The Forgotten One

Slc. Dennis Bishop 10/27/2004

The night is a dark one, with clouds overhead dropping their cold rain onto the land below, the cold winds blow down from the snow covered hills to the valley below. The lights of city streets reach into the sky, turning it an orange color. Many homes are done up with strings of lights for the holidays that are coming.

Out on the edge of a smaller town, is a trailer park, out in the field that runs between the trailer park and a newly built home is a garden. There are no lights in it, the plants await the daylight so they may keep on growing, in the garden sits old discarded chairs so that the one who works in it may rest at times. But there are many nights when that one can be found sitting out in the darkness. On clear nights he may look up at the stars overhead, other nights he just seems to be looking nowhere and yet every where too. In his eyes is a the look of someone seeing things far away, not only in distance but time itself. On this night he watches as the wall of rain draws nearer and he watches the flash of lighting too, and waiting for the roll of thunder to come. With each flash of light, he sees an image of a far away land that was lite up by another flash of light at night, with another kind of thunder rolling over the land.

He known that place is now nothing but an empty field, and to anyone seeing it, there is nothing then, but to some there is something more there, and no matter where in the world they are, they see the image. The image if could be seen, would be of a bunker made of sandbags, standing on top of it with an M-16 stands one man watching the fields that seem to go on forever, and with the sun already down, his outline is against a brightly colored sky. Yet he is not alone, for others stand nearby, all of them watching the field beyond. Then as full darkness comes to the land, the image of the men fade away, the last image is of the one on the bunker. These are the sprits of those who died here, on this battle field, and while their bodies may rest someplace else, for these sprits the order to Stand Down never came and thus, until the end of time itself they will remain here awaiting the word.

The man feels the first drops of rain, so he wraps himself in the worn jacket and goes inside, he knows that the next day he'll take cane in hand, wrap himself up good and once more walk the road to the store, but in his mind, he'll be walking the road with those who walked another road in another land.