A Soldier - Flash fiction.

A Soldier.                              

He crouched down, camouflaging into the murky walls of derelict houses. His eyes peeked out from under his helmet darting left to right and back again. The giant rifle he held dwarfed him. He was about the same age as my son, back then, a teenager. I watched him cowering and shivering and decided I’d take him a cup of tea. As I put the kettle on the stove, I heard the shots.  I ran back to the window and saw him sitting against the wall, holding his chest. No return fire meant they’d left him - assuming he was dead. I grabbed a cloth from the airing cupboard and ran back to the window. A group of men had gathered round him. They’d taken his helmet off and were passing it around. I saw him take a bloody hand from his chest and hold it out towards one of the men. The poor lad thought they’d come to help him. I flinched as the man kicked his hand away. In a flash I was out of the house and running towards them. My heart was pounding thinking about his poor mother across the water.

The men were cheering and spitting on him. I pushed through and kneeled before him, his eyes were huge, still darting back and forth. I took his face in my hands and told him he’d be alright. He held out his hand to show me the blood, like a child showing his mother a painting he’d done at school. I heard one of the men calling for the sniper to finish him off and I prayed to God his lot would come for him now. He clutched his chest and cried out for his mother and I told him she was coming. I held the cloth against his chest and immediately it was saturated with blood. The rumble of a helicopter overhead disbursed the men. Then it was just me and him. I gave him my hand and he gripped it tightly. I looked down at the blood under my knees and told him again that his mother was coming. I wiped the spit from his face with my sleeve and he smiled. Then his grip loosened. I’d hoped he’d hang on ‘til they came for him. He slumped onto his side, still holding my hand. A tear dropped from my face into the blood beneath me as the Landover pulled up. His young body was hurled into the back of it, like a bag of coal. They couldn’t risk being there a second more than they had to.

I walked across the street, despising eyes watching me through net curtains. He was just a Brit to them. Not a boy. Not even human. I sat in my bloodied clothes listening to the news on the radio; I wanted to know his name. A soldier was shot dead, it had said. A soldier. And that’s all I would ever know.