Day 3: A Poem

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A Handful of Dust

(China, Poland)

-o-

The sun is still there. Despite everything, China can still feel the warmth of it on his skin, familiar. For a moment he can pretend that things are normal - the minutes and hours counting themselves down until the heat becomes unbearable, when the sun no longer soothes his aching body but flays it. He has no defenses anymore... if they even matter.

Someone is trying to till the soil, the hope of planting something maybe, making it grow. He can feel it, the flutter of flesh, parchment-thin and rough. He doesn't tell them to stop - it gives them some point, something to strive for, and he would not take away what little comfort that may be.

Air rasps in his throat, heavy for a moment, a whistling hiss, like the wind.

He doesn't need to look up to feel the presence of another. So unfamiliar. Unexpected. After so long looking, he'd given up on finding any others. He buries his fingers in the dirt as the other approaches, trying to read their intent in the shuffle of their steps. Uneven. Stumbling over some small nothing, some miniscule flaw. He lets out his breath. And knows.

"I didn't expect it would be you." His own voice is unrecognisable to his ears, harsh. Rocks scraping against the barren earth.

"No one ever expects me." It should be a laughing voice, he thinks, but instead it is soft, tempered. The heat has baked him rough, cracked him, drawn him into jagged edges... but in this voice he hears only the smoothness of rocks tumbled to a gleaming smoothness. A stumble and he turns, finally.

Their eyes do not meet. They can't.

Defeat has made him ugly, he knows this, but even the darkness where those bright eyes should be, even the emptiness is somehow beautiful. Perhaps it's just relief to see another. To not be alone. "Will you sit, aru?" He asks, knowing there is nothing else for them. If he is refused, it will not mean anything... except for being alone. Again. Sit, he pleads in his mind, Sit with me here. Don't go.

Head dipping, strands of long blonde hair almost obscuring the sight of those eyeless sockets. "..." As the silence stretches long, China feels the emptiness settling back into place. The heat is beginning to rise, dry-hot, grains of sand pricking at his rough skin, at the patches of glistening smooth redness where the bombs had struck, burned, cauterised. And then... "This is it, isn't it?" No surprise. No anger. No defeat.

Just fact.

"Yes." Soon he will have to move, to move away from the heat, to buy himself another day. Another week. Another month.

"I'll sit with you." Lips curl in a soft smile, hand reaching out blindly. He doesn't have to offer, simply holds out his own to guide, feels soft fingers curl around his. Sinking down beside him with all the grace of a king, knees folded beneath. China does not break the contact of their hands, waiting for the other to do so. He is achingly pleased when their palms stay pressed, one to the other.

"They were wrong." That voice again, soft, for once uncertain. China knows what he is thinking.

"They could not break you, Polska." He uses the name in a familiarity he would not have dreamed before this day, and sees those lips curl up in that smile again, the brief flicker of fear dissolving. "Here is the proof." Here, in the barren earth, in the sun, in the end of it all.

"Zhongguo." The word does not flow from those lips, but is somehow flawless nonetheless. So rarely said, so rarely heard now. Almost never from another nation, even over his many long years. China is surprised that he even knows it. "This is something I don't know if I can do."

China smiles then. Of course he would not know. China does not know either. How to die. "I think it should be simple, aru... People do it all the time."

They should go. The heat is stifling now - it steals the air from his lungs. He breathes it in and it's fire. They should go.

But they do not.

Now that they are not alone, there is nothing left to fear.

Together, they wait for the world to turn red.

-o-

Wow... okay that was weird and possibly disturbing. And it was based on a fragment of the poem "The Wasteland" by T.S. Eliot.

Here it is!:

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust

Frisch weht der Wind
Der Heimat zu
Mein Irisch Kind,
Wo weilest du?

- T. S. Eliot, "The Wasteland" I. The Burial of the Dead