Break My Body
1105 Words
Major General Roland stood frozen at the gate long after the click of the latch had faded.
My son died years ago.
He turned the words over slowly.He had watched his mother's face change — from the desperate grip of a woman who had missed him, to the closed expression of a woman who had made a decision — and all it had taken was one neighbour walking up the path.
He could not make it fit into any shape that made sense.
Amelia's shut gate had been a wound. This was something else entirely. Mothers did not calculate. Mothers did not weigh the cost of their children and find them wanting.
He had survived the worst five years of his life on that belief — that even when everything else collapsed, his mother would be standing somewhere steady, unchanged.
She had held him. She had wept into his shoulder.
And then she had shut the gate.
His body had gone cold from the inside out, but no tears came. The pain sat too deep for that, below the place where tears are made, in the part of a man that simply goes quiet when it has taken more than it was built to hold.
He turned and walked back through the estate gates without a word. The young guard watched him leave, his face full of questions. Roland had no answers to give.
He stepped back onto the dark road and kept moving, one foot in front of the other, with no direction and no reason to choose one over another.
The irony of it settled over him as he walked. He had spent five years fighting to protect the homes and peace of his people. He had endured captivity and starvation so that strangers could sleep safely in their beds.
And now he moved through those same peaceful streets with nowhere to lay his head, turned away by every person he had ever called his own.
He thought of the old woman who had pulled him from the road, and a dull anger stirred in his chest.
If she had simply let him go, he would have been spared all of this — his mother's shut gate, the dark road, the exhaustion pressing down on him like a physical weight.
"Hey." A voice behind him, sharp with disgust. "You smell terrible. Don't you bathe?"
Roland turned.
A young man stood a few paces back, his girlfriend at his side. Before Roland could speak, something small and cold struck his neck and clattered to the ground.
A coin.
"Do you know what that means?" the young man asked, smirking.
Roland said nothing.
"It means you should pick through rubbish to feed yourself." He laughed. His girlfriend laughed beside him.
They stepped around Roland carefully in wide, deliberate steps, as though the ground near him might be contaminated and walked away without looking back.
Roland stood still. Then he bent and picked up the coin.
He turned it over in his fingers. In the second year of the war, a coin tucked into a breast pocket had stopped a bullet meant for a comrade's heart.
Strange, the things that kept men alive.
Why take it? a voice inside him said. You are not planning to stay alive.
He slipped it into his pocket anyway.
"It's not bad to die with a coin," he murmured. "It took a bullet for me once. It deserves to come along."
After forty minutes of walking, Roland reached a marketplace. Most stalls were shuttered for the night, metal doors padlocked, the daytime noise replaced by silence and the faint smell of produce left too long in the heat.
He was exhausted and hollow with hunger.
The thought of dying had returned somewhere between his mother's gate and here, patient and unhurried, the way it always returned, like a creditor who knows the debt will eventually be paid.
But each time it arrived, something older and more stubborn arrived with it.
You survived five years in enemy hands without surrendering. You will not surrender now.
He had his son. A boy who had never heard his name, who had looked at another man and said Father, but who carried Roland's face as plainly as a mirror. He would find a way to that child. Whatever it took.
But first, he needed to survive the night.
He moved deeper into the rows of stalls, found a quiet corner behind a bench set against a shop front, and lowered himself carefully to the ground.
He exhaled.
Something cold and wet hit him from above.
He lurched upright.
A circle of people had closed around him — men and women, young and old, faces tight with fury.
"So you're one of the thieves," a heavyset woman said. Not a question.
"No." Roland raised both hands. "I am not a thief. I have nowhere to sleep , that is the only reason I am here. I don't even know what this stall contains."
"A thief would say exactly that," a man said.
"If you had nowhere to sleep you'd be in a shelter. Not pressing yourself against someone's shop door in the middle of the night."
Roland looked at the circle of faces and thought, with the flat pragmatism of a man who had spent years calculating odds: I hope the life I refused to end myself does not end in these people's hands.
Two men stepped forward before he could speak again. The first blow caught the side of his head. The second knocked him sideways. Then someone found a stick.
He did not fight back. He had nothing left to fight with.
When they were finished, they dragged him to the market entrance and threw him out onto the road.
He lay still for a moment, cheek against the wet ground. Then he pushed himself up.
His leg screamed when he put weight on it. Each step sent a fresh wave of pain from his knee to his hip. Sweat broke across his forehead. He moved anyway. One step. Then another. Then another.
His drill sergeant's chant rose from somewhere deep in his memory — the words they had shouted together while crawling through mud, when the body had nothing left and the voice ahead was the only thing pulling you forward.
He did not decide to say it aloud. It simply came.
"Break my body, not my will,
Strike me down, I'm standing still.
Blood may fall, but I won't run,
A soldier fights till the war is won."
The words faded into the empty street. And then there was only darkness.
- Writer
