[1944, The Ardennes]
The buzzing performed nightly. Quiet could settle thick as a tongue onto an uncleared field. In the mornings, men would climb out from the earth like beetles, like living things, to see if someone had left food for their snow-lined stomachs. Or news. Deep in the waking woods, a Midwestern boy huddled in a cracking fox hole. Trenches swam up the earth like waves. And when the mirror others came, they were armed with bright cold and stark hunger. Steel caps and woolen coats and foreign guns. Loss—sudden and irrevocable. Tuck fear like feet into boots quickly, quickly, and march the length of a wintered country.
Processed, a numbered body.
Clothes so stiff they shined. Days muddled into weeks.
His hand stretched out from a box car, fingers twitching towards warm bread tucked under German arms. Weihnachten. Men packed so tightly together they were but honeycombs of breath and arms and bones.
Stalag to stalag.
Geode eyes. Cracked teeth.
The boy stole food and so they stole his hair—an ancient branding of theft, of desperation. He grew sapling thin. Mouse skulls swam in the soup. Black bread baked with fillers of ash and wood dust. Dulled glass and sharp stones. Fewer and fewer eyes blinked in the dark. He dug gardens. He dug graves. And when his bones wept, the earth filled with water, mud warming into disease, wind brushing bottle blue skies clear. Cigarettes were but tiny fires, northern lights of captured breath. The smoke drifted up and poured into hungry mouths of long-forgotten gods.
#
Seventy years passed. The world had cracked open with a hiss. When the boy returned to the forest, his feet wore supportive shoes and his clothes were warm. His children and their children swam up around him like wood bees. The cities they passed through offered museum tickets, quiet crypts, and glass-tombed memories. Pictures of towns before bombs dropped. Pictures of the after. Come, see, compare where the pictures differ. Preserved helmets blistered by bullets. Preserved tanks empty and rotting save the wildflowers planted on their terraced bodies.
But here, among the trees, deep in the forest, there were few markers, few signs of what happened, of what came for them in the snow, from the blurred sky and winter earth. The Russians were gone. The Italians were gone. The Americans were gone. So many others—their languages had poured into his ears like rivers, stretching over the camps like thick canopies of tangled limbs and hushing leaves.
Barracks rebuilt into schools. Memorial fountains erected into weed-eaten gardens. His eyes on earth-cast waves, old relics of trenches, when time was split by fire and bomb, sealed with snow.
Were they close? Were they close?
Clouds passed by like open thoughts.
Liberated or buried, the ground called for them in aching trees and dragon teeth.
JENNIE B. ZIEGLER completed her M.F.A. at the University of Arizona in Nonfiction and currently teaches and lives in the Southeast. Her work often explores the body, regional identity, place-based writing, science, and intergenerational war storytelling. She has forthcoming work in The Washington Square Review as well as Roanoke Review, and has work previously featured in The Normal School, Essay Daily, Squawk Back, and the Appalachian Review, among others. Currently, she is working on a collection of essays surrounding preserved lands in Northeastern Florida, supported by the Humanities and Arts Project grant from the University of North Florida. Find her at @InTheFourteenth and more of her work at JennieZiegler.com.
CYRUS CARLSON is an abstract painter from the Midwest.
