After a long
time of working on my Young Adult book and not writing flash fictions, I
decided that I wanted to get back into flash. But I was a little intimidated,
having not worked in the form for at least 6 months or more. But I had a story
in mind. With the novel, I'd been writing on the computer (I typically write by
hand) so I sat down with just a notebook – no computer, no internet – and this
story flowed out in not even an hour, and with not much revision to the draft
below.
Within a week,
it was accepted for publication by SmokeLong Quarterly! But the best part was that they have every story
they publish illustrated, and asked if I had anyone in mind. I said yes ... my
wife, Jeannie!
I also love
this piece because it is based on a real moment in history, which I learned
while reading the book Monuments Men – the movie adaptation of which comes out
in February! It's a beautiful moment in history, and another of my favorite
flash fictions.
“Chartres”
from
SmokeLong Quarterly
Half-eaten bowls of meager rations still rested where they’d
been hurriedly abandoned, the bread and cheese desiccated
and colored with mold, the cups once warmed with coffee now filmed over. The
pathway that over the centuries the penitent had crawled in supplication had
become a gathering place, a communal table to its sheltered. But this sanctuary,
too, the war had confiscated. Chartres was a ghost town, now after the German
retreat, the bridges, roads, and buildings surrounding the cathedral mined in
twenty-two places with explosives, enough tonnage to bring down in seconds what
four generations had toiled to build.
|
"Chartres" (c 2012 Jeannie Beirne) |
Toward the end of his first day disarming the mines,
Corporal Penner had seriously considered detonating the rest of them, letting
the cathedral come down. German bomb-makers were notorious tricksters,
innovative, always looking for new ways to fool army engineers. Penner had
missed a hidden tripwire in one, discovered it when a button on his sleeve
caught on the wire, and only by pure dumb luck didn’t pull hard enough to
trigger the fuse. He’d stopped then for the day, lain awake well into the night
waiting for the adrenaline to wear off; by morning, a tremor remained. His
hands weren’t shaking, he could still do his job – the tremor was internal, as
if his body were impatient, restless, distracted. All night, he had considered
the value of art, of human construction and history. He had weighed the lives
of four past generations against his own. No one else was there to get hurt; no
one else was there to know. Corporal Penner had finally fallen asleep planning
to detonate the remaining explosives the next day, unwilling to risk his life
to save no others.
But in the morning light, Penner had beheld the cathedral
with new eyes. Golden beneath the dawn sun, its spires reached toward heaven,
the majestic skyline of a culture, and Penner walked toward it imagining
himself a worshipper coming to mass, a refugee seeking sanctuary, a sinner
seeking redemption. He had heard reports from the Italian theater of the
bombardment of the abbey at Monte Cassino, and just two months ago Hitler himself
had been unable to order the destruction of Florence, preserving the Ponte
Vecchio – his favorite bridge – despite the tactical necessity of its
demolition. The atrocities of war were no secret to the world, but there was
still an honorable way to wage war.
Penner resumed his work, using the lingering tremor’s reminder to be more
cautious and thorough.
Months before, Penner had fought another kind of tremor,
fatal to anyone working with explosives. Earlier in the war, he had coped with
the strain of prolonged focus in his work by drinking coffee almost constantly
to stay awake. Then his army division ran out. The quartermasters promised to
get more soon, but soon was too late. For three days, Penner excused himself
from duty, his hands shaking violently, piercing aches sprinting through his
head. When the withdrawal was over, the coffee supply returned, but Penner was
done.
This new tremor from the adrenaline
of his close call stayed with Penner through the rest of the job. Mine after
mine, he worked his way bridge and road around the cathedral, disarming each
device then storing the components until his team could dispose of them. Now,
the cathedral safe, he entered the sanctuary, the first to set foot inside since
the town’s evacuation, the half-eaten meals still where they’d been left. He’d
felt the pain of shortage, even as an American soldier, and saw the urgency of
flight in this abandonment.
Walking slowly down the center aisle, Penner was alone in
the massive sanctuary. A cooling evening breeze entered through the empty
windows like a breath, the stained-glass removed and stored away. Sandbags were
stacked along the walls, and further gaps had been opened in the ceiling by the
trajectory of artillery shells, though none had managed to detonate inside. It
was some kind of miracle, Penner understood, that the cathedral still stood
against this bomb-leveled landscape, and for the first time he saw himself as
an instrument in a hand beyond the U.S. Army. One thing he had always liked
about working on a bomb squad was never having a supervisor looking over his
shoulder. He felt an unexpected peace at finding this freedom no longer true,
nor wanted. Standing in the center of the medieval labyrinth at the cruciform
crossing, evening sunlight slanting brightly through the empty window frames,
he realized that the tremors had gone.
(c 2012 Matthew Brennan)