No Mercy for the Wicked
“Ain’t no God here. You done wallowed in the sins of man,” the soldier rattled, loading his rifle and aiming it at the unarmed guard’s head. His finger gently embraced the trigger, and both the soldier and the guard wondered if the soldier were savoring the moment.
The soldier felt guilt in his chest, irradiating from his heart to his extremities. His fingertips were icy cold. The trigger of the rifle was invitingly warm.
“Bitte,” the guard pleaded, drifting to his knees and intertwining his fingers. The guard’s hands, clasped so tightly that a purplish hue underscored his tan, peach skin, reminding the soldier of the last meal he had before coming overseas – blueberry pie.
Blueberry pie from the little diner up the road from his father’s farm. They let the Negroes cook there, bringing along their soul food, and he always thought that’s why the pie tasted so good. He looked at the dead little Jewish boy and wondered if he would’ve liked the blueberry pie.
“Probably not,” he quipped to himself as he drifted away into a balmy spring day. There was a river, and the little boy was playing there with his friends. The soldier walks up with the pie in his hands, warm steam still flowing from the vents.
“Do jewish kids eat blueberry pie?” He asks, placing the pie at the edge of the river.
Confused faces rise up, staring him dead in his eye. The little boy climbs out of the river, soaking wet and sticks his dripping hand right into the pie and pulls out a mass of hot pie shell and blueberry filling.
“Of course we do,” he says, opening his mouth as wide as he could and shoveling the pie in. A purple grin splits the boy’s face open from ear to ear. “We’re kids.”
Now he’s back to the camp. Back to the stink of death. Back to the rotten smell of man’s ambition. Back to the warm trigger against his freezing finger.
When he pulled the trigger, the loudness of the gunshot caused his ears to ring.
He wondered about his own death. Wondering if on the day he died, would his ears still be ringing?