Schrapnel Dreams

When I heard the sound of waves, the reality that everything was wrong came crashing down on me. Normandy had no waves. Or maybe it did. Either way, there was no way of hearing them over the screams of dying men and the rat-ta-tat-tat of the German guns. These waves I could hear clearly, and each break reverberated in my ears.

Another piece of something gone wrong was that I was dry. When I had finally crawled up onto Normandy sand, my uniform and self had been drenched to the core. I was amazed that I had managed to keep my gun clear of the water for that twenty-meter swim, but I had. Somehow. The reality that I made it to shore was the stunning part, but in this reverberating wave world, I wasn\'t so sure.

I had always heard from my platoon that the images that run through your mind at certain times in your life will shock you. They went on to say that the shrapnel induced dreams were some of the ones that no one knew much about. And for a sickeningly good reason: No one came out of those dreams alive.

My eyes fluttered open to a sky of peaches and pale lavenders. A sky of beautiful colors unlike any I had seen before in my small town in Essex, England. Yet it was not Normandy\'s. Normandy\'s sky was a gunmetal with American planes flying overhead, releasing their live or explosive cargo with such vehemency we feared for our own lives. Ironically, as it turned out, we needed to fear for their lives. r thr the sixth American plane crashed down, either in channel or German held land, we realized just how desperately we had needed those few planes. I won’t lie; once we realized that hundreds around us were dead, we spared no thought in using that to our advantage. Several pulled dead bodies around them and started firing from there, picking off the grey suited Germans. Others hid under these bodies till the bombs cleared. Some however, remembered that one of them could have been a friend. Nothing could have been more devastating than to find out you used your best friend as cover. To us, that would be ultimate betrayal, an ultimate disgrace to our souls.

We were the ones first shot down, first bombed, and the first dead.

I wasn\'t dead though, that much I knew. But what I didn\'t know was where I was. It looked like Normandy; the cliffs were there. The white cliffs that symbolized home stood off in the distance, but it all was different. Somehow, it wasn\'t what I remembered, so it wasn\'t what I knew. In this sense, I knew what I saw wasn\'t true, and I didn\'t believe it. Luckily for me, I didn\'t have to. Seeing never always meant believing.

I tried to glance around, but the swift movement brought a sharp pain to my head. It was an instantaneous throbbing, directly behind my eyes. Slamming them shut, my breath came in long hissing gasps as I waited for the pain to recede. Again I cautiously opened my eyes, and this time, I slowly propped myself up on an elbow before glancing around again. I didn\'t see much, save a few scrub bushes and copious amounts of short grasses. The sandy beach only lasted about a meter or so, then the grasses filled in the 10-meter space between the beach and the cliffs. On about the second glance around, I noticed something that frightened me because I realized I missed it the first time. A gorgeous bay stallion stood not but two meters from me. His breath came in a powerful snort as he cropped the grass close to the ground. His build reminded me of the great war horses from the past, and judging by the spots of bare skin around his neck, chest and back, I presumed I was correct. His mane had been neatly shorn to the graceful arch of his neck, but his tail streamed out. As my gaze followed its insane flutters, I saw droplets of blood falling down the strands. Horrified, I turned my attention back to his head. No longer was he eating grass, but his teeth that had only seconds before ground up delicate blades of spring grass were now methodically destrg a g a young boy\'s heart. The boy\'s lifeless cobalt eyes stared me down and blood fell from his lips. The insignia on his arm and chest were hidden from my view, but from his short cropped blond hair and the helmet and goggles that lay nearby, I could only assume he was an American flyboy. The horse himself had changed. Wire wings had sprouted from his bulging shoulders, and his coat was a mix of dark dried blood and a fresh splattering of new red over a coat of pure white I b I blinked, stunned. When my eyes reopened, I was assaulted again by the peaceful scene of the proud warhorse. He didn\'t seem to have noticed anything different and didn\'t seem to have cared that only a moment before I had seen him as a cannibalistic fiend, happily destroying my ally\'s youth. I released a breath, trying to let the scream out silently, but the horse knew differently. Acting as if I had just yelled in his delicate ear, he reared up and proceeded to lope away, poul mul muscles in his fore and hind quarters bunching and straightening effortlessly. I was in awe, yet I was sickened. I didn\'t know how to respond to this perversion, this dream that I was stuck in.

Suddenly, my entire body screamed in pain. Looking up, I saw before me the panicked eyes of a medic. He seemed to be searching for something in my pain filled eyes, yet it might not have been too evident. He turned and yelled at his companion to hurry because they didn\'t have much time before the next one landed. As I glanced down to look at this second medic, I first saw his arms. The sleeves were covered in blood, some mine, some my friends. His hands had disappeared into my abdomen, also with six inches of his forearms as well. As his companion tugged frantically on his sleeve, radioing in this disaster, he slowly pulled his hands from my gut.

The tree branch waved over my head, its leaves fluttering, waving their gold- green for all to see. I was the only one that was watching them however. I was frightened now, I had no idea as to what was going on but I knew one thing: I wanted this to end. I wanted to be free of whatever last little bit of sanity held me chained to this world.

Again I tried my luck at finding something resembling a human in this desolate Normandy. I found one hiding behind a few boulders near the water. She was watching me with cool burgundy eyes that shone with a bubbly happiness. She wasn\'t human, that much was apparent from her head and hands, all I could see above the rocks. She had no apparent nose or ears. The spikes that lined their way from her forehead down her back seemed rather formidable. Gills were present on her neck. The only thing I could think of as I stared at her webbed hands was, \'Great, now for the stereotypical mermaid siren.\' However, as we both stared at one another, she felt the desire, I suppose, to come forwards. I figure she had never seen a man before, and, of course, I had not seen one of her kind at all in my life. None of my lessons in mythology and its creatures prepared me for this. As she pulled herself forward, she revealed a slender human torso, only marred by gills along the rib cage. Then the shapely forelegs of a horse were seen, though not of a great stallion like the one I had seen before, but of a smaller, lighter horse, an Arabian I would suppose. This body too had gills down the sides, along the rib cage to be exact. Fins sprouted where hooves once were, and its body was covered in shining delicate scales. Then came the most amazing of all things. The horse\'s torso melded into a tail that measured roughly 6 meters. It was obvious from the tremendous way the tail slapped the wet sand that it could propel the girl, or whatever she was, through the water at very high speeds. Fins on the back of the human and horse torso would help to serve as ballast, and the front legs were like the rudder. For all the amazing strength I knew this creature had, the way she pulled and slid her way toward me reminded me only of a terminally ill patient. Her movements seemed drugged, and her hair and scales shone with a pained listfullness. As she approached me, she reached out a slender hand to touch my forehead.

I stared up into the barrel of my burgundy eyed assassin\'s assault rifle. The screams of dying men filled my ears. It was a brutal collision with the peacefulness I had just before been exposed to. The rat-ta-tat-tat returned, and it was some how a sound that lulled me even more than the waves did. Soon I forgot about the cold metal gun barrel to my forehead. Soon I forgot about the metal scraps that had torn my abdomen to shreds.

With a click and a sharp crack soon following, I found out why shrapnel dreams were the best.