"LAST BRIGHT COOKIE." (SECOND OF 2 PARTS)

(PART TWO OF TWO)

Reloading, my vision drops to my rifle's receiver.

     All is slow.

     All is slow, and gleams.

     Metals gleam.

     The smooth blued steel of the bolt, the long grooves in the receiver where the bolt's locking lugs and roller travel, the bright chrome flange at the entrance to the chamber, the copper-jacketed bullets, brighter brass cartridge casings - all these metals seem to glow with a radioactive light from within.

     This instant folds back on itself, scrambling upstream in time like a climber clawing the ice on a slope that ends just below him at a thousand-foot cliff. It is as if my life, knowing it is about to end, has decided to stretch this last moment into the sixty years or so that I won't get to see and hear and smell and touch. A little place, a fine warm nest for me, is bounded by the lip of my helmet, the collar of my flak jacket, my own face and shoulders and arms engaged around my rifle, and the rifle itself and the low sandbag parapet it rests across. My hand ‑ this is all in the same instant, now, the same tiny cove in space and time where what I must do saves me from having to look at the humans who are walking this way to eat my last bright cookie of time ‑ my hand reaches under the rifle and grabs the empty magazine. Thumb releases latch. Hand opens, lets fall magazine on sandbag, grabs another. Its weight says it's full. My happiness is extreme: I am not out of ammo. The flare­light lets me see down through the rifle's receiver, glinting facets of grey steel grooves, as the loaded magazine comes up from below and snaps in. The top two cartridges shine for me like God's own golden torpedoes, the instant stretching as the bolt, sliding forward, peels off the top cartridge and pushes it into the chamber, copper pointed 7.62mm bullet first, brass casing behind, hardened steel bolt clings home and rolls to the right, locking. This, the expanded instant lets me think, is why I'm here. This is what my stepfather knew, my uncle, their fathers: mechanical perfection and maleness, the hard, lightly oiled, amoral, monstrously beautiful fit of a live car­tridge seating in its clean‑machine chamber and the bolt locking home behind it.

     I beg:

     Please go away O please go away. Okay. Take this place this awful place. I don't want this place honest it's yours anyway. Take it, and just let ME go away. I'll never come back. Honest.

     I put my cheek to the rifle and look up. They're closer. I fire. As the rifle lurches into my shoulder, I hear a crackling like bacon on a too‑hot griddle, and foul smoke burns my right eye. Blinking, shooting, knocking down the fierce little soldiers, I know I've burnt my cheek on the rifle's hot receiver and smile at not feeling it: how violently wonderful, to live long enough for that burn ‑ or its scar ‑ to matter...now so many of them are through the concertina I can't see the wire any more, and I wish the soldier mother would attack somewhere else, but I guess our guys are all down and I am the only one still firing so they are coming for me and my rifle the muzzle climbs on full auto, makes me shoot over their heads, I hook the hinged butt plate over my shoulder so I can lever the muzzle down with both hands at the grip I keep knocking them down but there are too many and the soldier mother keeps coming, not even firing, out of ammo or wait­ing to get closer, I see that little head looking out of the bundle, looking over her shoulder at me, she's getting too close, I can see the baby's dark eyes now in the flarelight, wide open and unblinking, staring over her shoulder at me. How can Vietnamese eyes open that wide? I see only the child's eyes. The child's eyes see only me. The mother's eyes are on the ground. She's watching her footing. She doesn't fall. She doesn't stop. She doesn't hurry. She doesn't slow. She keeps coming, and I turn my wonderful rifle, my savior, and terror mixed with something else gorges up from my stomach and vomits through the rifle at them. I aim for her legs but she leans forward and I forget to lever the muzzle down and the rifle belches up her and the kid like zipping a pair of coveralls and they're slammed into the mud as if by the fist of some uncaring giant, then I'm hit and spun away from the rifle and I scramble like the panicked rats we used to dip in diesel fuel and light up in the bunker and I thank Ski for being dead and pull him further on top of me and roll Glover onto my head and shoulders and I sink into the beautiful mud, my mud, my mother, home.

     I hear them.

     A single rifle shot at the machine gun bunker.     

     Silence.

     A single rifle shot at the med bunker. 

     Another single shot.

     Silence.     

     Some part of my body calls for attention. I remember I was hit, I'm wounded somewhere, but I am so commingled with dead people and mud that I can't tell what part of me was hit.

     I feel the swelling in my crotch and think, O Dios mío, I'm wounded there. But it's not a wound. I have a hard‑on. Doc Motto said a lot of guys get a hard‑on just before they die.

     Six more shots, pistol shots, slow and rhythmic and careful, like the tick of time.    

     Silence.

     Steps. Voices, tired, speaking Vietnamese in short nervous phrases. The steps, the voices, come to us. A boy‑sized rubber soled black tennis shoe, eerily like we wore back home in that other life, last year, as children, scrapes my forehead. My right eye clenched closed, buried in the mud, I see only a glob of red mud covering the toe of the tennis shoe out of my left eye. The mud flashes red in the electric‑arc light of a descending flare.

     That sound.

     Fucking unfair: the sound takes me to when I was a kid out on Gearhart Mountain, but they won't let me go there. I've just killed my first mule deer and I have to cut his throat to bleed him but the hide is too tough, and my stepdad Bill is telling me, "You have to stick it," and makes a motion which I imitate, driving the knife into the buck's throat with the heel of my hand, thhht! butcher‑shop sound.

     But I can't go there. I'm here. They're bayoneting each of us to see who is alive. They spend a bullet only for those who squirm. Jesucristo, they're good.

     What's exposed? My left leg. I can do it: left leg, you do not exist for me, you will take the thrust and you will be just one dead leg. My back, mierda, the middle of my back is open....

     That sound: the bayonet, the knife driven into the deer's throat. Glover passes the test, he's dead, they don't shoot him. The tennis shoe moves against my forehead. I feel the soldier's body jerk as each bayonet thrust translates into a new scraping of my forehead by his foot. The scraping is delicious pain telling me I'm still alive. Please miss my spine. I can play dead if you don't stick my spine. A flare drifts low, throws white light under Glover's leg. I see the spider, little black spider, eight‑legged daintily tiptoeing away from the toe of the black tennis shoe, trying to make its way up the slick mud slide carved by the soldier's shoe as it slid to rest against my forehead.

     Go, spider, this is a bad place...leave this place of death, go to the place of life, take a message for me, from us, carry a droplet of my blood back to the living, back home.... I watch the spider walk up the slippery clay chute. It becomes all I can see, then the flare drops below the berm and I see nothing. Time happens, a second, a year, the foot is still there. Please let me see the spider one more time.

     The soldier whose body touches mine is talking in low, tired tones to someone behind him. He pauses between bayonet thrusts, soldierly labor. Lying here on earth's breast, comforted by my cloak of dead friends, I feel a sympathy for his tiredness. Another flare pops, high and farther back.

     Spider! It is the same spider, but this time I see it huge. It is the great hairylegged beast at the center of all the white light in the universe. Its totemic legs lift and bend and reach in rhythm, a ballet of redwood boles in the flarelight. I see how perfect it is, how perfectly it moves. It is everything. That spider is my whole world.

     The spider is solving a physics problem. The wet clay is at once sticky and slippery. Its four front legs, giant shaggy steamshovel arms, must reach up, pull, but not get stuck. The four back legs must reach down and push, and must not slip, else it will slide under the soldier's toe. Each leg lifts grandly, bends, reaches, tests the earth, pulls, pushes. No one leg does too much or too little, they share the weight, they balance the giant obsidian body, they move in cadence, visual music.

     The flare drops near the earth; the spider's shadow lengthens and swings hugely as the wind carries the flare to the side. The flare falls beyond the spider and its shadow covers my eye and the spider's body explodes in size to occupy my entire vision and something thumps the left side of my back and the boy‑sized black tennis shoe walks away.

     

     The clear rippling water returns, this time flowing top to bottom across a grey rectangle, and also this time with sound: the gurgling and dripping of real water have replaced the silence of the dream water. But it recalls the dream water for me, and the pictures of the boat and the dusty street and the feral children are just beginning to re‑emerge from behind the watery rectangle when I realize that I've gradually awakened, and am looking out the window at the rain.

     I'm alone in the room again, its walls sponged with the soggy grey daylight of a rainy season afternoon. The dream pictures follow one another through the rainy rectangle into my awakening. As the weapons belt and the bloody forearm begin a kaleidoscopic flip into the pictures of the dusty street and the children and the firefight, horror rises in my throat and pounds in my temples until I nearly black out again. I yelp. The pictures stop.

     I look around the room. The two rifles have been taken from the corner and taken apart and their parts spread on a military poncho near my cot. There is a stack of loaded magazines by each rifle: the M14 magazines are straight; the AK magazines curved. The two patas de gallina were left beside the poncho by whoever was cleaning the rifles...Hortensio, I remember being awakened by the smell of gasoline and seeing Hortensio squatting on one stool cleaning rifle parts with an old tooth­brush in a red plastic pan. Delfina sat on the stool beside her father, watching his movements with her child's inten­sity. The gasoline's pungence still hangs in the wet air.

     I roll onto my side and adjust the folded jeans Agapita has left me for a pillow ‑ my own longlegged, skinny jeans, I notice, that's why they call me Gordito, Fatso ‑ until I can relax and stare at the two stripped‑down rifles on the poncho. Esas metrallas conocen quien soy, those rifles know who I am.

     I feel myself a magnet, and steel is doing what steel does: the rifle parts seem to creep toward me. The attraction is both physical and emotional, as if what had passed between a man and a rifle has become some spiritual force‑field.

     Empiezo con el Aka, I'll start with the AK. There are the brown plastic banana clips ‑ magazines, actually ‑ called that because each cartridge is slightly larger at the base than at the business end, and thirty rounds stacked in the magazine form a banana shape. There's the signature Kalashnikov gas cylinder with its beveled end above the barrel, unlike this gringo M14 but like most armas soviéticas carried by Hortensio and Agapita and the other members of Jícaro's cattle co‑op who double as milicianos, part of the Sandinistas' attempt to organize the way we earn our livelihoods, then convince us to "Defend the cooperative, defend Sandinismo." Piricuacos: they yip slogans like mongrels.          

     The Aka, with its short, klunky shape and clumsy balance, is familiar to me, but some of its smaller parts, spread out on the poncho, are not. The rifle refuses to cough up its connec­tion with me. I try to find pieces of my own life among the dully glinting steel parts. Then the force that had stretched between me and the group of rifle parts seems to strike at me and recoil into itself like a rattlesnake suddenly encountered upon rounding a bend in a mountain trail. I recoil too, and comes a quick clammy sweat like those of my malaria attacks, but now the sweat pokes icy needles through my skin from inside. I lay back, look away to the rain falling outside the window, pull the blanket up to wipe sweat from my face and eyes and to warm myself, then turn back to the disassembled rifles.          

     I look at the M14 parts. I remember every one, and unlike the AK‑47, the M14 parts seem to welcome me among them as family. I can feel my body assembling them: line up the flat side of the gas piston with the flat side of the hole in the cylinder, drop it and jiggle it till the rod falls through and the piston seats ‑ a little air will whoosh out. Tighten the cylinder nut with the wrench from the well behind the hinged butt plate. Take the bolt by the roller... I fall asleep with my fingers forming into the specific grips required by each piece.

     Agapita is standing on me in the dark, desperately kicking my legs to get footing on the cot, stretching my blanket between her thumbs and forcing the blanket to tear enough to slip over the heads of the nails driven into the soft concrete at the window's upper corners, then bent into crude hooks.

     She jumps down and falls on her knees beside the disassembled rifles, turning on her flashlight and laying it on the poncho beside the AK‑47 parts. Her movements as she assembles the rifle are as urgent as when she kicked me awake. Her urgency startles me fully awake as I hear explosions in the distance. Now comes the staccato racket of automatic weapons firing from the direction of the miliciano guardpost down the street at the north entrance to the village. Exploding mortar rounds walk the length of the street, patiently approaching.

     The steel parts snik and ping as the feverish mound that is Agapita assembles the Aka. I see a hunch to her silhouette: Delfina is slung on her mother's back in the tired red cloth Agapita uses to carry the child as she tends the vegetable garden or walks to the junction to catch the bus to market in Jalapa.

     She straightens, stands, lurches toward the door. Her flashlight's beam lances about the room. She turns, nestles the flashlight in the crook of her left elbow, against the vest of Aka magazines that flat­tens her breasts with its weight of lead and brass and powder. The light shines upward onto her face and glints off streaks left by her tears as she bends over the rifle, pulls a magazine from the vest and slips it into the receiver of the upside‑down Aka, slamming it home with the heel of her hand.

     She tosses the flashlight onto the poncho among the M14 parts. Its beam catches a spider walking on a wrinkle in the poncho, just in front of the lens, and throws its huge shadow on the opposite wall, hairy steamshovel legs bending and reaching. The spider's shadow breaks the dam in my memory, rudely jamming the gears of my mind back to the firefight at Tho An, back to the Mekong riverboat in northern Cambodia, back along the weary parade of small, dark‑skinned, dark‑haired, dark‑eyed people I've watched, first across my rifle sights, then through 35 millimeter camera lenses, the parade of people burdened under weapons too large for them, in Laos and Vietnam and Thailand and the Philippines and Honduras and Guatemala and El Salvador and now here, back to the time of leaving the world behind, trading gun belts for tool belts, nailing roof‑decks on Colorado A‑frames, memory returning in an avalanche as my mind speaks English to itself for the first time since weeks before the malaria made me delirious. 

"Hortensio está muerto, Gordon," Agapita is saying, Hortensio is dead, and she says "Gordon" in English as if it left a scum on her teeth, "so you're the only gringo hijueputa who can put together this gringo hijueputa..." Sobbing through her curses, she flicks her hand angrily toward the M14 parts on the poncho. "And they won't give a shit about your chingada neutralidad periodística” ‑ she spits the words, your precious fucking journalist’s neutrality – “these bastards you gringos pay to kill us don't even look in a house to see if there are kids inside before they blow it. ¿Qué vas a hacer, Gordon?" Crazily, as if there were time for it to matter, I hear her question two ways: “¿Qué vas a hacer?/¿Qué vas a ser? What are you going to do?/What are you going to be?”

     She chambers a round in the AK, slings it on her shoulder,  reaches under the vest, pulls out the ancient US service .45 that she carries cocked and locked, for herself and Delfina, in case they catch her. I hear the 2‑stage slide of that weapon, the snik of the safety. She stuffs it back into her belt. As she turns for the door, I see, in the periphery of the flashlight's beam, Delfina's large dark eyes, wide open and unblinking, staring at me over her mother's shoulder.

                        

END

"LAST BRIGHT COOKIE" (FICTION)

Last Bright Cookie 

A short story by Dean Metcalf

(Part 1 of 2)

     I know nothing of myself or of the world except this clear

rippling water, flowing right to left like a slow unaerated

waterfall tilted onto its side. Now a boat wells toward me from

the darkness behind the stream, merging with the stream and

undulating, hula‑like, with it. It is a large wooden boat, with

plenty of space on the plank deck for families to roll out their

woven straw sleeping mats and to stroll about. The people are

dark‑skinned, with black hair and large dark eyes that notice

me, but offer no reaction beyond acceptance that I belong among

them.

Most wear a simple, multicolored body wrap which extends

from waist to ankle on the men and from breast to ankle on the

women. Someone shouts, and the boat begins to move with the

stream. It seems to be inside the stream.

     Night. I am aboard as the boat comes alongside a high cliff. Small people, some carrying torches whose light transforms the eroded cliff‑face into a vibrating corduroy of light and shadow, run up a gangplank from the base of the cliff to the deck. Niños. Ah. Language, at least, is beginning to return. 

     The children carry baskets piled with food: hands of short thick bananas, hot cobs of corn, skewers of roasted meat and dried red peppers, slices of ripe yellow mango and pieces of broken white cocoanut meat. The colors of the food flicker like neon seen through night rain.

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     I grow angry at the fragments of my life dancing on the fluid screen. I want my nickelodeon memory to break open and utter my name, to locate the pictures in my past. But memory goes its own way. A bell rings; the waves of its pealing resonate in frequency with the rippling of the water. The boat shudders. Niños scurry among the sleepy passengers, trying for one last sale, then run down the plank, torches bobbing away into the dark. The boat fades from sight behind the stream.     

     Receding torchlight coalesces into the fire in a rough red brick fireplace in a small wood frame house. The hearth fire undulates with the surface of the stream, and is liquid like it. The pumpkin‑flesh color of the walls makes them seem to stretch to meet the fingers of orange flamelight as a cat will arch its back to meet a human hand. Something beckons from the left. The stream joins the appeal for movement, a polite usher saying "this way, please." The left wall ends in a post. From a nail in the post hangs a carpenter's tool belt, and it is that which beckons. The belt is even more familiar to me than the fireplace, the wall, the post.

     The belt itself is of faded green nylon webbing; tired threads hang from chafed places. One group of frayed threads hangs in such an attitude as to conjure before me the boneless, wizened stump of the arm of a derelict Japanese veteran, still wearing the remnants of his World War II uniform, holding out a tin cup with his one hand in a crowded pedestrian underpass. Yokohama, my memory says, but does not explain. 

     My hands close, twist in opposite directions, twist back.  They are remembering the latching of that belt around me. The leather pouches, once rough, are worn to a dark mottled shine. Dim outlines of hand‑tooled flowers show through the worn shine of the near nail pouch. Who tooled those flowers for me? A claw hammer, its long hickory handle bronzed from sweat and sun and beeswax, hangs from a latigo loop on the wearer’s right side. A combination square rests in a scabbard opposite. Half‑inch cold chisel, drift punch, nail set, awl, razor knife, tape measure: each in its leather home. Mis manos conocen cada uno... son mis hierros: my hands know every one...they're my tools.

     A man's dark‑haired hand and forearm reach around the post, unhook the belt, take it away. Es mi brazo, that's my arm. The  hand and forearm reach back around the post and hang another, similar, belt on the nail. Now the hand and forearm are bloody. This belt, weighted with dusty green canvas pouches, hangs ponderously from thick canvas suspenders. Two pouches hold canteens. One holds a small mili­tary first aid kit. Six pouches hold ammunition magazines for an M14 rifle, the rifle the gringos used after the M1 Garand and before the M16, that deadly black plastic toy that's now all over latinoamérica. The bayonet is in its stiff olive drab scabbard that's supposed to sharpen the blade being sheathed and unsheathed, but doesn't. ¿Cómo conozco éso? How do I know that? I ask, still searching for some stray artifact that will transform itself into a mirror of my past.

     There is a flitting vision of men walking with rifles through waist‑high grass. I'm one of them, snikking the ring of my bayonet’s hilt home over my rifle’s flash suppressor as a harsh voice says, "That's it, that's what I like, lemme see some steel on the end of it." The vision is gone before I can track my identity in it.

      Esos también son mis hierros: those are my tools too. I wince at my own phrase; it seems appropriate to use the same word, hierros, irons, for tools and for weapons. Everything I know about myself so far says only that I am a workman and a soldier. The similarity between the tool belt and the weapons helt seems to say I could be any workman, any soldier, any time.

     The weapons belt recedes behind the stream.

    

     The sun is directly overhead, a hammered brass cymbal raging about the sky, banishing blue to near the horizon, and further pulverizing the dust of the wide street. Here on the outer edge of the city, only a faint mix of noise from the hordes of Japanese scooters, police whistles, roaring American army trucks, and the cries of black marketeers reaches the fly‑festered ears of the squatting women and feral‑eyed children and rare inert old man who occupy the ammunition-crate shanties defining the street's ragged edge. Artillery crunks in the distance.

     I look at the sky, trying to see something there besides sun. The sky becomes a rectangle of fierce white light. The light extrudes itself into sound, a raucous shriek that hurts my head. The shriek ends in a flutter of green and yellow, and the rectangle is filled by the head of a great horned beast. A woman is laughing. I waken, afloat in sweat, and see her just as she pulls her head back in through the window. It's Agapita; she turns and sees that her laughter has awakened me. "Lo siento, Gordito, no pienso reír a tu dolor... sorry, Gordito, I don't mean to be laughing at your pain. But it was so funny, Claribel stuck her head in the window just as you were waking up...."

     "¿Claribel?"

     "Sí, nuestra vaca... don't you remember our cow?" 

     "¿Y el grito?" I ask, What was the scream? How fine, after swimming through a swamp of dreams, to be conscious at last, speaking my language. Now I can find out who I am.

     Agapita laughs again. I know her by that laugh; it begins down low in her stout brown body and erupts with such force that it snaps her head back. She seems forever laughing at the sky. "No mas que eso chingado perico," she says, "Just that fucking little parrot. Claribel chased him off the window sill.

     "You've had a bad case of malaria, Gordito. You're very weak. You'd better sleep some more." There is a shout from outside; Agapita ducks out the door. I'm too weak to yell after her. Entonces, soy Gordito, so I'm Gordito.     

     With an effort that nauseates me, I roll onto my side and look around the room. Like most of the houses in Jícaro, it is a small, rectangular, one room concrete block building. The walls are painted a bright turquoise green inside and out (I remember the outside, with its lonely valiant row of flowers between the north side of the house and the two muddy ruts of the street); the rough wooden door, standing ajar just now, is crusted with successive layers of fuchsia enamel. The single window is a rectangular hole in the wall. The earth floor is swept. My bed and two three‑legged stools, patas de gallina - chicken feet, as we locals call them ‑ are the only furniture in the room.

     Two rifles lean into the opposite corner. I study them, hoping they will tell me something about myself. So far, all I have to go on are the dreams and Jícaro and Agapita...and now I remember her husband, Hortensio, the wiry, good‑natured cattle farmer with a Clark Gable mustache and face lined beyond his twenty‑four years, and their baby girl, Delfina, who plays with me sometimes in the evenings, whose big eyes haunt me in a way I don't understand. I study the two rifles in the corner as daylight dims. Emecatorce, Aka, I mouth their names: M14 and AK‑47. Zancudos come with evening and whine in my ears; I retreat under the blanket until only my eyes are uncovered. I stare at the rifles. Mierda, they're everywhere. The Russians and gringos pass them out to all us poor hijueputas so we'll kill each other off. They could be anybody's. They don't tell me mierda.

     The fever returns with darkness.

     I'm on the street again, under the brass‑cymbal sun. Dust and sweat mix in a gritty soup I can't keep out of my eyes or from between my teeth. Children come running. I smile, and walking turns to wading as the wave of children breaks around

me like hip‑deep surf. Little hands pull at my trousers and fingers; one quick, practiced hand tries to break my watchband, but can't. "Hey you, fuck you, you give me money!" one boy shouts, his voice a miniature thunderclap. The others chirp harshly and claw at me with the urgency of children hungry enough to be desperate but not yet starved into that near catatonia where only the eyes can demand. My notebook squirts from a hip pocket. I turn, bend over to grab it away from the three children already fighting over it in the dust of the street. My appoint­ment book and the business cards of the USAID officer and the WBAI reporter fall out of my shirt pocket. As I reach for them a hand, darting like a hawk's beak, snatches the fountain pen from the other shirt pocket. Gotta get flap pockets. I panic, reach down with both hands. They push from behind and jerk me down from the front. I'm on my back, defending my soft parts with feet and hands. Sticks and rocks come at my eyes. A circle of small fierce faces blots out the sun. As vision fades, the face of one of the smallest children becomes the face of an infant slung on its mother's back, the mother one of too many pith‑helmeted soldiers coming through the coils of razor wire on the perimeter, short dark people with short AK‑47s with short bayonets coming through the concertina to kill me and Ski and Rabbit and DeMine and the handful of others left out here to rot, coming through the wire, so many of them that the very earth, the red muddy earth glowing horribly in the white light of the drifting parachute flares, coming through the wire, the earth like a carcass teeming with pulpy maggots methodically converting its past into their future, coming through the wire, and they're on top of the corner machine gun bunker now and Ski gets up from beside me to start for the bunker as the bunker erupts from a grenade and then a rocket, sparks trailing, hisses across the compound and Ski is standing beside me, his body quizzical because it can't see because his head is gone, and I think how odd, the twin crimson fountains spurted by his final heartbeats from the severed carotid arteries, and Glover screams and crumples beside me and Ski's body decides to give it up and falls on me and I'm still firing my rifle on full automatic, short bursts, there are more of them than I have ammo for, save a long burst for the end of the magazine ‑ keepembusywhileIreloadfast....      

     The bolt locks back after the last brass casing tinkles onto the pile of its smoking brothers. 

          Now is a valley in time.

     What name shall I give to this valley?

     Mm.

     Reloading Valley, I guess.

     It's nice and cool here.

     Cool, and quiet.

     Things move slow.    

     I don't know. You have to understand. I am nineteen, and this is the last moment of my life. You have to wait. You have to understand that I don't know what time is doing now. You have to understand that what time is doing now in Reloading Valley is its Long Gone Boogie and its Forever Minuet. Time is doing Always and Never at the same time, and it is doing them to me, here in Reloading Valley, the last moment of my life. It can't be told. You are stuck here with me in Reloading Valley while I tell it.

     I hunker.

     Reloading, my vision drops to my rifle's receiver.

     All is slow.

     All is slow, and gleams.

     Metals gleam.

     The smooth blued steel of the bolt, the long grooves in the receiver where the bolt's locking lugs and roller travel, the bright chrome flange at the entrance to the chamber, the copper-jacketed bullets, brighter brass cartridge casings - all these metals seem to glow with a radioactive light from within.

     This instant folds back on itself, scrambling upstream in time like a climber clawing the ice on a slope that ends just below him at a thousand-foot cliff. It is as if my life, knowing it is about to end, has decided to stretch this last moment into the sixty years or so that I won't get to see and hear and smell and touch. A little place, a fine warm nest for me, is bounded by the lip of my helmet, the collar of my flak jacket, my own face and shoulders and arms engaged around my rifle, and the rifle itself and the low sandbag parapet it rests across. My hand ‑ this is all in the same instant, now, the same tiny cove in space and time where what I must do saves me from having to look at the humans who are walking this way to eat my last bright cookie of time ‑ my hand reaches under the rifle and grabs the empty magazine. Thumb releases latch. Hand opens, lets fall magazine on sandbag, grabs another. Its weight says it's full. My happiness is extreme: I am not out of ammo. The flare­light lets me see down through the rifle's receiver, glinting facets of grey steel grooves, as the loaded magazine comes up from below and snaps in. The top two cartridges shine for me like God's own golden torpedoes, the instant stretching as the bolt, sliding forward, peels off the top cartridge and pushes it into the chamber, copper pointed 7.62mm bullet first, brass casing behind, hardened steel bolt clings home and rolls to the right, locking. This, the expanded instant lets me think, is why I'm here. This is what my stepfather knew, my uncle, their fathers: mechanical perfection and maleness, the hard, lightly oiled, amoral, monstrously beautiful fit of a live car­tridge seating in its clean‑machine chamber and the bolt locking home behind it.

     I beg:

     Please go away O please go away. Okay. Take this place this awful place. I don't want this place honest it's yours anyway. Take it, and just let ME go away. I'll never come back. Honest.