ELASTICIZED.....
Awakened by the fourteenth bomb splintering across the pavement littered with corpses, I lifted my head off the park bench and searched the nearby trees for any limbs hanging around. The air raid still hummed in my ears, the propellers failing to drown out the insistent screams of hysteria and undeniable, uncontrollable anguish and suffering. I listened to a couple birds chirping and the rhythmical flutter of their wings as they thought of nothing but each other and their next meal. I knew if I closed my eyes again, even for a brief moment, I'd feel the warm splatter of blood upon my face once more, I'd see the mangled bodies strewn about, and I'd hear the babies' cries gradually degenerate until they are no more. I looked across the park to the fountain some kids were playing in and my mind was carried across the water to the children with holes in their heads; to the eight year old pleading on his knees for the General to spare his life before the bullet entered his brain and ended him; to the screaming three year old girl who was accidentally smothered by her own frightened mother in their hiding place; and to the ill, defenseless six year old boy with no parents who summoned the strength within to make one last stand before the barrage got the best (and last) of him. The beautiful, green grass--which held a volleyball game, a family playing cards and eating sandwiches, a spinkler under which youth ran and danced and laughed, a dog fetching the frisbee thrown by its master's hand--faded to a brown, withered and blood-stained field as I recalled the atrocities my dream captured for me. I was floating the whole time, merely witnessing the horror, understanding with dreadful realizations the true depth and darkness of man's depravity and inhumanity to man. The terrible screams, the lacerated deceased, the bloody living holding their insides, the artillery, the wreckage, the complete mutilation of body and mind... these are nowhere to be seen or heard where I am sitting, but I still feel them. I feel them. I am just on a park bench, but the aforementioned are in my dreams.