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Abram Graham
A True War Story |
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My uncle with his wooden smile and walnut teeth told me that he once saw an ostrich bounce off a trampoline. It tumbled toe over beak in the air flying like a lopsided sack of laundry and landed in a pile of elephant shit six feet from where he stood. He was at a circus near Da Nang and as the wranglers rushed toward the bird, he calmly walked outside.
He said he was taking a heroic piss when suddenly guns sounded and he who was cooler than peppermint leaves stopped pissing and ran.
He said that while running he stepped on a mine. His right shin exploded like a clod of dirt hurled against a doghouse and he got to fly for the first time, tumbling foot over nose until he struck the soft black ground just above a Viet Cong tunnel.
He said his leg was stinging like his teeth after smoking and that menthol cigarettes feel like biting into a slice of cold carrot cake.
He said he saw his life, frail as a bridal veil, being lifted over his head and that on Earth our souls have no dominion for here our bodies rule.
He said that upon looking at his stump of a leg, gazing at his own gore and blackened limbs while frantically scrambling backward into the village he could only think of the snake he murdered at Beck Lake when he was a boy. The snake, guilty of having no legs, was resting in the weeds by the water and he snuck up on it and crushed its spine with a rock. The snake pulled back into the water quick as you pull back your hand from a flame, its guts trailing half behind, bobbing up and down, drowning under the lapping ripples of lake waves.
My uncle said that Viet Cong soldiers began to scramble out of the ground like smoked moles and that he and his carrot leg watched while bullets struck his friends across their backs and all he could smell was piss and blood and it smelled sweeter than the can of GI yams he ate for Thanksgiving and all he could see was fog and steam like the village was a boiling bowl of war soup and all he could feel was his stump humming like a boy’s hands after pushing a lawnmower.
I asked him what happened next.
He said he died.