Fiction by Yossef Sharifi • Art by Mitch Miller
 

Fallujah was dark today though the sun was bright. It was because of the buildings and telephone wires. They gave you shade whenever you walked through an alley. There were so many damn telephone and electric wires; more even than I’d seen back home. It was hard to imagine this place as a functioning city that people lived and worked in once.        I was separated from my unit and walking down a long alley behind a secondary school. There were bodies in the streets from the gunfight yesterday. It usually took a couple days to clear out the bodies.        “PFC Garcia!” I heard from behind me. I turned and my CO standing by a doorway. “What the hell you doin’ boy?” he yelled. “Get back wit yer unit!”        “Sir yes sir,” I said. “The private thought he saw movement at the end of the alley sir.”        “Fuck yer movement. Now get the hell back.”        “Sir yes sir.”        I ran out of the alley with the rifle across my chest, the rest of my gear clinking as I jogged out into the busy street.        I saw Jacobs standing on a porch smoking and I walked up to him. He was thin and wore wire-frame glasses. His hands were dirty, grease caked under the nails. Everyone eventually got dirty here. You could always tell when someone was fresh out cause they’d be clean.        “Where the hell were you?” Jacobs said.        “I thought I saw some hajjis. Can I have one of those?”        He pulled out a package of cigarettes and gave me one before lighting it. “See anything?”        “No. Smith ordered me back.”        He nodded. “We’re supposed to keep watch over that tanker across the street,” he said, motioning with his chin toward a large white tanker parked in an empty parking lot.        “What’s in it?” I asked.        “Cheesecake.”        “You’re fucking kidding me.”        “Nope,” he said, exhaling a puff of smoke. “KBR’s got us watchin’ their shit. Halliburton’s gotta make their money too, I guess.”        “How long we supposed to be here?”        “Till night. The truck’s gettin’ repaired.”        We sat on the porch and smoked and talked about home the rest of the day. What we were going to do and who we were going to fuck when we got back. I had a girlfriend when I first got here, but after my third tour things pretty much got fucked. She hooked up with some guy from school. I haven’t gotten a letter from her in six months. I used to like getting those letters. It gave me something to look forward to.        Night fell and we could see little pinpoints of light in the darkness and hear the crackle of rifle fire a few blocks away. There was always rifle fire. You got used to it. Some guys couldn’t get used to it and they were the ones that couldn’t sleep.        The mechanics had packed up and left and we were waiting for our replacements when I saw some people across the street near the tanker.        “You see that?” I said.        “Yeah.”        We motioned for the cars to stop and we walked across the street. In Iraq, if you put your hand out palm forward, that means “hello” not stop. The sign for stop is when you put your fingers together and turn your hand up. A lot of Iraqis got shot at checkpoints until we learned that.        We walked past the tanker and in between two buildings. It was quiet over here, the only noise was the traffic and buzz of electric wire on telephone poles.        The moonlight was bright enough for me to see into the alley. It looked empty at first, but then I saw a glimmer about ten feet away. It was the barrel of gun.        The man peaked out and looked right into my pupils as he started firing. I was hit in the chest and flew off my feet. The air smelled like gunsmoke as the man was firing and Jacobs fired back.        The bullet hadn’t gone through my vest and I crawled to my knees and fired, screaming each time I pulled the trigger. He stumbled out and fell onto the pavement, black liquid spreading around him. Blood always looks black in the moonlight.        I looked over to Jacobs. He’d been hit and was lying on his back. “Jacobs! Get up man!” I grabbed him and rolled him over so I could pick him up. When I did, I noticed the shiny surface on the side of his head where his skull had been blown off.        I let him go and got to my feet. I couldn’t think about it. The best advice I’d ever gotten in this fucking desert was to take everything you feel and shove it down deep inside you and forget about it. It was the only way you could keep going.        I heard a noise behind me and spun around with my rifle in front of me. An old Iraqi was crouched over something. “Ma Ismok!” I yelled. “Ma Ismok!”        The man didn’t move. I walked closer to him and saw he was crouched over a body. It was a young girl. She had a large hole in her chest and blood had spattered over her face. The man was crying.        I stood for a long time and watched him before I lowered my rifle. He was sobbing and saying, “ Allah Adiva.”        I got the cigarettes from Jacobs’ pocket and walked over to the man. I sat down next to him in the moonlight and looked over to Jacobs’ body. After a while the man stopped crying. I took out two cigarettes and lit them.        The gray smoke whirled around us and we smoked and listened to the sound of traffic behind us, not saying anything. We didn’t have to. Back  •  Home  •  Next