Wagtail

• Ev Gorskikh, Grade 9
• Short Story
• 2021

It’s been some time since I met Earnest. Back then his off-centered ways alarmed me, yet beckoned me to intrigue at the same time. He was behind me in line, using age against the younger folks, warning us of the game that was war. He was cocky but quiet, refused to submit to officers.
He disgusted them.

He was illiterate, for a man so evenly smart.
Sat at camp, in the mildewed tents, the man drew. With a fatherly hand he laboured vastly coloured worlds often too optimistic for our own foreground. It was always castles, tigers, sketched in a notebook. He adored tigers.
He drew vivid landscapes of unusual flora, beasts a land-tied Englishman would only dream of seeing, spending hours hunched passionately, muttering like a foregin wizard.

Sometimes I complimented his creations.
“For my daughters” he’d smile, calling us ‘gentlemen’ kindly.

When the bugle pierced through the array of tents, its sound shrill, we piled out for breakfast, lingering in unbuttoned tunics. Mornings were eerie, the numbness managed to nestle under your skin, your eyes would water if you looked directly at the sky.

Earnest stood next to me, smelling like mud.
I thumbled, taking out a cigarette, then caught him staring, deep-set with melancholy.

“Take one.” I began to retrieve my rations, but he dismissed me with a wave.

“I don’t smoke.”

“Rare to find a soldier who ‘don’t smoke’.”

“First time I did, my mate swiped one from his dad. We hid behind the house, taking goddamn ages to light the thing.” He chuckled, “the blasted burning, never again”.

I avoided his gaze and re-lit my own.

“Hey, lemme show you a thing.” he called. I shifted closer, not knowing whether I should. He unbuttoned his jacket, I followed his eyes to a pocket, and inside, a petite bird. A scuffle of grey feathers.

A White Wagtail, it seemed

“You’re a good man, Henderson.”

“It’s beautiful.”

“Found her on the ground yesterday, shivering..” he looked up, cautious of my reaction.

But why save something so small and unimportant? Was he trying to be impressionate and stand out?

I looked around the yard. Everybody was avoiding us, blending in with the horizon, still half asleep, or immersed in their own preparations. We didn’t look like an army. We looked too young and too weak and too fragile to hold a gun.

“Let her be a reminder. Stay cheerful.” He buttoned up his jacket again. “I’m taking her with me.”

“It’s not a soldier.”

“They're gonna throw her out otherwise. Heartless creatures.”

“A battlefield has no place for it?”

“She’s mine, so I decide what happens to her.” I stared at him intently. “Even if there’s no place for her at all.”

My eyes fell to the dirt. I imagined the bird frozen, lying amongst dismantled bodies, trampled over by men streaming to make everybody in unfamiliar uniform fall dead. It did nothing wrong.

Earnest smiled at me.
And the bugle tore through the tents once more.