I've updated my Christmas Tales with a new story for 2012, and also appearing is my first collection of short stories.
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![]() Almost Today Brent van Staalduinen I almost wept today. I almost wept for distant siblings who packed up most of what they needed, entrusting it to new brothers and sisters in filthy tent spaces, ugly places where God shone first. I almost wept because I forgot the kindred souls who picked up swords, rifles, pens and went to war. They bruised themselves to pay back what I had not yet earned, cast down lots about which brother would deliver the news to mother, father, uncle, son. Life, they whispered, is bigger than a sum of actions. Freedom, they said, as they signed on lines and cut their hair hair, is more than expecting others to give when mostly what gets done is taking. You, they yelled, mean more to me than I mean to myself. That we can love and hate and fear as much or as little as we want or desire or crave or stand isn’t a right – it’s a privilege, won by those who guard my shores even though I don’t ask, keep safe every delicate mote of an existence I can’t live without yet often can’t explain. So why do they stand in places where steel rain brings agony and the sun makes dust that cannot bind the wounds it creates? Why do they stand on lines and make war, humanity’s true negotiation, when all I do is stare, lost, at numbers and figures and soft, gentle things and wonder where everything went wrong when it isn’t going wrong at all. It’s right, but only because they refuse to let it be wrong although I, bathed in choice, try to make it so. It’s right because their blood, leaking into soil and paddy and ground and sand and jungle and hedgerow and ocean and beach and bamboo prison cage is the guilty fuel I fill my tank with. I might want to weep, yet brush away tears that might be seen by anyone, even those whose sacrifice should remind me that I didn’t get here by myself. You brought me here. You wept on ground not yet named and jagged wire not yet holy – you bled tears and gore and ragged, unheard last breaths and said that I could work this piece of ground, if only to borrow it awhile from those for whom I’d not yet wept. |
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