Short Story - THE LIE
Oof. This one made me cry, ladies and gentlemen. Oddly enough the prompt was: Two people are somewhere, picking up a shoe at the same time.
Boy did I take that in a…direction. Hmm. It’s also my first time writing in the first person! Hooray for meeee!
Content Warnings: Gun Violence, bombings, acts of war, death.
Yeah, I told you I took it in directions!
Without further ado, I bring to you: THE LIE
THE LIE
“You’ve been lied to,” she murmurs, her fingers touching mine across a single boot. Not one for a man or woman. One for a child. A small one.
“Of course, you’d say that.” My glare is locked on where our hands touch. The bootie is frayed at the edges. What was once yellow with flowers has melted into the singed color of rust. “You people would say anything to demoralize us. To make us turn against our own.”
She snatches the boot and cradles it to her chest, her face set in grim stone even as her eyes swim with tears. “You think we would do this? To ourselves? To our children?”
For the first time, I cast my eyes around me and truly try to make sense of what I’m seeing. People who search through the rubble are shooed off or shot by the armed guards, multiplying the bodies laying outside the hospital grounds. The building itself is in shambles, the side a crumbling mass of brick as tiny patients trickle down from collapsing floors like white paper dolls.
“We wouldn’t do this,” I say, shaking my head and grimacing. My body thrums with tremors, forcing myself to believe every word. “This place is off limits.”
“Tell that to your fellow soldiers, shooting people who are looking for their babies.” Her eyes are like glass. “Will you shoot me, too?”
That shoe in her hands, that yellow shoe, now screams a story. I’d thought her a dirty scavenger, like all her people, flooding the hospital courtyard to ensure their staged bombing was a success and to pick at the spoils of war. Now, the object cradled in her hands makes her a grieving mother, one who holds what’s left of her baby in her hands.
“We didn’t do this,” I say again, my resolve sinking with every pop pop that rings out in staccato succession behind me. “We didn’t.”
“Then who did?” she asks. “Because if you know, I’ll kill them.”
She’s tricking me. She has to be. But at this point the mother’s eyes are leaking small rivers down her dirty cheeks as she rocks on her haunches, back and forth. I believe she’d do it. She’d claw their eyes out with that same dead, wet expression on her face.
Koseckey walks up behind her and rests the barrel of the gun on the back of her head, but the mother never takes her eyes off me. She’s not pleading. She’s branding me with her own personal flavor of hatred, and it burns me from the inside out.
My body jerks with the sound of the gunshot. She’s dead and gone before I can blink. That little boot tumbles to the ground, bouncing off the litter and coming to rest against me. I don’t know why, but I pick it up and hold it as I look my fellow soldier in the eye. He knows it, too. He knows what the woman knew.
We were lied to.
But he doesn’t care.
