Guest Writer: Bill Lapham

Any Second

“…uncommon valor was a common virtue...”
           – Adm. Chester A. Nimitz, of the Marines who fought at Iwo Jima

Whether a man be judged extraordinary or not depends less upon his physical stature than upon the content of his character. In the normal flow of events, opportunities to demonstrate the content of anyone’s character are few, but when they present themselves as obstacles to good outcomes, how they are surmounted is the best indicator of it. Quite often the action of ordinary people in extraordinary situations leads us to elevate the status of some to heroes, and devalue others to, well, cowards. The difference can be attributed to something as mundane as training, preparation, readiness, study habits or physical fitness, or it could be attributed to something as essential as the quality of family and peer relationships, teacher involvement or heredity.

Stuart was lucky. Did I mention that? He came from a strong, hard-working, lower middle-class family, had great childhood friends, wonderful teachers and, if the dates on the tombstones in the family plot were any indication, came from a line of healthy family members who lived long lives. He was a good student, not a natural leader, but a loyal friend, motivated student and fun-loving boy. Stuart was your average small town chap from middle-America.

And this morning he was scared to death.

He was standing in a rocking and rolling Higgins boat, a troop landing barge, approaching a small island in the Pacific Ocean. Frankie had vomited on him he was so seasick. Seawater sprayed over the top of the boat. Machine gunners were firing at machine gunners onshore. Bullets were pinging off the exterior of the hull. Mortar and artillery shells landing in the water nearby exploded with a deafening roar. And Stuart wished he was playing baseball in the field back home in Kansas, say, or stuck in a church listening to the pastor drone on about salvation on a blistering hot summer day, anything, anything would be better than this!

But, no, he was here and there was no turning back. He was a Marine invading a tiny sulfuric island within flying distance of Japan and he wasn’t going anywhere but down that ramp when it fell. He was here to kill Japanese soldiers.

“Doesn’t sound good, does it, Stuey?” Frankie asked rhetorically, more or less. Stuart would never see Frankie after this little boat ride. Frankie was a Marine who was about to die, anybody could see that, but Stuart didn’t tell him, that’s just what he thought. Standing next to him, he could feel Frankie vibrating so hard he thought parts of him might come off. Frankie looked like he didn’t have any blood in his face.

Stuart just looked at him and shook his head. He didn’t say anything because it felt like his throat had seized, like a motor that plum run outta oil. He brushed his face with the sleeve of his uniform. God, I hope I’m not crying, he thought to himself. This is the big game. I gotta be ready! He had been in big games before. This was like that; only these butterflies were bigger, fatter, flying in faster and thumping into his stomach lining without remorse.

Overwhelmed with curiosity, Stuart, who was standing next to the hull, stuck his head up to look over the side just when the boat next to his took a direct hit. He felt the concussion right through the hull and his ears were ringing just like that time he got hit in the head with that other guy’s football helmet.

He stuck his head back down at the same time as the coxswain, the boat’s driver, yelled, “Git yer fuckin’ head down, gal-dammit! Wanna git yersef kilt?”

People think soldiers are told to spread out in order that one shell or one bullet doesn’t take out more than one soldier. That’s only part of it. The rest of it is the further away soldiers are from each other, the less likely they are to see what it looks like when their friends get ripped to pieces. That just leads to problems – shocks them. The horror of it causes men to freeze. It makes it harder for them to keep functioning effectively on the battlefield.

But sometimes massing troops in tight formation is not only unavoidable, it’s crucial to bringing the greatest amount of combat power to bear on the weakest part of the enemy defense. What Stuart wanted to know was, if this was the weakest part of the enemy defense, what was the strongest part like for chrissake?

The diesels slowed. All their training told him when the diesels slow it’s time for the ramp to come down. What he didn’t know was that when the ramp came down he would face an inferno.

Anyone standing there alone would have been immobilized by fear, wouldn’t be able to summon the courage to move against such violence. The enemy had figured, correctly, that aiming one shot or twenty shots at the beach was not as effective as firing 20,000 rounds down range all at once.

Stuart’s group was greeted by a wall of steel, but they moved, something about the power of a group. No matter how scared an individual may be training and mass action can overcome any solitary effort to balk or run away. Stuart ran through the water and onto the beach just like everybody else. The difference was he was lucky enough to make it. Or unlucky enough to make it depending on how you looked at the glass, half full or half empty. All empty today.

He didn’t run for long, though. He dove right into the bloody pulp of a dead Marine and tried to submerge in the sand, tried to bury himself in its blackness. Claw his way to China, anywhere but here! Anywhere but here! Anywhere but here! Tell my mother I love her, goddamit!

Bullets whizzing over his head electrified the air, shook it with extreme prejudice. He turned his head to get a view of the beach. A man’s gold wedding ring was sitting there just as pretty as you please in the black sand. Like it had been sitting there since the island formed out of a volcanic eruption eons ago. He grabbed it and stuffed in his pants pocket.

A force lifted him just then. He didn’t want to rise but he was rising up out of his private little beach-womb. A voice pierced his eardrum and smashed into his brain.

“Move your ass, Marine!” It was Sergeant Craft, his platoon sergeant.

Stuart regained his senses, reclaimed his perch on the earth, snatched up his rifle and followed his sergeant, just like he’d been taught to do. He never looked back. He couldn’t. The fight was raging all around them but they moved forward, firing and running. Shoot and scoot.

They pressed ahead until Craft dove into an old shell crater. How old? Seconds, maybe minutes. Stuart flung himself in after Craft. They were below the ground and out of breath.

The sergeant grinned. Could it be he was having fun? What does it take to grin out here? Stuart said to himself. Sick bastard.

“Cartwright?” Sergeants only used last names.

“Yes, sergeant?” Stuart replied.

“Are we having fun yet?”

“Yes, sergeant!”

“Good! Follow me!” Sergeant Craft yelled as he churned up the face of the crater before Stuart was ready. He was still reloading.

Sergeant Craft no sooner lifted his head above the rim of the crater when he took a bullet right between the eyes and slumped back down into the hole. Stuart looked at the dead man’s face. It seemed – what ? Peaceful? At ease? Undisturbed?

In that instant, Stuart was relieved. He realized death waited just above the rim and there was nothing he could do to change that fact. He realized there was no sense worrying about it. If he died, he died. He’d go to sleep. Rest. Sergeant Craft had showed him in the time it takes to check your watch you could be dead out here. Any minute, hell, any second could be the second you die. It was Iwo Jima, 1945. Lots of Marines were dying all around him. Death is what happened here.

So Stuart decided. It was simple, lift your head, force your body to follow your eyes and quit worrying. Kill, die or move; you never know what’s going to happen next.

So he charged up the face of the crater and ran smack into the face of the fight.

© William Lapham 2010

Bill Lapham is a semi-professional student and retired U.S. Navy submarine veteran. He attends grad school at the University of Michigan – Flint, and he’s been published at Six Sentences and the U.S. Army NCO Journal.

Static

I first heard it when I woke at six, a hollow moaning rising from the dry patch beyond the yard. Figured I’d make a move to investigate when Annie rose at half-past, but then was deeply involved in cooking eggs for her.

“It’s been a long time since you made breakfast for me,” she said. She seemed reluctant to throw off the comforter. “Did you leave the kettle whistling on the stove?”

I said I hadn’t but I’d check to make sure, and went back out to the kitchen. I sat and rolled myself a cigarette.

I had only smoked half when she hollered, “What’s that?”

“Nothing, love.”

A couple minutes later she came out, tying the cloth belt of her terry robe. “It’s coming from outside,” she said.

“Yes,” I agreed.

“Won’t you see about it?”

For a moment or two I thought I might, but when Annie turned on the radio and all it produced was sputtering static, my resolve faltered.

“Why don’t you get dressed?” I said instead. And where’s your breakfast plate?”

“Coward,” she said. She turned off the useless radio and headed back toward the bedroom.

“It doesn’t sound like a human in pain,” I said to the closed door.

“All the same,” she said, “I thought you were my protection.”

“What if it’s carrying something?”

“Well, if it dies, it could be just as dangerous later as now.”

We had already desexed whoever or whatever was making that awful noise.

I sat at the table thinking, but concentrating was difficult. When we’d first bought the farm, I sat that way for hours on end, marveling at the quiet. We were so glad to leave the city behind us. Annie would play solitaire in the parlor, and I’d sit and smoke and think.

Around noon she came out with the dish. It still had most of the eggs on it and she hadn’t touched the toast, either.

When evening fell and we discovered there was no light by which to read, we decided to go to sleep early.

Annie lay far off on her side of the bed and there was more than the usual space between us.

I awoke around 11:30 to see a beam of light coming through the closed window, then I realized it had grown silent. I rose and walked quietly to the window and pulled down the top pane to let in a little air. There was no sound at all. Not even the owl, nor the crickets. The beam flickered and faded. I couldn’t see the stars. The only thing visible then was the hard white moon against an empty black sky.

Guest Writer: Mike Handley

Time to Go

It had been five years since Katrina drove Auguste Babineaux from his bayou home near Lafitte, La., to neighboring Mississippi. His only possessions packed into his then-new, crew-cab Ford -- bought outright with cash earned from skinning alligators in September and redfish and speckled trout the other 11 months -- he drove north to Meridian. There, he toiled alongside teenagers 20 years his junior, bagging groceries and selling 99-cent tacos.

His coworkers’ smooth faces bore no resemblance to the topographical map encircling Auguste’s tired eyes. They spent their paychecks on the accoutrements of youth, while his were cashed, the $20 bills stashed in a metal box under his F-150’s front seat, awaiting the day he could go back home.
Late in December 2009, sick of living amongst people who couldn’t understand his Cajun dialect, he drove south to Biloxi, figuring he’d find a job easily with the hordes of contractors still rebuilding the coastal city. That didn’t work out so well. Cooyons couldn’t even pronounce his name; called him R.G. (instead of Auggie). And they were constantly poking fun at his white rubber boots.

Auguste wound up with the perfect job, though, as a security guard -- a role without a language barrier. At night, he slept in his truck, which he could park at the job site next to the Isle of Capri Casino on U.S. 90, the main drag. By day, he sat in a dingy guard shack barely 18 inches wider and longer than the fluorescent green Port-a-John 10 yards away.

The little shack was okay, though. It had an air conditioner about the size of small Igloo cooler, an even smaller television and a book shelf full of paperbacks by John Lee Burke. He liked to pretend he knew the protagonist, Dave Robicheaux, because he’d poached ducks on Barataria Bay with cousins sharing that surname. He’d also spent time in New Iberia, where Burke’s Robicheaux was a detective.

The guardhouse sat at the gated entrance -- think chain-link fencing, not lions atop pillars -- to a 5-acre cement slab abutting the Isle’s westernmost parking lot, used mainly by brown-skinned staff. It was difficult for hotel guests to decipher whether they were looking at a casino cemetery or nursery because the half-built or half-destroyed buildings’ exposed steel beams were rusty, as if they’d been squeezed out of the Gulf of Mexico’s colon.

Auguste hadn’t intended to stay in Biloxi. After barely a week on the job, he’d wanted badly to keep driving to Lafitte. He held no illusion that his camp, accessible only by boat, had survived Katrina, Rita or Ike. Far lesser storms were capable of burying the highest and most well built homes there, even those stilted ones on the mainland.

Yessir, he wanted to go back, perhaps return to his former life as a gator and fish skinner. Maybe find that spit of land and rebuild his cabin, one boatload at a time. But the BP oil rig blew that spring, and the leak had poisoned Louisiana’s marshes.

Fishermen were leaving. Shrimp nets were rotting. Restaurants were closing. TV people were moving in, and residents were again moving out.

But they’d stopped the gusher a month ago, and no more oil was coming out of the hole in the bottom of the sea. Fishing bans had been rescinded. Television news folk were no longer showing clips of pelicans covered in what looked like milk chocolate.

Just as Auguste stepped out of his air conditioned vault and stared at the water, a lone shrimp boat glided past, blue wings folded, heading out to the Gulf. He flipped his Marlboro into the stout breeze and decided right then it was time to go home. No more shitting inside a green ammonia bottle for him, mon cher. Besides, it was September, and Louisiana’s month-long gator season had opened.

© Mike Handley 2010

Mike Handley of Montgomery, Ala., is a career journalist and artist. His musings can be seen at handlets.blogspot.com, his artwork at www.mikehandleyart.com, and he's a frequent contributor at the 6S and ThinkingTen websites.

Guest Writer: Brian Michael Barbeito

Osho Rajneesh: Some feet of clay are okay

In the late nineteen seventies, when Mohan Rajneesh, later also known as Bhagwan Rajneesh, and now known as Osho, was at his oratory heights he spoke to thousands about ideas and experiences ranging from enlightenment to sex and plenty of topics in between. There have been books written on Osho and the movement has waxed and waned throughout the years and decades. Information can be gathered instantly, from the internet to libraries and other places on this strange and paradoxical man and his movement, a duo that sought to change the world through changing consciousness. Here I will only relate my part, part of my own impression, and by stating the subjective musings of one, I will be somehow or another following an Osho directive, though he’d be the first to tell you he had none. Nevertheless, anything both highly individualistic and infused with at least a try at awareness should be welcome in the world of Osho.

When I first picked up the book Unknown Man by a writer named Yatri, a book that tried (and succeeded very well) at marrying the theories of science and mysticism (think Fritjof Capra only more fun and with more neat pictures), I saw a photo of Osho and definitely felt some interesting connection. In the years to come I would explore his teachings and life intensively (think Ken Wiber looking into Adi Da and his people) and would become perhaps one of the few in the entire world that would be so sympathetic to the work yet never become an Osho sannyasan (renunciate).

I remember in the early days of this research going into a three story bookstore, the largest of a modern metropolis, and asking one of the workers if they had any books by him (Osho never actually wrote anything but many books were and are available in the way of transcribed discourses). I thought, now I am really on the path to enlightement because I am going to read these great words I have heard so much about. The worker lashed out at me and actually yelled ‘We do not carry books by cults!’ And that would not be my last in such tongue lashings; verbal hatred that came from certain apexes and establishments that I thought would be sympathetic. I was receiving darshan from a Mother Indian guru by the name of Devi at the University of Toronto’s congregation hall and I asked her people afterwards about Osho. One of her representatives barked at me that Osho did more harm to people’s energy systems and lives than anyone else and that I’d better watch myself!

So how was it that this man with the great words and beautiful eyes, that spoke about awareness and compassion and love stirred so much emotion and polemic against himself, and why did this man receive the status of persona non grata in so many countries while he was alive? It was probably because he had, as they say in the guru business, feet of clay, meaning, for the uninitiated, that he was not a god, and very human indeed, indulging in activities we don’t want our gods to indulge in. But that is okay here for two reasons. One is that Osho always stated that he was ordinary, that ordinariness was blessed, and that, for instance, he had been trying to part the waters in his bathtub for twenty years and nothing had happened yet! But the second reason is the more important one, and that is that it is the message and words that count. As we enter a new world, or try to transform this one, his words can act as a guide and reminder to follow our innate wisdom and awareness. These are trying times, and Osho knew they would come, not because of the gift of prophesy- probably just because he was reading the newspapers and saw the writing on the wall- it doesn’t take much if you have even a modicum of knowledge. But I believe that Osho had something to offer and that any seeker, artist, light-worker, poet, baker or even candle stick maker should give his words a chance as we try to transition into yes, a new age of sorts. Now it is precisely because it is hard work that Osho can help. Osho was fond of speaking out against people, and even spoke against the idea of Sri Aurobindo’s claim that humanity would naturally evolve to higher states. Mr. Osho Rajneesh said it was a nice idea, but what would it be worth to the individual if he or she hadn’t worked for it? Osho’s message still remains, and more than ever. He claimed that he was only a finger pointing to the moon, and that people should look at the message, at what he was indicating, and not get caught up in the messenger. This is among the greatest of Zen messages, thus the saying- if you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him! Well Osho is dead, but the finger remains, and the moon definitely remains. As for the bookstores, I see the major chains now carry his books, beautiful books with life altering messages of hope, creativity, awareness, and transformation through a difficult birthing process into a new time and temperament. Osho is okay with me, even if he did have dirty feet.

© Brian Michael Barbeito 2010

Brian Michael Barbeito writes fictional vignettes in a style of his own making with a view to exploring questions of the psyche and the spirit. His work has appeared at Glossolalia, A Million Stories, Our Echo, Crimson Highway, and Useless Knowledge magazines. His first novel is an experimental work called Postprandial, and a second novel in the same vein, titled The Electric Light Queen, is under way. Brian is self taught and short fiction is a favored form. This is because he feels it has the tendencies to describe ‘places in between’ that are highly subjective and idiosyncratic.

Guest Writer: Bill Floyd

Performance Art

The uptown critics finally take notice after my piece in the Tribeca loft, the one involving the John Doe’s remains and the forty lab rats, which I titled Winston Smith Redux. The cops take notice, too, of course, so I toss my cell phone in the Hudson and start crashing on the couches of various sycophants. Subsequent pieces are more guerilla in nature: the jettisoning of tissue and fluids from the skyscraper over Broadway; the flotilla of candlewaxed skulls bobbing ashore near Battery Park. Spectators are briefly engaged, but I realize with a sinking heart that it’s mostly just curiosity they’re experiencing, even the rhapsodizing bloggers and hipsters who pretend to be moved.

What I want is for them to feel, to react.

So tonight, for my ultimate performance, the audience is strictly by-invite only: the spear’s tip of the avant garde all congregated in a carefully scouted cite across the river in Jersey City. The building is an abandoned detainment facility, scheduled for demolition within weeks; the room is separated into a gallery and a holding cell. I sit facing them from behind dull but impenetrable bars as they file into the anteroom, until they’re all gathered pensively within and my assistants have sealed the exits as they’ve been instructed to do.

Initially I simply stare at them, taking their measure. Of course they can't stand this and within minutes they're calling me names, trying to provoke me. At my side is a table that has been covered with a velvet drop cloth. I remove the cloth and don the gas mask and some of them understand immediately and begin to bang on the doors. Once my mask is secure I turn the knob on the tank beneath the table. The gas is in no way odorless and within a few breaths they all know what's coming. Voices once taunting and jaded go high and hysterical. While some of them trample their fellows, it is much worse to witness the few who try to help each other. The doors won’t budge and they begin to slide to the floor and writhe in place as their oxygen-starved blood bursts internal dams and their skin turns blue. I impassively watch them fall, but for perhaps the first time in my entire life my pulse rate increases just a little.

The cops will ask why I did it and I’ll tell them, with clenched fist and locked jaw, my face still creased from the mask’s straps, “I made them feel something pure and genuine this time, didn’t I?” My own voice sounds high and strange now. Knowing all along that it was never about the audience at all.

© William Floyd 2010

Bill Floyd is a writer from North Carolina who is feeling his way around the on-line world of micro-fiction. He blogs occasionally at Six Sentences.

Guest Writer: Bill Lapham

You Have Your Drones...

I realized the look on his face was fanatical the instant he blew up. The sight of the fire and the sound of the explosion reached me at exactly the same time. I was that close. When you stand too close to a lightning strike, there is no pause between the flash of light and the sound of thunder. This was like that. If I had been farther away there would have been a caesura between the sight and the sound. But this was boom, shock, flash, dirt, screams, bam, now!
I always thought I would see, if I ever saw one at all, the pieces of a suicide bomber streaking through the air after he detonated himself. That wasn't the case at all. I saw none of the bomber's body parts, ever. The man vaporized like a puddle of water sitting too long in the summer sun. Alas, there were pieces of other people strewn everywhere. Surely, they did not awaken this morning with the thought that they might stand too close to a suicide bomber today. Nobody would do that.
When my shaken vision stabilized, the scene was from one of those Halloween horror movies. Some kind of Texas chain saw thing maybe.
A fire-fight erupted, right on the city streets, automatic weapons fire cracking everywhere. It was impossible to tell who was shooting at whom; the good guys looked the same as the bad guys. Everybody was shooting everywhere. So this is what Clausewitz meant by the fog of war, I thought, but not for long.
I dove behind a jersey barrier and grabbed for some earth. I have never been so friendly with dirt and never so glad to be in it and alive. I had my face smashed against stinging hot dust so tightly I could smell the microbes that live between the grains of sand. My breath caused little puffs of dust that got into my eyes and made them water; the tears tracked across my face sideways and formed a puddle of mud under my left temple. Bullets whizzed by and ricocheted off the walls over my head making a strange pinging sound as they headed off in another direction. I couldn't stop trembling. And I could taste a little bit of puke on the back of my tongue.
I admit to having those thoughts. You know the ones, the bargains with God. I asked forgiveness for ever doubting his existence. I promised to live a better life. I promised to be kinder to little old ladies and help the blind cross the street. If God would get me out of this shit alive, I promised I would quit drinking, tomorrow.
And then, just as suddenly as it started, the shooting stopped. It took a second for my brain to register the silence - the echoes faded - and before long I craved a shot of whiskey.
I rose to a crouch and just barely stuck my head above the top of the concrete barrier, just high enough to get an eyeball on the situation. Anybody looking at me probably thought I looked like that "Kilroy was Here" cartoon made famous in World War II.
Men were walking around without aim, stunned, exhausted, suffering from adrenaline hangovers, arms limp at their sides barely keeping a grip on their rifles. Some were taking a knee, trying to catch their breath before they passed out, others were crying. The women were gone, or sprawled on the ground dead. This would have been a good day to stay home and do the laundry, I thought.
It was so sudden and quick it made me wonder if it had even happened at all. My ears were ringing and my nose and throat stung from the acrid smell of coagulating blood and burnt hair and flesh. The smell of gunpowder hung in a blue haze. It was so hot it made it hard to breathe; there was no respite from either the heat or the terror.
This had been a coordinated attack with bombs and guns. They didn't use artillery, or Predator drones. They were more primitive than all that; they used a man who preferred death to life and strapped a bomb to his belly and placed a trigger in his hand. There was no warning - there never is anymore - no massing of troops on the border, no air raid sirens, no intelligence tip from a drone circling high overhead catching all the action on camera for the generals to review from their high backed chairs in the Operations Center.
All they saw on their big, flat, high-definition monitors before the blast were ordinary folks meeting to complete their meager business deals on an insufferably hot day in the nation's capital.

© William Lapham 2010

Bill Lapham is a semi-professional student and retired U.S. Navy submarine veteran. He attends grad school at the University of Michigan – Flint, and he’s been published at Six Sentences and the U.S. Army NCO Journal.

Guest Writer: Paul de Denus

The Amber Sea

The blizzard has picked up in intensity. It stretches along the horizon, fusing clouds, snow and iced air into one. It blasts up the drifts like white dirt dug from the earth, a frozen burial ground encircling our thin tent, entrapping us. It may well blow us clear off this floe into the arctic sea. Captain Wells has stepped outside to secure the rigging; “batten us down for the night ahead,” he said. St. John is bundled up beside me, asleep. His eyes twitch and roll as he escapes into the warm safety of his dreams. Lucky him… able to drift off so easily.

My fingers tingle. Frostbite I’m sure but what do I know for certain? They are remote from my hands, floating just beyond but I can still see them move. I can barely keep a clutch on the pint bottle. It is my true savior. My insides burn with its fire as it consumes my being, dulls my thoughts. If I could only climb inside, immerse myself in its warm amber sea. It is the color of the earth. Oh, the earth. What I wouldn’t give to have it under my feet again… green grass and the hot soil… the smell of clean rain… the seed of life bursting everywhere. There is no life here, only a bleak slab of frozen desert and a sorrowful wind that calls for me to venture out.

How have I come to such a desolate place? Was this not what I wanted? An escape? Her letter spelled out her wishes, a biting end to our engagement, pure and as cold as this foreboding landscape that surrounds my heart. Oh Emilee, I have tried but you… I cannot escape or forget.

I stare into this bottle and the calm amber rolls in a gentle wave, back and forth, side to side, leading my thoughts to a safer place -- oblivion -- slowly taking me down. I can hear it now, clearer, just behind the flap, a whispering call beyond these thin walls. The isolation has crept in; I can’t keep it out. It is colder, though only to that of which I can feel. Captain Wells? He should have been back by now. I lean into St. John but he doesn’t stir and his eyes no longer move. I’ll wait a little longer… before I go out. The wind is insistent though, with my amber all but now gone.

© Paul de Denus 2010

Paul de Denus is a graphic artist by day, writer by night. He has been published at Six Sentences (the Love Book, Word of Mouth & 6Svol3), Smith Magazine, Fictionaut and Espresso Stories.
The Amber Sea and other writings, and self published books appear at his blogspot: metheothertwin.blogspot.com