Teen Ink

A Place Untouched by War

The first rays of sunlight spread across the land. Slowly revealing the charred land. The sunrays began to try to warm the cold land. The girl opened her eyes and slowly allowed herself to wake up. Little boy was cold in her arms, cold and motionless. The girl was completely awake now, she shook little boy, and his cold little hands still gripped her shirt, his body holding on to her when his soul could not.
Wild boy’s eyes glow though the receding darkness, watching the girl bury the little boy in a blanket, for the soil is frozen hard and graves cannot be dug.
“He died with his eyes closed, still afraid to look at the world.” The girl says, her face is without tears, for she has no more tears to cry.
“We must leave this place.” Says wild boy.
“What we?”
“You and I”
“I will not leave this place. I have no where to go.”
“What is there to stay here for?” Says wild boy, his eyes on the girl. She turns and faces him, her harsh eyes stone like and glinting in the morning’s new light.
“Where is there to go? As far as the eye can see, there is only charcoal and the bodies of the dead. To travel would be a waste.”
“There must be some place untouched by the war. Our country is large.”
“Our country? You do not understand, we have no country; this land is now a place with the name ‘no man’s land’ there are no boundaries, no place untouched. All around is only the destroyed, no more. Soldiers still lurk about in the areas we do not know, and I have no mind to be seeing them again.” The girl looks right into wild boy’s eyes. Those glass green eyes penetrate though wild boy’s harshness and to his soul, where he is still a poor orphan child, with just one glance she sees right though to the place he protects the most.
“To move would give a purpose to living. Here there is nothing but rebuilding what will be knocked down by the next round of soldiers. There is no one and nothing here for you.” Wild boy’s voice is harsh, although he does not mean it to be.
“Living needs no purpose, it simply is. A man can live without a care, without a reason or without a purpose and still breath. To live is to survive, to continue to exist.” The girl rises and takes one last look at little boy’s body, wrapped in the blanket. She remembers prising his ice-cold hands off her shirt. No blanket will bring him warmth now. The girl looks up at the morning sky, and the leafless trees with their blackened branches, and the rubble that used to be a village.
“I will go with you, to search for some place untouched by war. There must be some corner of this earth where peace exists, although I hardly believe it. The search will most likely kill me, and though death I go to a whole another place, and that strange and distant place might be without war.”
“Dying is easy, you only have to do it once.” Wild boy says with a smile. His face has become so hard to the wind, and there is a scar that runs down his cheek; these two things make his smile more a curling of the upper lip to reveal sharp, cat like teeth.