fic: had my head in the oven so you'd know where I'll be
I'm writing fic again, woo! And reading a lot of poetry. I have a TSN thing I'm writing too, and sketches of a Sherlock thing mostly in my head. But now, the Pacific fic I started writing six months ago.
had my head in the oven so you'd know where I'll be
pacific; PG; sledge/snafu.
It’s not time to wake up until he says your name
8.
A bullet casing, hitting the ground. An M1919’s muzzle, steaming as the rain hits it. Someone’s frantic screaming in the night, a shovel, and silence. A grenade canister, rolling to rest by your foot. Open it up: it’s full of shit of course. You’re still dreaming. It’s not time to wake up until he says your name.
1.
The way the coolness of the floor is seeping into your cheek. The way draught is pushing under the door frame and creeping up the back of your shirt. What are you doing on the floor, boy, it’s the middle of the day! Get up! Outside, the Louisiana heat is trying to creep into your pores and soft-boil you. If you look busy enough no one will ask you to do anything. Look, you’ve cut yourself climbing trees again. Look, you’ve forgotten your shoes again. What’re you gonna do if you need to run away again? Little Merri, come here, I have a job for you. Little Merri, I need you to scrub these for me. Goodness your feet are dirty. Here, scrub these barrels. Don’t complain, darling. Every man a king, but no one wears a crown.
2.
Ride the rails until you have nowhere left to ride. Cut your soul apart on playing cards, wrap it in a bridle around that horse’s neck. Make yourself a new bet.
Here, a piece of paper, a dotted line, a pen - this is a sequence no one can mistake. Just an X will be fine, the recruitment officer supplies helpfully. You respond: a fuck-you very much they’ll never quite knock out of you. Choose a path, press down the nib: that twisting within you is your deserted futures.
Good choice, says the officer, We need more men out there.
Later: coral cuts your shin to the bone. Red, white: all you’ll need to do is stand in the sea now, and you’ll be the most patriotic sonuvabitch in the world. Every morning, a rising sun of Japanese corpses. Every morning, new mouths opening like flowers, and you are wandering, from tooth to shining tooth.
3.
Drag the hood of your poncho up to keep the rain from running down your neck like the cold hand of death. Try not to get your boots stuck in the mud, or in the soft grey-pink of a man’s intestines, fallen into your trench. If you are breathing, you are breathing water, you are breathing a body’s decay. If you are breathing, you are drowning.
Every so often, a flare charges into the sky and illuminates black and white outlines of a decimated landscape, before fading and falling to the ground like a metaphor for hope. Each time, the image it captures lingering in your mind until the next, as though you are living in a very morbid flip book.
Like this: Eugene’s face, too close, yelling at you to shut up. You, with your e-tool in hand, wanting to smash it into his head until his skull cracked and split and spat. Hating him, with a potency and purity that was almost liberating. You’re tired of this, of living in the notes in his bible, of the rain, the smell, the madness curling inside after each near miss, your odds diminishing in a game you can’t rig - you know, the house always wins in the end, and nobody is leaving -
You just want to sleep. You could tuck yourself into the ground, draw up a nice mud blanket, loll you head to the side, let your thoughts dribble out through a bullet hole in the back of your head. Your dogtags are cold, and they are burning your skin.
4.
These things that burrow into your heart, scraping away and tunnelling in. Take the effort to search them out with a flamethrower, maybe. Otherwise, memories collecting in you like butts in an un-emptied ashtray. His hands, finding their way about his pipe. The dirt underneath his fingernails. Boots touching in the agonising wait for the darkness to stop creeping with knives in the undergrowth, for dawn to finally heave itself over the horizon. Otherwise, the blue sky above the high sides of an Amtrac, the salt-water reminders of the things you can’t see coming. Blinking away your own fear so you can stand beside your brothers.
Stop that. So many things that probably never happened. You were probably dreaming again, in the way your exhausted brain decides, Right, that’s enough, and tries to drag you off into wonderland. Dreaming, that he’d been on purpose so close your shoulder’d bumped into yours when you walked. Your dead friends sinking in the muck beside you, their bloated flesh, they are saying to you Snafu what have you done, well, they ain’t your fucking mama, dead fuckers’ve no right to be so damn judgemental.
5.
There is sun, now, bright and yellowish and falling through the leaves like the holes in a poncho. Eugene is having a picnic with you. That can’t be right. Where are the maggots, where is the rain, the mud sucking you down the express route to Hades? Still there he is, doing that complicated shit with his pipe. And here you are, your mouth tasting like ash as usual and your chest feels like it’s been kicked in, as usual, so maybe this is real.
Eugene is taking a nap. Like you, the sunspots on the backs of his eyelids are probably melting into the bright burst of an air raid. But maybe not. Maybe he is in another field, one with flowers, lying in light that’s a hemisphere away, and instead of you, he’s picturing a dog beside him. Wouldn’t that be a typical order of preference.
“It’s nice to be dry,” he says.
It is. You press a dry palm to his dry forehead. It’s nice. You should probably lift your hand up, but it feels heavy and doesn’t want to. His eyes are closed, like he’s fallen dead asleep.
“I’m glad I didn’t smash your head in after all.”
“I’m sorta glad too, Snafu.” He is unable to keep up the pretext of sleeping with the grin that cracks his face. You think about pressing your hand to his mouth, too. You don’t. Eugene is talking, saying, We’ll keep touch back home, Louisiana isn’t that far from Alabama. We’ll go fishing or something. Or something. This must be the kind of thing people tell their high school sweet hearts. You wouldn’t know. You feel stupid for thinking it, even. But you’re thinking about it.
How many freight trains between New Orleans and Mobile, how many nervous miles? When Eugene returns home he’ll go pale and soft again, while you’ll still be sweating greasy patches on your shirts. What’re the odds of a warm welcome for your dirty boots and stumbling words, on his nice clean porch? Here, Eugene, it’s me. I’ll be the grinning skull head at your dinner table, and look, I’ve invited all the old ghosts we used to know. They won’t rattle their chains, promise, but sorry about the muddy footprints they’ll leave on your carpets. Sorry I couldn’t drag a sheet over the past, to give some dignity to the corpses below.
6.
This is your stop. Eugene is sleeping. You were watching the brightness of a day filled with jokes, the occasional slap from a sweet thing, with Eugene’s weird pea-eating face (maybe all rich folk look like that), dim slowly from behind the train window. The glass shifted from it’s vision of rolling fields, of the American dream, until it was just your reflections and you could only see your past written in that scene, and not the future you were hoping for.
This is your stop. You want to wake him up. You are thinking about waking him up. But there is this, something you don’t have words for, the way you don’t think Merriell Shelton and Eugene Sledge know each other, and that Snafu and Sledgehammer were only stuck together with mortar fire, the echoes of gun shots, and intermittent dysentery.
You want to wake him up. You know if you bent down low ‘till you enveloped him in your shadow and said Sledgehammer in his ear, he’d snap awake like he always does. You are afraid you won’t have the words for him. You are afraid he won’t have the ones you want either.
If you hesitate, it is only because those small things that buried themselves in your chest are fluttering against your ribcage, and for a moment it is hard to breathe.
7.
Because the buzz-saw rip and burn sometimes blurs into sound of a throat tearing with a scream. Because when the rain hits the metal of your roof, well, it echoes just like your helmet did.
Because of the way the machine gun fire had hammered like a startled heart. Because you were mud-soaked and his voice sounded like Alabama; because he sounded clean.
Because a man’s mouth had glinted gold and someone dug in with their knife, and because the screams had scraped your bones you took your sidearm and beckoned your finger towards you, the shot like a book slamming shut -
Well. You are still staggering from the recoil of a weapon you fired long ago.
You want the silence that followed as his head rolled back. You’re still here wanting to mute the voices.
You want that silence for yourself, because you can’t stop the pattering of the scraps of a woman and her baby raining down on you like shrapnel from a mortar round.
You can’t mute the sound made by a single sniper bullet burrowing into the brain of the son of a textile manufacturer and you can’t stop the inside of your skull from echoing like the walls of a coral ridge. Their bodies are still twitching with the pulse of maggots beneath their skin. Their hollow eye sockets are still round and taunting.
You still wake up with the ghosts caught up like sheets around your ankles. You still stagger out into the dawn like a drunk trying to sober.
And when Eugene finds you, you still try to apologise. You still struggle with the explanation a noose around your tongue. But he just says,
“I know. I was there.” and his thumb finds the groove between your spine and the cut of your shoulder blades.
You can’t stop the morning breeze from chilling the sweat on your skin. You can’t stop the warmth from his hand burning through your back and spilling into to your heart.
had my head in the oven so you'd know where I'll be
pacific; PG; sledge/snafu.
It’s not time to wake up until he says your name
8.
A bullet casing, hitting the ground. An M1919’s muzzle, steaming as the rain hits it. Someone’s frantic screaming in the night, a shovel, and silence. A grenade canister, rolling to rest by your foot. Open it up: it’s full of shit of course. You’re still dreaming. It’s not time to wake up until he says your name.
1.
The way the coolness of the floor is seeping into your cheek. The way draught is pushing under the door frame and creeping up the back of your shirt. What are you doing on the floor, boy, it’s the middle of the day! Get up! Outside, the Louisiana heat is trying to creep into your pores and soft-boil you. If you look busy enough no one will ask you to do anything. Look, you’ve cut yourself climbing trees again. Look, you’ve forgotten your shoes again. What’re you gonna do if you need to run away again? Little Merri, come here, I have a job for you. Little Merri, I need you to scrub these for me. Goodness your feet are dirty. Here, scrub these barrels. Don’t complain, darling. Every man a king, but no one wears a crown.
2.
Ride the rails until you have nowhere left to ride. Cut your soul apart on playing cards, wrap it in a bridle around that horse’s neck. Make yourself a new bet.
Here, a piece of paper, a dotted line, a pen - this is a sequence no one can mistake. Just an X will be fine, the recruitment officer supplies helpfully. You respond: a fuck-you very much they’ll never quite knock out of you. Choose a path, press down the nib: that twisting within you is your deserted futures.
Good choice, says the officer, We need more men out there.
Later: coral cuts your shin to the bone. Red, white: all you’ll need to do is stand in the sea now, and you’ll be the most patriotic sonuvabitch in the world. Every morning, a rising sun of Japanese corpses. Every morning, new mouths opening like flowers, and you are wandering, from tooth to shining tooth.
3.
Drag the hood of your poncho up to keep the rain from running down your neck like the cold hand of death. Try not to get your boots stuck in the mud, or in the soft grey-pink of a man’s intestines, fallen into your trench. If you are breathing, you are breathing water, you are breathing a body’s decay. If you are breathing, you are drowning.
Every so often, a flare charges into the sky and illuminates black and white outlines of a decimated landscape, before fading and falling to the ground like a metaphor for hope. Each time, the image it captures lingering in your mind until the next, as though you are living in a very morbid flip book.
Like this: Eugene’s face, too close, yelling at you to shut up. You, with your e-tool in hand, wanting to smash it into his head until his skull cracked and split and spat. Hating him, with a potency and purity that was almost liberating. You’re tired of this, of living in the notes in his bible, of the rain, the smell, the madness curling inside after each near miss, your odds diminishing in a game you can’t rig - you know, the house always wins in the end, and nobody is leaving -
You just want to sleep. You could tuck yourself into the ground, draw up a nice mud blanket, loll you head to the side, let your thoughts dribble out through a bullet hole in the back of your head. Your dogtags are cold, and they are burning your skin.
4.
These things that burrow into your heart, scraping away and tunnelling in. Take the effort to search them out with a flamethrower, maybe. Otherwise, memories collecting in you like butts in an un-emptied ashtray. His hands, finding their way about his pipe. The dirt underneath his fingernails. Boots touching in the agonising wait for the darkness to stop creeping with knives in the undergrowth, for dawn to finally heave itself over the horizon. Otherwise, the blue sky above the high sides of an Amtrac, the salt-water reminders of the things you can’t see coming. Blinking away your own fear so you can stand beside your brothers.
Stop that. So many things that probably never happened. You were probably dreaming again, in the way your exhausted brain decides, Right, that’s enough, and tries to drag you off into wonderland. Dreaming, that he’d been on purpose so close your shoulder’d bumped into yours when you walked. Your dead friends sinking in the muck beside you, their bloated flesh, they are saying to you Snafu what have you done, well, they ain’t your fucking mama, dead fuckers’ve no right to be so damn judgemental.
5.
There is sun, now, bright and yellowish and falling through the leaves like the holes in a poncho. Eugene is having a picnic with you. That can’t be right. Where are the maggots, where is the rain, the mud sucking you down the express route to Hades? Still there he is, doing that complicated shit with his pipe. And here you are, your mouth tasting like ash as usual and your chest feels like it’s been kicked in, as usual, so maybe this is real.
Eugene is taking a nap. Like you, the sunspots on the backs of his eyelids are probably melting into the bright burst of an air raid. But maybe not. Maybe he is in another field, one with flowers, lying in light that’s a hemisphere away, and instead of you, he’s picturing a dog beside him. Wouldn’t that be a typical order of preference.
“It’s nice to be dry,” he says.
It is. You press a dry palm to his dry forehead. It’s nice. You should probably lift your hand up, but it feels heavy and doesn’t want to. His eyes are closed, like he’s fallen dead asleep.
“I’m glad I didn’t smash your head in after all.”
“I’m sorta glad too, Snafu.” He is unable to keep up the pretext of sleeping with the grin that cracks his face. You think about pressing your hand to his mouth, too. You don’t. Eugene is talking, saying, We’ll keep touch back home, Louisiana isn’t that far from Alabama. We’ll go fishing or something. Or something. This must be the kind of thing people tell their high school sweet hearts. You wouldn’t know. You feel stupid for thinking it, even. But you’re thinking about it.
How many freight trains between New Orleans and Mobile, how many nervous miles? When Eugene returns home he’ll go pale and soft again, while you’ll still be sweating greasy patches on your shirts. What’re the odds of a warm welcome for your dirty boots and stumbling words, on his nice clean porch? Here, Eugene, it’s me. I’ll be the grinning skull head at your dinner table, and look, I’ve invited all the old ghosts we used to know. They won’t rattle their chains, promise, but sorry about the muddy footprints they’ll leave on your carpets. Sorry I couldn’t drag a sheet over the past, to give some dignity to the corpses below.
6.
This is your stop. Eugene is sleeping. You were watching the brightness of a day filled with jokes, the occasional slap from a sweet thing, with Eugene’s weird pea-eating face (maybe all rich folk look like that), dim slowly from behind the train window. The glass shifted from it’s vision of rolling fields, of the American dream, until it was just your reflections and you could only see your past written in that scene, and not the future you were hoping for.
This is your stop. You want to wake him up. You are thinking about waking him up. But there is this, something you don’t have words for, the way you don’t think Merriell Shelton and Eugene Sledge know each other, and that Snafu and Sledgehammer were only stuck together with mortar fire, the echoes of gun shots, and intermittent dysentery.
You want to wake him up. You know if you bent down low ‘till you enveloped him in your shadow and said Sledgehammer in his ear, he’d snap awake like he always does. You are afraid you won’t have the words for him. You are afraid he won’t have the ones you want either.
If you hesitate, it is only because those small things that buried themselves in your chest are fluttering against your ribcage, and for a moment it is hard to breathe.
7.
Because the buzz-saw rip and burn sometimes blurs into sound of a throat tearing with a scream. Because when the rain hits the metal of your roof, well, it echoes just like your helmet did.
Because of the way the machine gun fire had hammered like a startled heart. Because you were mud-soaked and his voice sounded like Alabama; because he sounded clean.
Because a man’s mouth had glinted gold and someone dug in with their knife, and because the screams had scraped your bones you took your sidearm and beckoned your finger towards you, the shot like a book slamming shut -
Well. You are still staggering from the recoil of a weapon you fired long ago.
You want the silence that followed as his head rolled back. You’re still here wanting to mute the voices.
You want that silence for yourself, because you can’t stop the pattering of the scraps of a woman and her baby raining down on you like shrapnel from a mortar round.
You can’t mute the sound made by a single sniper bullet burrowing into the brain of the son of a textile manufacturer and you can’t stop the inside of your skull from echoing like the walls of a coral ridge. Their bodies are still twitching with the pulse of maggots beneath their skin. Their hollow eye sockets are still round and taunting.
You still wake up with the ghosts caught up like sheets around your ankles. You still stagger out into the dawn like a drunk trying to sober.
And when Eugene finds you, you still try to apologise. You still struggle with the explanation a noose around your tongue. But he just says,
“I know. I was there.” and his thumb finds the groove between your spine and the cut of your shoulder blades.
You can’t stop the morning breeze from chilling the sweat on your skin. You can’t stop the warmth from his hand burning through your back and spilling into to your heart.