Trench Warfare

This Micro Fiction piece resulted from a prompt asking us to write for a solid twenty minutes. I took what bare vestiges of story I had from that, and expanded it in a prompt which asked for a scene with a single character.

Trench Warfare

It took Steven thirty years to realize that he wasn’t a brave man. He lived in Providence, Rhode Island, and owned a bakery, and every once in a while he found himself wondering if he possessed enough courage to ever matter. The night that he found out was the night he woke drenched in sweat, woke wide-eyed, woke alert yet filled with growing terror. It was the night when a brick was put through his window by a gang of teenagers. Steven didn’t know this, never would know who had done this. All he knew was the crash that snapped his eyes awake at three in the morning, his whole body quivering.

Steven quickly swung his legs over the edge of the bed, alone in his tiny bedroom, the door shut. He went no further. He sat there, straining to hear anything more, still not sure if the crash he had heard had been a dream, but knowing - on the same level that the terror rose from - that it had not been, that there might be someone going through his apartment at that very moment, touching everything in the dark, looking for things that belonged to Steven, things to take.

The power had gone out at some point. His digital alarm clicked blinked red at him. He frowned at it, rubbed his face. His hands came away slick, and he realized that he was drenched. Beads of salty sweat ran down his thin back and his long arms. They dripped off the ends of his fingers. His short beard was matted oddly. His skin didn’t feel real. The sweat and the fear he felt still welling up inside of him rooted him to the bed. His sheets clung to his bare skin.

Steven sat, and watched the door. He waited. He tried to tell himself to move, and couldn’t. He felt like a British soldier eighty years ago, squatting in a trench somewhere in Flanders, huddling in the cold mud, fingers shaking as they held a rifle, his ill-fitting boots filling up with water, waiting as the air began to brighten - to go from strange dark night to the grey haze of dawn – waiting for the whistle and the yelling voice which would tell him he must go scrambling over the top, shoving his fingers into the packed walls and nearly loosing his boots to the sucking squelch of the mud, coming out of the pit screaming, his rifle held before him, firing from the hip at nothing, into driving rain and the winking German machine guns, reaching for him with their countless whining arms.

There was no noise from the rest of his ground-floor apartment. Steven sat, his hands clenched on the bedspread. The sweat began to cool on his body, and Steven trembled, cold and scared. He stared at the door. He told himself to get up, to lock the bedroom door at least, if he was too scared to go out. He sat on the edge of the bed. His feet were cold against the cheap hardwood floor.

The trembling began to subside, but Steven didn’t move. Every muscle in his body felt sore. His back ached, and he rubbed at his eyes. He stared at the orange glow from the streetlight which came through the only window and covered the bedroom door. Get up, he told himself. Get up and go out there and fix this. It was the last thought he had before his eyes closed and he fell asleep, sitting on the edge of his bed, his head sagging forward into his bony chest.

It began to rain at seven in the morning. The April air was grey and Steven woke up to the sound of the rain beating against the walls. He looked up, confused, his brain fuzzy with sleep. He saw that the orange glow had disappeared from the door. Steven stood.

He swept up the waves of glass in his living room, a scarecrow in a stained white t-shirt and boxers. He wore thick brown leather loafers to keep the glass out of his feet. Steven swept, any sound he made drowned in the roar of the rain, wishing he had a hawk in his heart.