Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers

Author:Kevin Powers
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780316219358
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

We moved on. A lark or finch called as I planted my tired footsteps into the dust. I looked over my shoulder and reinforced that I had been and was still going. My footsteps marked my passage. I made more, more firmly planted in accordance with my training. I held my rifle in accordance with my training. Through this I gained strength and purpose. I have leafed through heavy manuals and have found only these things to be certain in accordance with my training.

The empty city smoldered. We wore it to the bone with our modern instruments. Walls crumbled. Blocks composed of halves of shelled buildings allowed warm breezes to sweep up trash and dust and send them swirling in little cyclones as we walked. We took breaks for water, smoked where we pleased, reclined in chairs behind unoccupied desks. Empty shops with wood-fronted booths still stocked with wares from times at once ancient and obscure filled the bazaars. We placed our feet on the desks, as the soles of our boots could not offend the dead.

We walked in alleys. Saw the remnants of the enemy where they lay in ambush, pushed them off their weapons with our boots. Rigid and pestilent, the bodies lay bloating in the sun. Some lay at odd angles with backs curved slightly off the ground and others were wrenched at absurd degrees, their decay an echo of some morbid geometry.

We walked through the city, down pockmarked valleys of concrete and brick that bore the weight of old cars burning, seeming to follow the destruction as it spread rather than spreading it ourselves. No one around but an old woman. I caught glimpses of her, briefly, a shuffling gait as she floated out of sight. As we turned corners she was turning opposite and I had no solid picture but her form receding, shawled in an old quilt that gave her shapeless comfort.

We stopped at a corner. A parade of rats crossed the street, weaving through the detritus. By force of numbers they shooed a mangy dog away from the corpse that it fed upon. I watched the dog as it loped off down an alley with a mangled arm clenched tightly in its jaws. Soon the dog was out of sight and the lieutenant raised his hand to signal to the platoon to stop near a bridge that crossed over the Tigris and the sparsely wooded banks below. A spare quiet and the river flowing softly nearby. A body sprawled in the center of the bridge. His head was cut off and it lay on his chest like some perverted Russian doll.

“Oh fuck,” the lieutenant whispered.

Someone asked him what was going on. I could see on his face, as he peered through his binoculars, the unmistakable look of recognition.

“Body bomb,” he said. All stopped. It was impossible to know who the man was or what brought him to that place, and it was hard to fathom because a moment is never long enough to account for tragedy when you are in it.

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