leaves and tangles of pith-vines, you have wished that someone might tell you where home is, what shape it takes under yellow clouds or upon the cusp of rocks. You have wished for a voice to mention a location, perhaps just two square feet of earth or mind, that could stand for home. You want to see it somewhere, in words written on a page, in the thin tremors of a cymbal, in heavy brush strokes on canvas. Until you see it there, you’ve decided that you’ll content yourself in wandering, in traveling with your heart in a box, carrying it around like mules carry sugar and straw and sunflower seeds.

Patrick Barney is currently a graduate student in the Creative Writing MFA program at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, where he teaches freshman composition. His poetry and prose has appeared in Flights: A Literary Journal and 40 Below, a literary journal dedicated to explorations of pedagogy.

– to my father

An exhale – an O let out, then another white ringlet, then others leaving the dark of your mouth, each a loop in front of you, growing increasingly large, spiraling as they widen, until they uncoil, drift apart, gather as a big cloud, clouding the air the color of storms….

*

Even as a child I knew. Each day this happened, each time, it signaled something. I came to understand the smoke from you as an exhale of your thoughts. Not as in alphabet. It did not look like the cursive writing we learned in school, the way our pencils scrolled to connect one delicate letter to the next without lifting from the paper; nor did your smoke zip through air like a plane’s contrail scribbling against the bluest of sky. But it did have a way of being deciphered.

It was more like entering weather, this room with the box of Cubans where you puffed. Once they were lit, the clear air turned milky white or sometimes gray, depending on the sun, of course, and how it entered the window. Sometimes its light stabbed the smoke, piercing through to arrow the floor. Other times the sun’s light shone on the smoke itself angling in a way that magnified its particles. There was sundown too – what painters call the gloaming hour – a time of evening light when the day’s end was aglow, that turned the smoke a hazy blue. Like colored glass that is frosted, or like vapor in a swamp in the dark, that translucent blue risen up from the bogs.

I saw this once, a turquoise haze in a thick forest of pine. It was the night of the winter solstice; the moon so large its light sent blue through the trees. Lit the cold mist, turning it blue. I was with my friend Betsy. At one point, in a clearing, we just stood looking up. There, the moon. Framed in a haze that gave it a halo. So round, such a white face in the sky, its cheeks puckered. The moon kept its mouth fully open, forming the same O as you. As if the moon breathed blue, as if its blue breath was smoky. Like your smoke, in a shaft of light at the end of the day.

The room where you smoked was our den, small with tight walls that you paneled yourself. You even did the ceiling, covered it with white tiles one year – raised yourself on the step ladder, pressed each panel into place. I believe it was after midnight when the entire ceiling crashed. Tiles buckling, falling, a day’s work piled upon our rust-colored rug. In the room was a black leather chair, a recliner which we thought of as yours although you never claimed it for yourself. It was an unspoken entitlement, one that arose of its own accord, or maybe because an ash-stand stood beside it, a benevolent object, fashioned with a tray that seemed always to hold the mauled butt of a dead cigar. In this chair you sat often, working out what lived in you. Your smoke could be like that as well, quietly venturing outward, navigating its course.

Smoke signals, yours, they had an air about them that became the very air we breathed…. It was a big deal to be nearing thirteen and receive a phone call from a boy. My call came while we were at the dinner table and the phone mounted to the wall was conveniently located by your ear. You answered, passed it to me and the cord unraveled to where my face was suddenly lit. Surely I was excited by the boy’s call but you, who knew a particular about him, were not. When finished, after passing the phone back, you paused before excusing yourself from the table. Instead of talking you returned to the den, lit a stogie in the black chair to work it out by yourself. There was a matter at hand, and with large matters you tended to take your time. Later, when I went to check on you, the answer came in the form of clouds. Cumulus clouds, bunched up; cirrus clouds, in long strips like complex sentences. They encircled you – your face tilted upward, eyes staring out. We never discussed the matter of the boy, my seeing him, because, in truth, this look of you already said it. It was like thick language between us. Something to do with the smoke imparting knowledge about this particular, not yet known to my innocent self. Something about this cigar dangling from your serious mouth – which made me say to the boy, in school, he should not call again.

It is also an art. Like wine tasting, like ceremony at a Japanese tea. Cigar smoking involves preparation, which I was to witness early on, in those brief years before you got ill. There was a style to squeezing it until the tobacco was evenly spread. Then, the whiff – when this roll of tobacco leaf was held to your nose. While sniffing its length, you sometimes rotated it in admiration. After, you cut off the cap, the end which was closed. There was a way of gripping a cigar with your thumb on the bottom and all four fingers curled on the top, holding the thing like a piccolo, not chomping down on it but keeping it more like the wooden board of a seesaw, balanced, but also loose, so that it wobbled in your mouth. Then, while lighting, to hold the cigar above the flame, keeping the cap slightly above the lighter. Next, to draw in and puff out, while rotating the cigar so the entire end caught fire. And to just continue, puffing, turning it until the cap glowed. The image I have of you lighting a cigar is slow and purposeful, like posturing in meditation, how one forms a lotus with the body before beginning to breathe.

The act of smoking, I learned, was to just take the smoke into your mouth, not to inhale so that it could travel down into your lungs, but to simply draw in then out, as if your mouth could be an alcove for the smoke’s incoming and outgoing waves. I even tried it with my friend Maria, held it like I saw you do but, in truth, we couldn’t handle the stink, its smoky taste.

Still when I think of cigar smokers, I find them intriguing, something about their process that I associate with their minds, especially in matters of decision-making. Like, Winston Churchill who was inseparable from them. Smoking eight to ten a day, in almost every picture he has a lit one slanting from his mouth. Even so, I’d like to think of his addiction as a habit that informed his person. That, in the act of puffing, or by chewing cigars until they were frayed, it gave him the pause needed for certain decisions. Certainly, an asset to diplomacy. To plumb for the logic, to reach down into the interior world where wisdom reigns, and in this way, the cigar bided him time. So that when he removed it from his mouth, when he spoke finally, his words would mean something. I’d like to think that cigars have serviced some of the great ideas risen from a person. That the act of smoking helped to pace language, like the peace pipe, whose ceremonial smoke gave credence to words.

Aside from serious matters, cigars have also been used as a stage prop, of sorts – adding to the comical appearance of W.C. Fields, enhancing the role of Clark Gable as Rett Butler, or any suave idle of old film. In actual life, the cigar has played in a myriad of scenes – from a smoke-filled kitchen with card players murmuring through their own haze to the wealthy gambler who puffs and pauses in a manner that predetermines his winning hand. None of which seem like you…. Still, if I was asked to match your cigar smoking to any one personality, it would be the smoker as thinker, the Churchill type, and it would be the man who used them for celebratory occasions, as in the look of a proud father who eagerly passed them around moments after a birth.

You smoked in the open. In nature, for example, when we went camping each summer. When nights were all about the rugged dark, and I would watch you, you with us, all of us talking until the campfire went out. Watched the wood burn, heard it crackle. I was young and there were other late nights when I saw from the tent window how everything blackened, how night’s determined darkness overtook our camp. All but for a few embers and that small light from you, that circular orange of your cigar, blinking, like a firefly.

Aside from the occasional Cuban, there were American brands like El Producto, Dutch Masters, Phillies, Tudor Arms. I really liked the boxes they came in. The El Producto box with its image of a colorful woman; the Tudors, in an unvarnished wooden box, fifty of them, carefully layered. Later, the boxes would have other special uses. A place to store marbles or stash paints or start a collection of bugs. The wooden had little hinges in the back and a latch in the front, as if, what it housed was treasure. At times you bought singles which came in glass tubes, which I then used for my self-created science experiments, mixing cleaning products to create various concoctions. You went through other phases as well, the pipe period, for example, and the pouches for the loose tobacco and the cherry tobacco phase which scented the den.

In the 1960s, in the neighboring town of Audubon, was a store everyone frequented, by the name of Korvettes. We were no exception. It was our habit to ride the escalator up to the tobacco department on the second floor to buy one of the special boxes each weekend. After, there was the lifting of the lid in the car. There was the first cigar you drew out to whiff, the paper ring you then slid off and onto my finger.

*

I take signals seriously, as does the moon with its light. As does the moon’s blue light traveling downward to earth. You know how they say that light from the stars is light years away, flying to us at a speed we cannot even fathom. Likewise, I imagine this of your smoke, those signals of old, the swirls, clouds, ringlets that have long gone, let out of our atmosphere – I believe they are traveling onward in some other form, though invisible to our eyes, are still moving through sky, going beyond even, back to whatever it is that is you.

And I believe if smoke signals can do it, so can a person’s words. Words that say something significant, those within us that we want released to the air, to live on. I believe in the power of intent, to send messages forth, to keep language alive beyond the moment of utterance, so that, somehow, they will reach those for whom they are intended. Going where they need to, at times traveling far, words written, spoken, the carefully chosen, words, these – I send them to you. I send them to you.

Therese Halscheid is pursuing an MFA at Rutgers University, NJ. Also an accomplished poet, Therese has been the recipient of a number of prizes, including the Paterson Poetry Book Prize. Her poetry has also appeared in the Bellevue Literary Review, Connecticut Review, and others and she has served on the editorial staff of Story Quarterly.

diffuse a colony by default, because our trees were limited.
we are not this residence yet, but should be.
magpied twice as often minus abundance,
these ages openly passerine. accidental,
a perimeter. as sentries stash circumstance.
crow folk, of course, and adaptation
to everywhere even. recognize reflections, yes, visions
of ourselves avian, but unable anyways
to let longer tales catch on. cross the neighbor country
no one means to begrudge but does, magpie.

fly three to four weeks after hatching. mercy.

grown, they aren’t picky with food but hoard
scattered caches carefully. the sown ground.
plus tuck bills beneath feathers for later
roosting, though my tree was lonely. and yours.
that scavenged pocket watch keeping
calendars tidy, unturned. disturbed eggs
cross-country too many miles to defend
too often irreconcilable predations.

y madrone currently lives and works in Chicago, IL via Olympia, WA via Detroit, MI via Baku, Ahzerbaijan. Other work can be found or is forthcoming in The National Poetry Review, RHINO, American Letters & Commentary, Columbia Poetry Review, Cloudbank & So to Speak.

I must unlatch this cold
constellation of two fish

as for me these kinds of dreams
for his way to moose I am armed

with my whistle but this is only a backstory
three more cities will loom

for these chapters and unspent ones
this is how hope is

always spoken beforehand
I am warned and I am ready

that neptune has been
to all our houses these nameable places

a pirate can say so o larch
a decade can be talked over or forgotten

but irregular saturn came once and went
will be back twice more, I am sure

this isn’t a final statement but the scope
of becoming a man some day

y madrone currently lives and works in Chicago, IL via Olympia, WA via Detroit, MI via Baku, Ahzerbaijan. Other work can be found or is forthcoming in The National Poetry Review, RHINO, American Letters & Commentary, Columbia Poetry Review, Cloudbank & So to Speak.

birds can be everywhere at once northern
harrier all winter long guarding the plot of dormant
strawberries and asparagus when, actually, some habits are unaccountable.
like enjoying interferences, the iridescence caused by this. and you
winter bird beside the woodstove caused the jar to crash
and crackle into bits of undoved. arrival.

something nasturtium of our whereabouts. every hellebore
bloomed and crabapple. blossoms out-pinked with never asking—
why the hops wasn’t brewed, or the kiwi coaxed
to supply what quinces couldn’t satisfy. an empty chicken
coop and untilled field where st. john’s wort grew
but was not steeped. remember how
that lime-green nook incensed our nest.
a careful task of ten acres to northern

harrier who stalked all winter long. she should
have gone south, instead waited for your birth
against the radiant floor. by photograph
that captured the unjustified shadow
hovering above the pregnancy
plant who bloomed a thousand times. to begin
with broken glass and shaking.

our anxiety to rustle certainty—
you, proper hawk of uneven
grass and one-eyed horses.

y madrone currently lives and works in Chicago, IL via Olympia, WA via Detroit, MI via Baku, Ahzerbaijan. Other work can be found or is forthcoming in The National Poetry Review, RHINO, American Letters & Commentary, Columbia Poetry Review, Cloudbank & So to Speak.

The chlorophyll remains in leaf:  the limbs
retain their hair:  the trees do not believe
the sun will set on them.  They think the film
of heat is normal—that it will revive
their energies.  Their organelles deceive
them.  Arctic air is coming:  the frigid winds
decelerate, creep at angles, cleave
the weeks—abnormal patterns bend
cuticle and xylem.  The curl of fronds
should soon commence, for their own sake:
precipitation turns crystal at end
of month:  the sappy network may soon break
beneath the neck of snow.  The season, white
and brittle, may betray the strange sunlight.

Janann Dawkins’ work has appeared in publications such as Existere & Ouroboros Review and soon features in The Flea, Two Review & Blue Fifth Review, among others. In 2008, Leadfoot Press published her chapbook Micropleasure. Twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize, she manages the eclectic journal Third Wednesday in Ann Arbor, MI.

Andrew Bynom

On the morning of the cease-fire we set off to meet the Turkish delegation in the poppy field above the beach. We mounted a plateau and advanced through gullies filled with thyme. I always liked the smell of thyme. Ahead of us, a voice attached the word Anne, Turkish for mother, to the morning air. “Anne,” he said, as if the mother in question had just entered a room where she had every right to be. I asked Ricky Rumbold why it took wounded men so long to die. He said men would will their own deaths but their bodies rebelled, refusing to lie still, reluctant to decompose.

I didn’t think we would get any rain today. In fact, I knew we wouldn’t. Today there would be nothing but death bathed in soft sunlight. The overnight showers had cleared the biscuit-colored dust that hung over the peninsula. When word of the cease-fire spread through the niches and dug-outs the ANZACs had hewn into the Gallipoli rock, few wanted to emerge into the light; none trusted the intensity of the new silence. For a month these men had been looked down upon, sniped at from poppy-covered peaks. Now they moved slowly towards the beach like the first bathers of summer, shredding tatty remnants of uniform as they went.

I bent down to pick up one of the purple flowers and held it to my nose. I knew we were close. I could smell it on the droplets forming on tulips and bluebells, on the flame-colored fruit of a pomegranate tree. The men excreted it through their pores. It was a sticky smell like charred syrup.

We moved into a larger area of scrubland and saw the Allied trench line facing an open area of two or three hundred yards. Two days had passed since the Turks tried to drive the ANZACs from the cliff face into the sea. Forty thousand men sneaked across two gullies in full view of howitzer and machine gun. Gluttony broke out in the Australian and New Zealand ranks. They fired indiscriminately before becoming ruthless, waiting for the officers to appear and assemble their men before slaughtering them wholesale in neat, packaged platoons.

Men lay in mounds on the wet earth. Some had sunk to their knees, leaning and clinging to their brethren, freeze-framed in a drunken proposal. Ricky Rumbold and I clambered over and around them, tripping and stumbling, and laughing as one of us almost fell, only to be swooped up by the other.

—-

I had met Ricky Rumbold the day before when he was perched on the blubbery crest of an abdomen belonging to a sergeant of the Turkish 57^th. “This one will be all right for a day or two, mate, but then you have to watch out or they can explode.” Ricky Rumbold was my very own ANZAC guide. I introduced myself.  He couldn’t believe my name. “Aubrey?  That was the name of me sister’s cat!” He shook my hand. “You here to parley with the enemy, mate?” Yes I was. “You watch them Turks don’t give you any of that goat’s cheese, you’ll be shitting through the eye of a needle for a week.” Thanks. “You should get some of their baccy, mate. It’s better than the shite they give us here.” Yes, I would try. So why hadn’t this man been buried?  “Can’t do anything, mate, till Birdy gets here and you’ve finished pow-wowing with the Turks.” Birdy?  “Jesus Creepers, mate. General Birdwood.” Oh that Birdy. “Yeah that Birdy.  He’s all right for a pomme. His dick’s a bit shriveled up – we all had a gander when he came swimming with us. But he’s got a lotta balls.”

Ricky was running a book on the nearly dead. For cigarette stakes he gave odds on how long a fallen soldier could stay in voice – two fags could win you twenty if a recognizable ‘mother’ or a specific girlfriend lasted the day. One man growled Fatma as if berating a troublesome wife, another called Allah, Allah, Allah, with the staccato rhythm of a steam train. I taught Ricky the meaning of a high-pitched yardim, help, which was attracting some late interest. He offered me a free wager, “what with you providing inside information as it were,” but I politely declined.

—-

In the poppy field the Turkish delegation was standing in a half circle, smoking and biting into pistachio shells. The senior ranking officer, who wore more gold lace than his colleagues, introduced himself as Essad Pasha and saluted. The second officer called himself Arif, had acne and picked at his ear between sentences. The third, a captain, kept back from the huddle we had formed amid the scarlet flowers, drinking tea from the tulip-shaped glasses the Turks had secreted in their packs. We chatted about the weather, the King and the Sultan in that order. But this captain seemed content to gaze off into the distance so it was a surprise when he said during a lull in our small talk, “They have to be buried today. They can’t stay there. Our religion won’t allow it.” His voice was as soft and tired as a bruised peach.

He took one step towards our group, parceling his gaze among us. He was taller than his colleagues; lean, sharp-shouldered under worn beige. His green eyes and smooth features looked incongruous among his swarthier Anatolian colleagues.

The captain turned and pointed to the gullies below. I followed his outstretched arm over the scarlet smear of the poppy field, past blasted tree stumps and charred scrub, down to where his soldiers lay on beds of thyme. The captain held all this in his splayed fingers like a green-eyed sorcerer conjuring faces from the earth. I asked him where we would bury the dead. “Where they fell. We will dig mass graves. And if necessary, we will carry them, body by body, until we find a place to dig.”

“I’m not sure the cease fire will last that long,” I said.

The captain smiled. “Then, why are you here?”

—-

We were to meet the generals so they could listen to our plans and claim them as their own. We would have to go back through the gullies to reach the path to the cliff-top. The Turks agreed to blindfolds at the cliff-top. It wouldn’t do for them to see the trenches on the ANZAC bridgehead. We would remove the blindfolds only when we were safely down the other side of the cliff and inside the officer’s mess on the beach at ANZAC Cove.

The Turks gave us cologne-scented handkerchiefs to hold over our mouths and noses. The captain led the way, stooping to pick up the odd personal effect: a small Koran, a hunting knife, a strip of brightly-colored turban, a pocket-watch proudly ticking, before placing it next to the nearest body. Meticulous, he was slowing down the war to see what it was all about. I shuffled along in his wake, a child trailing through a museum of bloated relics.

Ricky Rumbold walked a step behind me. The quiet was overwhelming. Instead of the guns and the flares and the screams of men and animals, we heard the insidious lapping of the sea, the intimidation in the breeze, the faint threat of returning bees.

The captain bent over another man and extracted a letter protruding from a torn pocket. The corners of the letter were neatly bloodied as if the writer had dipped them in sealing wax. I waited for him to replace it but instead he folded the paper, turning the stained corners inwards and slipped it into his own pocket. For a moment his green eyes settled on me and I heard his question again, “Then, why are you here?” I could have told him I was here to crawl out to the foremost trenches during the battle and translate the statements prepared by the mandarins at the Foreign Office, entreaties to win over the wily Turk. Or to weave tales of German treachery and dastardly deeds, claiming to be a friend of the Sultan, urging my enemy to join us in holy war against the Kaiser. I was here to stand guard with my dictionaries and grammar books while decorated generals came into my tent and examined my arsenal of words.

At the cliff-top we stopped to blindfold the Turkish officers, Ricky Rumbold placing Arif’s spectacles, absurdly, on the outside of his blindfold. Then we heard a voice coming up from the earth. A man was singing in Turkish, a scratchy tenor recalling streams and swings, the glimpse of a loved one in a summer meadow. I realized as I listened that I had heard this refrain before. The captain’s ears pricked like a dog’s and I saw him mouth the lines:

I used to think there was no friend for me in this world

But as I offer myself up for you, I know I’ll never be alone

The captain smiled. It was the saddest smile I had ever seen, heightened not diminished by the cloth over his eyes. A smile of quiet times, a simple reflection of one man’s love for another. A smile that didn’t belong here, I thought ungraciously. The song too with its uncontaminated pleasures didn’t belong to a voice that chafed at the melody like army wool on a rash.

The singing stopped. “Strewth, that bloody singing corpse,” Ricky Rumbold said in my ear. “He’s a tough one, I’ll give him that. I had twenty fags riding on ‘im being done.”

We began our descent, treading tiny steps down the goat tracks as a line of ANZACs bearing kerosene tins of water struggled in the opposite direction. They had hewn themselves into the rock here, a sheet of iron or a layer of earth for a roof, an extra shelf chiseled into the rock to hold their rations, a piece of blanket for a curtain, a coffee-tin to house a pink oleander or tulip. Now, sunbathing on the cliff, they watched us struggling down. For men who herded cattle for a living across vast spaces where the sky nuzzled the earth we had become the morning’s entertainment. Blind man’s bluff in a freakish circus with no safety net.

When we reached the beach, Ricky Rumbold smiled broadly and winked at me. “Hey!  Whoa!  Hold up there! Two steps to the left, unless you wanna lose your feet!” The Turkish officers obliged as Ricky plotted a course through imaginary mines and barbed wire. The captain shuffled, sidestepped, and sighed.

We ushered the Turkish officers into the mess tent and removed their blindfolds. I recognized Birdwood from his photograph in the newspapers. “A word,” he said, and held open the tent flap to let me back outside. He was slighter than I expected, watery blue eyes in a pockmarked face. “Do you have everything you need?” he asked me.

“Yes, thank you, sir. But perhaps you have access to a more recent map of the terrain?”

“If we had ‘access’ to a ‘recent’ map of the peninsula, we wouldn’t have landed here in the first place, lieutenant-colonel.”

“No. I suppose not, sir.”

“Still, I am sure we can rustle you up one of our most ‘recent’ maps, from about 1865. How does that sound?”

“I’m not sure sir.  Does it bear any resemblance to what’s here now?”

“My dear boy, you would be better off with a map of Piccadilly Circus.”

“Oh.”

The general smiled. “You have been chatting to the Turkish officers. What do they say about the attack?”

“They’re all a bit stunned, sir. Understandable, really.”

“Well, lieutenant-colonel, we were all a bit ‘stunned’ to find ourselves attacked by forty thousand Turks.”

I was still working on a rejoinder to this when Birdwood turned on his heels and went back inside the mess tent.

The negotiations went well. We sat in the officer’s mess on soft armchairs, while servants hovered with trays. We smoked cigars. The Turkish officers produced cheese, olives and cucumbers. The cucumbers, especially, were well received. We ate and smoked. A bottle of Napoleon brandy was passed around. General Birdwood led the negotiations for our side, after shaking hands solemnly with Essad Pasha. General Bridges should have been there also, but he had managed to get himself shot on Friday morning. General Birdwood removed his cap to reveal slicked back iron-grey hair. The captain watched the proceedings keenly, his green eyes darting around the room, but almost inevitably settling on me. Disconcerted, I struggled to translate, once or twice asking Essad Pasha to repeat himself. We agreed that the cease-fire should last until six that evening. Three zones were to be marked out with white flags for the burial of the dead. One (by far the largest) was for the Turks, one for the Allies, and the third was for those only God could identify. Priests and imams were to wear white armbands as they worked. Everybody was to dig. Nobody was to shoot.

We stood to attention and saluted. We shook hands and wished each other well. It had all been very civilized. I felt like I was leaving my club in the Strand, waiting for the footman to fetch my hat and coat. Suddenly, an Australian soldier burst into the mess tent, wild-eyed. “Which one of you bastards has my kettle?” he demanded. We stared. Ricky Rumbold guffawed outside. I didn’t look at General Birdwood.

I came alive as we buried the dead. I flitted between both camps, conveying requests, allaying suspicions and soothing egos.  I supervised the digging of the communal grave. I directed the stretcher bearers. I carefully marked out the white flags. I was respectful to the officers and affable to the men. I decided when everybody could rest and when they could eat. I checked that the troops who were not needed remained below their parapets. I supervised the gathering of rifles into a huge pile and appointed the roughest looking soldiers I could find to guard it. I peered into dead soldiers’ faces and gave them a nationality. I introduced priests to imams and translated the Koran and the Bible for each when we could not tell where a man was from. I was magnificent. I was God for the day in a land God had forgotten.

My only regret was that I could not find the captain. I wanted him to see me in action, to stand and watch me in that remote way of his, observing how soldiers scurried to my command. He would understand then why I was here and that this was not the time for pieces of cloth or still-ticking watches.

At 5:15 we could see stretches of thyme. At 5:30 we discovered the Turkish watches were eight minutes fast. Frenzied activity. They would have blown us away like flies for being unpunctual. Then I saw the captain staring at the earth and I went over to him, holding out my watch, hoping he hadn’t heard about the time difference. There were fifteen minutes before the cease-fire ended. The captain was bent over a body. I thought nothing of it at first. After all, he tended to so many on our walk to the cliff. But when I approached and heard the pale voice, the fragment of lyric, I knew he had found the boy who defied Ricky’s odds.

But as I offer myself up for you, I know I’ll never be alone

—-

He was a young officer, too young for the stripe on his shredded uniform. The captain was hunched over him like a doctor or priest. I bent down beside them. I watched the captain administer to the boy, folding his arms over his chest and passing the two remaining buttons of his tunic through their holes. He smoothed the boy’s brow with the backs of his fingers. The boy’s mouth formed silent shapes and the captain prayed the poetry of the Koran. I looked at my watch. Five minutes. “We have to get back behind the lines,” I said, and put my hand on the captain’s shoulder and felt the bone. I waited for his weary acquiescence but it was as though I wasn’t there.

The captain placed the Koran, a cube of black leather, in the boy’s right hand. He got to his feet, straightened his tunic and adjusted his cap. But when he leaned into that familiar, unhurried stride, it was not towards the Turkish lines but over to where his shovel lay.

Three minutes. I imagined the men calling me back behind the lines, the arms waving above the parapets, the anxious whistles. The captain walked back towards the body, shovel slung over his shoulder like a rifle.

“We’ve done it,” I said. “Don’t you see?” I turned my back on him and advanced five steps towards the lines. I knew all about this moment because I had pictured it throughout the day. I would head to the left and the captain to the right like gentlemen and ladies at a cotillion. I looked hard for someone to recognize on our side, but all I could see was a shifting mass of khaki and grey.

On the sixth step I stopped and looked back at the captain. He stood with his shovel pointing at the sky. One minute. It was a time for shameless running, head bent low, a time to remove one’s scent from the hungry guns. But the captain would not move.

A Turkish sniper fired from a distant hill. There was a moment of pure silence. I stood sideways on, a shoulder and a cheek for each side of the war. I was still waiting for someone to call my name. The Australians replied with a volley of hatred. I looked down at my feet and scratched the earth with the tip of my boot. It was smooth and flat. When I caught the captain’s eye, he nodded thoughtfully at the place to dig and walked towards me, holding out the shovel.

END

Andrew Bynom has written both contemporary and historical fiction set in Turkey, especially Istanbul. His work has been published in The Tusculum Review and Armchair Aesthete. He recently finished a novel, The Executioner’s Race, in which tulips and calligraphy intertwine. He lives in Carbondale, Illinois.