A Boy And A Game

Excellence Award in the 'Read Write Repeat 2015' competition

The year was 1941. The train was silent bar the soft hum of a lullaby coaxing a mother’s baby to sleep. Dmitri had disappeared, his red scarf rippling, giggling and playing as if this condemned train ride was simply the means to a new location. This was hardly the case. Unknown at our departure, was the next move. Dispelled and on route, the missile whistled before impact; there was little hope for a miracle. The creases and folds engraved in my skin stood as a testament that it was nearly my time, and surely my insignificant life could never withstand the odds against a German bomb. And it didn’t. Not that it mattered in any case, with the exception of a dark haired boy who was now completely alone. My grandson.
“Dmitri!” I called, ignorant of the fact that my voice was nothing but empty sound waves. Outside, the scene before me unfolded slowly and painfully. Clothes and belongings were strewn across the tracks and lilac clinkers. I winced as I saw a young woman gasping for oxygen, wheezing as thick smoke obtruded her lungs instead. Family and friends shook at loved ones viciously urging them to wake between their wailing sobs. Another token has been wiped off the game board, yet the player cannot see the consequences from behind his desk, coward I thought. Now the soft white frosting lay stained with the crimson coat of loss and devastation. The thought of Dimitri drove my ghostly figure forward, over the debris, passing one compartment after the next.
Over scattered evidence of broken lives I willed myself to believe that Dimitri was unharmed. The voice in my subconscious insisted I find Dmitri for the sake of consolation or peace before departing this world. While mindlessly floating through obstacles, my attention was drawn to a figure ahead. A figure with a familiar red scarf and dark hair. A figure lying very, very still. A little girl, recognisable the friend Dmitri met on the train, shook at Dmitri, an odd little bobble on her hat bouncing as she did. Sluggishly, the bruised boy stood, his knees grated and his head bleeding. “Grandmamma!” The little girl took off, walking with a definitive purpose. The two zigzagged through bodies until their voices tired. Hitler’s pawns must have proceeded as the droning in the air receded farther into the distance.
“I don’t think we’re going to find our grand mammas.” Dmitri stood still processing what she said. I watched my grandson as he said, “come, I’ll protect you.” In an instant a boy became a man, his innocence shattered with an air dropped bomb, a single move. This game is a futile cycle that no one had won twenty years earlier, and no one will win now. The Führer had strategized Operation Barbarossa but how is checkmate a win when you have pawns, bishops, castles or knights scattered at your feet, their blood staining your hands?

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