Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers Page A

myself as we reached the other side of the bridge.
    “Yeah, Ma, I’m fine.”
    I let the green blur of trees along highways and side roads lull me into some approximation of comfort until we turned down our gravel driveway. The yard had not been mowed in a long time.
    “What’s the first thing you want to do, sweetie?” she asked excitedly.
    “I’d like to shower and then…I don’t know, sleep, I guess.”
    It was almost noon and it was spring and the pond behind the house was quiet. She helped me bring my duffel inside the house, and I went into my room. “I’m putting breakfast on, John, your favorite.” Bright sunlight fell between the wood-slatted blinds. I shut them and pulled the curtains over. I shut the light off and pulled the chain dangling from the ceiling fan. The hum of the blades muffled the cars’ engines on the street and the soft rattle of pans in the kitchen. I smelled the grease and the unmowed grass. I smelled the clean house and the wood-frame bed. It was all filler. The noise, the sound, they existed just to take up space. My muscles flexed into the emptiness I still called home.
    The room was dark and cool. I was tired. I folded my cover and put it on the bedside table. The blouse came off next. Then the belt, hung over the bedpost. I sat on the bed and reached down, unlacing the right boot first, then removing the right sock. In the muddy dimness, the dog tag strung into the laces of my left boot shone. I fingered it and sat upright.
    I was disappearing. It was as if I stripped myself away in that darkened bedroom on a spring afternoon, and when I was finished there would be a pile of clothes neatly folded and I would be another number for the cable news shows. I could almost hear it. “Another casualty today,” they’d say, “vanished into thin air after arriving home.” Fine. I leaned down and finished unlacing the boot and strung the dog tag back around my neck and let it lie against the other. Left boot and left sock off. Pants off. Underwear off. I was gone. I opened the closet door and stood in front of the dressing mirror. My hands and face were tanned to rust. The rest of my body, pale and thinned, hung in the reflection as if of its own accord. I sighed and crawled beneath the cool sheets.
    My mind and body waxed and waned under the fan. The sound of motors trilled as they moved toward our house, then lulled off into the distance as they rolled past. A train in the cut beyond the wood line made its shift as well, high-pitched and seeming to hurtle toward my single bed, as if falling toward me, as if I’d become some mass attracting the noise of metal and the metal itself. My pulse fluttered up into my eyes. I exhaled hard whenever the noise rolled past, off toward some other target. I don’t remember what I dreamed, but Murph was there, Murph and me and the same ghosts every night. I don’t remember what I dreamed, but finally I slept.

6
SEPTEMBER 2004
    Al Tafar, Nineveh Province, Iraq
    When we neared the orchard a flock of birds lit from its outer rows. They hadn’t been there long. The branches shook with their absent weight and the birds circled above in the ruddy mackerel sky, where they made an artless semaphore. I was afraid. I smelled copper and cheap wine. The sun was up, but a half-moon hung low on the opposite horizon, cutting through the morning sky like a figure from a child’s pull-tab book.
    We were lined along the ditch up to our ankles in a soupy muck. It all seemed in that moment to be the conclusion of a poorly designed experiment in inevitability. Everything was in its proper place, waiting for a pause in time, for the source of all momentum to be stilled, so that what remained would be nothing more than detritus to be tallied up. The world was paper-thin as far as I could tell. And the world was the orchard, and the orchard was what came next. But none of that was true. I was only afraid of dying.
    The orchard was quiet. The lieutenant waved his arm