Always Before the Black Flame

By William Crosby

In midnight clad stood the crow on his nightly watch. In this brief respite, nothing assaulted his senses—not a creak of an old elm, sagging beneath the weight of the years, not the rustling of its leaves in the hot breeze, carrying with it the smell of freshly upturned earth, not even a distant shout of a barrel chested man. In this moment, the waking world was naught but silence. In this silence, the halcyon days of yesteryear once more drew breath.

As always, it was not to last. The distant thump of the Khakis’ big thunderers, reeking with the blood-stench of scalding metal, started up again, first as a slight pattering, like that of a nascent rainstorm, then as the full deluge of a pregnant sky. As the crow knew to expect, the thunder from so far away, from another world, soon breached the firmament and split the sky. A shrill musical whistling, like that of the playing children that once ruled this land, pierced the inky black, and the crow turned his attention. Gazing upon the Grays, the crow waited for the inevitable.

“Suchen Deckung!” barked a thin man, obviously aged beyond his years, his voice striking out across the broken pasture like that of the nightly parties of grim men, probing the enemy’s web. What the crow expected came to pass: the pockmarked world was illuminated by a miniature sun cast in the air from the grayed man’s hand. “Suchen Deckung, suchen Deckung, suchen Deckung!” croaked the crow in shrill imitation of the grayed man, who was known as “grenadier”, in his sooty uniform. All around him, boys, looking half the age of the old grenadier, scrambled in their web of concrete in obeisance to the older man’s command, all seeking shelter from the steel rain. In the time it took for the crow to readjust himself on his splintered post, the rain crashed down all along the web, unleashing a deafening percussion such as the crow had heard many times before. Stones and dust and splinters of metal and wood, all cast up in the air, were scattered about in a pattern that underlies all such calamities. Within a short minute, the barrage concluded, and the crow slipped his mooring and cast off for the Grays trench in a flurry of pitched wings.

The crow, furling his feathers, dropped from the sky in a mimicry of the steel rain from just a minute earlier. He sped towards the ground, a tightly speeding bolt of black aiming for the Grays, looking for any who turned his eye to the sky as yet more munitions. At the last second of his terminal descent, the crow threw out his wings, immediately catching the air with a thwack of wind-beaten feathers. His wizened claws then felt the give of the padded post that the Grays maintained for him, despite the carnage all around. “Suchen Deckung!” cried the crow as the grenadier ran by, grabbing each individual soldier he came across, inspecting them for wounds, fretting like a worried mother over her child’s clothing. After a few moments, the grenadier evidently concluded none of his boys were hurt enough for real concern, and he trudged through the trench with a thin grin splitting his face. The crow inclined his head, fixing his stygian eyes on the gray man. The man approached and unclenched his fist, revealing a few crumbs of rye bread therein. “Suchen Deckung!” squawked the crow in appreciation, snapping up this offering.

The grenadier’s smile widened, showing the wrinkles of his face in all their glory, and sighed, “Ja, suchen Deckung, richtig,” as he gently felt down the crow’s wing. The grenadier’s children ran past, grabbing their long branches and thin mud-colored pots, slapping the latter on their heads.

As they passed, each soldier acknowledged the crow, either with a nod or a quick “Ewig”, which the crow had long since come to understand to be the Grays’ name for him. Each boy continued past the crow to a specific point along the stone line of this small part of the web, whereupon each would slam into the bank, pushing off with one foot and a knee to peak his head and branch above the top. Soon, the trench was silent, all except for the faint click of the crow’s beak. After ensuring Ewig was cared for and the boys all in position, the grayed grenadier in his muddy gray uniform shooed the crow off with a wave. “Jetzt, fliegst du, Ewig.”

With that, Ewig followed the man’s command, leaping from his post and taking to the sky, the loving eyes of the soldiers following him. He quickly reached a hundred feet above the ground, whereupon he began to lazily wheel about, beating his wings only on an occasional whim. Glancing about, the crow saw the familiar sights of the broken field. Large holes carved out of the land, shattered trees, charred trees, rotting fleshy things, half submerged in the brackish water, met his eyes.

The sound of thunder once more thumped in the distance, sounding like the bales of hay which farmers once threw down from wagons on this land. This time, the crow knew, there would be no lightning percussion following in response. As the crow flapped, he saw shells leisurely crossing the sky, shooting stars beyond time. In just a few more seconds, the shells struck down, finding their target in front of the Grays’ home.

Each shell, as was expected of such a secondary bout of thunder, resulted in a cloud of thick gray smoke. As of late, this thick smog had come to replace the choking yellow smoke of the earlier seasons. The crow figured this was due to the fact that both the Khakis and the Grays suffered in equal measure at the hands of the poison smoke, its fickle nature being beholden to none but the wind, and thus, they decided to tell their thunderers to abstain from such measures.

This replacement gray smoke, while sooty and thick, didn’t burn as the poison smoke did, liquifying flesh and breaking anything that drew breath as surely as would the steel rain. Regardless, the billowing gray smoke spewed forth from the crashed shells, venting their concealed cargo upon the devastated landscape.

With the grays now totally blanketed under the shell-fog, the crow turned his gaze upon the Khakis, seeing them scurrying around their own respective web, which the crow figured now to be more like that of an ant colony. While the Grays had a spider web of stone, stark white in its concrete cladding, the Khakis had a muddy brown series of ant tunnels, reminding the crow of his favorite food before the breaking of the land.

While the Grays had a drier, nicer web than the anthill the Khakis lived in, the Khakis had the better food. As the crow drifted over the Khaki lines, the bark of a thickset man drifted up, seeming to whip the Khaki boys into a frenzy of movement. The crow couldn’t quite make out what this man said, so he once more shot downwards, though he hoped more for food than he did for clarification.

The crow tucked his wings a second time, angling downwards with his tail feathers to guide his descent. The wind whipped by as the crow fell, seeming to none but him as an equal in volume to the thunder of the first barrage. This time, however, the crow let fly his wings early, unclasping them from his body far above the ground. He wheeled about, scanning the disorderly trench below for his scavenged wooden box the Khakis kept for him. After a few seconds of searching, the outline of the box made itself apparent, and the crow plunged down again.

The crow set down on the roof of his wooden nest and ticked his head, pausing for a few seconds between each avian movement to take in what he saw. Men with stripes on their shoulders sped through the line, grabbing each Khaki boy, each ironically displaying a bloodless gray face under their flat round steel pots. Each striped man rummaged about each, feeling over canvas pockets and pouches. Finally, after all the boys were checked, the same barrel chested man from earlier called something that the crow clearly made out this time. “Affix bayonets!” shouted the large man, overly wrinkled like the Gray’s grenadier, but with a ruddy coloration of his face. He hiccupped, then spotted the crow. He barked out a harsh laugh, then rummaged in his myriad pouches for a few seconds, pulling out both a piece of bread and a tin of fruit preserves. The crow expectantly clacked his beak, lusting after the sweetness offered by the jam. The big man smeared the bread in the tin, then offered not just a few crumbs to the crow as the grenadier did, but rather the whole piece of bread. Without even a croak, the crow frantically started picking at the jammed areas, savoring each nip as he did. The big man, who the boys reverently referred to as “colour sergeant”, let out a booming laugh at the crows behavior, then fetched himself his own piece of bread. Two boys huddled against the wood runged trench side made to follow suit.

“Shouldn’t do that, boys, or you’ll wish you didn’t when you take one to the gut,” rasped a hollow cheeked man next to them. “If you make it back, surgeons’ll not be able to untwist your innards, what with the food and all…” trailed off this specter of the mud. The crow recognized this man, though he knew not what the Khakis called him. The other two boys, however, didn’t look familiar to the crow. Still, the two boys looked at each other, then slowly spit their bread into discolored strips of cloth, bundled up to be eaten later. Each looked even grayer than before.

“Shouldn’t do that, shouldn’t do that, shouldn’t do that,” mimicked the crow now, having gorged himself on the bread and jam to fullness.

The towering Colour Sergeant, now looking back at the crow after checking his wrist, chuckled and said, “S’ppose I shouldn’t, now should I?” Unlike the two boys, however, he continued chewing, eventually finishing his white bread after what seemed like an eternity of mashing. He swallowed, then looked back at the crow.

“You’ll wish you didn’t, wish you didn’t, wish you didn’t,” said the crow this time. Again, the man chuckled, hiccuping several times in the process, then proffered a flask to the crow. The flask gleamed in the early morning light, polished to a blued steel mirror finish, looking to the crow like a still, pure lake. The lengths of steel on the end of each boys’ rifle looked much the same in coloration. The crow, out of curiosity, brought his beak close to the flask, and the scent of the water they fed the metal beasts met his senses.

“Here, for you,” rumbled the sergeant in a low tone, like that of a friend sharing a risque joke at a funeral, and the crow squawked, then lapped up a tiny portion of the liquid. With that, the man burst into full blown laughter, and some of the boys joined him, having been watching the crow this whole time. Soon, however, the sergeant checked his wrist again, and signaled for the boys to be silent. “It’s time for you to leave, m’boy,” said the sergeant, this time in a much more muted fashion than his previous utterances. He waved his hand at the crow, and the crow started off for the sky.

Almost before the crow cleared the edges of the trench, the big man reached for his neck, then let loose a loud, shrill screech from a trinket on a chain. The crow once found this item in the mud, fishing it out to return to its owner. Now, back in the hands of its rightful possessor, it emanated a loud whistling cry. Down the line, other men with stripes imitated this noise with devices of their own, and as the crow soared higher into the sky, he heard the resounding shout of the sergeant. “OVER THE TOP, BOYS!”

Gracing the ears of none, the crow replied in kind. “You’ll wish you didn’t, wish you didn’t, wish you didn’t.”

****

William Crosby is a college student at the University of Nevada, Reno, and a current third year cadet in Army ROTC. He is an Eagle Scout, mechanic, outdoorsman, avid reader, and community service organizer. Upon receiving his commission into the United States Army as a second lieutenant, he intends to branch infantry. He is a recipient of the American Legion’s General Military Excellence Award and Scholastic Excellence Award.