The smell of the damp earth jerked him to attention once more. Living in that hot, damp ad-hoc bunker three days in a trot now, you did not feel the sick sweet stench all the time. In fact it only got to you when you cared the least about it. He did not understand this - often when he'd take a deep breath with his eyes closed, trying to waken his near-extinct latent senses, and he might as well be sitting in his little cottage by the sea the way it seemed to him. An odourless, insipid atmosphere. The kind that you are so familiar with you almost take for granted.
His partner-in-combat lay sprawled on the ground beside him, face down - the coolest guy he'd met his whole life. A year older than the boy, he never really cared about doing his hair right or brushing his teeth before going to bed, for he never had a mother to tell him that, not as far back as he could remember. And the least ambitious fellow that ever tooted a harmonica. And his harmonica did not just play, it sang! Not something that pleased him overmuch though when the boy once told him, for according to him if singing was what you really wanted, nobody was stopping you from crooning your larynx out. You played because you wished for something different, and he would be mighty pleased if the former were to keep his compliments to himself till the time he knew better. That was him, that was his partner, and he was proud of him, too on the sly. And yet he was quite tender at times. He remembered how once he'd helped him cross the busy street holding him by the hand. He, the boy, was an acutely absent minded fellow who, as his comrades put it, had let his mind wander long ago - so far, that it'd never found its way back. Later, he'd confessed he'd never quite forgiven him for doing that.
"Its that same sky again", he muttered to his partner. "Lucky though, we have a breeze going. It was so beastly hot last evening I honestly thought I would start oozing liquid brain through my nose, I really did" And he made a pretense of inhaling with all his might, as if to hold the flow back, as long as possible. He took out a lulu of a handkerchief from his pocket that was once white but now of such an indeterminate hue as can be only caused by the lining of one's sidepockets shifting in the general direction of one's hindquarters resulting in the person's eventually sitting on it over freshly dug earth, and fanned himself with it. But he quit almost as soon as he'd begun, for the handkerchief was woefully damp from staying in his pocket for so long and his chronic hay fever, of which he'd had his fair share in the past few days.
"Hey, pass me that water bottle", the boy said to his partner almost exclusively out of his right shoulder rather than his mouth. And as such an attitude rightly deserved, he was ignored by one and all, or one rather, for there was noone else within earshot. So as if made self conscious by the sound of his own voice, he turned round and said - "hey, please pass me that bottle of water, would you?" But despite this condescension on his part, his partner did not respond. Oh, he could be an ass for the silent treatment, he could! That, in fact was the whole problem, in his opinion with all the ultracool people in this world. Most of the time they'd give about as much acknowledgment of your existence as a dog would to a flea. So he'd learnt to hold his peace the hard way. And yet, there were moments when he'd feel chagrined beyond all else and rather erroneously put the blame of most of the evil in this world to such attitudes. The problem, he'd then say is not because of the ultracool people there are, who are a rare species in themselves, with very low rate of propagation, god forbid otherwise. But there are these people who imitate them so crudely without actually becoming one of them, and that is where the trouble lay.
To ebb the flow of the rising anger in him, he thought of his girl. The only person he'd want to kiss and throw up on all at the same time. He remembered, oh how he remembered - that tiny pink frock and those saliva coated crimson lips. In fact it made you cry out to give her a different aperture for the purpose of speaking - uttering words as indiscriminately as the incinerators of Auschwitz. He was pretty young back then with cheeks as smooth as hers. He'd been jilted - indeed, he'd have been quite disappointed had it been otherwise. So, since then he'd been carrying around the ghost of her with him wherever he went, so that people he did not even know too well would have had no trouble figuring out who he meant at the slightest mention of her. "She was quite a one to share a good sunset with, wasn't she?" he said. He knew he'd said that rhetorically, and therefore, didn't even expect his partner to answer. " Oh she had a way of taking the sunset and turning it into one huge, wholly agreeable extension of her." He beamed to a passing slug as he said this. For a moment, he thought that he'd almost manufactured poetry and expected that very moment a swarm of admirers to materialize out of nowhere and congratulate him. But none did, and he started to poke the slug with a stick, till it fell down on the ground from the wall it was clinging to, acutely agitated.
Then, as he had nothing better to do, he started practising kung-fu moves against an invisible aerial enemy. He'd been brought up on a staple of movies where the combatants would not lower themselves to the level of guns and other artillery and preferred to use their bare hands instead. As a child, he'd often or whenever he chanced to find himself entirely unobserved, conjure up a magical enemy and pretend to pound his pancreas out. This form of amusement never left him, and later the enemy took up all sorts of forms such as an incomplete homework assignment or the playground bully (not to his face, though). On this occasion it was the heat in the bunker, and with sweat dripping down his face, he was very near to having conquered it. Then, as he was about to go for the finisher, the supreme move which could be executed only when the enemy is half dead already and which involves a 360 degree spin in the air with the right leg extended, designed to shoot the head off the enemy and send blood spewing all over. He made the jump, in fact it would have been his best jump ever, had it not been for that spoilsport of a loose earth beneath his feet. His leg rose a trifle too fast, before he'd actually intended it to and his head fell back creating a torque that the rest of his body simply could not counterbalance. He landed, hard upon his back, right on top of his lying partner, turning him over, exposing his anterior for the world to see. He did not expect a jump or a groan of pain and he did not perceive any. He wasn't even surprised by the pallor of his skin, the blue-black lips, or the bullet wound on the his tunic front right where the heart was. He'd known it all along, the past three days; in fact, it'd all been enacted right before his eyes, he being by no means the silent spectator! To this day, if you asked him which of the two had died, he'd tell you in the same tone that we would normally use to talk about the weather, that he still hadn't quite figured that one out!
Yours sincerely
Jude
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