Turning

France 1848

~

     The gunshots were louder than I could have imagined.

     The screaming was like nothing I had ever heard before.

     Even though I knew the cause was lost, and that everyone who participated was sure to die, I couldn’t help but want to join in the chaos. It was almost magnetic, the sounds of gunfire and the desperation in the men’s voices. We were all yearning for a freedom we could not possess.

     But I knew better than to join the fight.

     The building I sat in rattled with every blast of a cannon. I could feel the bodies dropping; thumping painfully on the cobblestone streets they had grown up on, as if they were raindrops from the sky, falling and shattering once they hit the ground. I never once covered my ears though. I felt a debt to those who were fighting. I knew this was a crucial part of our history, and I wasn’t going to miss a thing. I knew that when this was all over, no one would remember their names or their faces, so one by one I listened to them fight and ultimately die.

     I owed them that much.

     I was hungrier than I had ever been before by the time it was all over. Maybe that meant hours, maybe it meant days. I could never be sure. It had been quiet for a while. The silence was unsettling.

     This is what happens after.

The smell hit me first as I stepped out of my hiding spot and into the street. Traces of gunpowder still hung in the air. It stung my insides when I breathed; I tried not to. The barricade was a sad pile of what I had seen before. Pieces of furniture from the backgrounds of happier memories thrown across the streets in desperation as a last effort to slow down the oncoming enemy. Tables, chairs, cupboards; you name it they used it to shut themselves in. All of the windows in every building nearby were broken. Powerful panes now shattered by violence and death, just like the rest of Paris.

Bodies littered the ground.

Soaked in the liquids that once occupied their limbs so eager for change.

The most profound part being that no matter which side they were on, once wounded, they bled the same red.

Mostly women and children were milling about as I was, unable to rip our eyes from the carnage in front of us. I glanced at the children, noting the fear and horror in their faces.

These are things they will never un-see.

“Mademoiselle.”

A soldier stood next to me, his uniform wrinkled and stained, his hand extended to me. A rag was clutched between his fingers, knowing the horror he was about to ask of me. I ripped my eyes from the rag to see other women being silently told the same task. Their faces went stony as they collected what was needed for the job.

If we knew anything, it was how to put our heads down and work.

The pit in my stomach that I had forgotten about up until that point began to tighten as the soldier sighed and dropped the rag at my feet. The thought of having to sift through the wreckage and clear it away made my insides burn with shame.

The men behind the barricades would not receive a proper burial.

Instead, they would tossed away. Erased, as if they never existed in the first place.

Their memories wiped clean with each swipe of a rag.

A woman came to stand next to me, stooping down to pick up the discarded rag, before pushing it into my hands.

“Just don’t think about it.” Her voice was soft and stern, eyes glossy, face calm.

As I kneeled down on the bloodstained streets, her words echoed in my head.

How could I not think about it? How could I not think about the blood that stained the ends of my dress and the soles of my shoes? How could I just wipe it away knowing that it came from the bodies of boys who wanted something better? Boys who thought they were men meant to go off to war at ages as young as sixteen. Boys who took the troubles of the people around them and made them their own responsibility.

My rag sloshes in time with the lullabies they were sang as children.

I can almost hear their cries of laughter and sadness, I can almost feel the hunger and pain they experienced throughout their lives.

I see a severed hand discarded in the gutter of the street and wonder how many times it gave a gentle touch, or how many times it was held by a loved one.

I see a body strewn out on top of a pile of splinters and wonder how many times he might have scraped his knee as a child, tripping over the furniture he now lays dead on.

I look at the few children around me and wonder if any of them lost fathers or brother in this fight. Where they thinking that they would one day grow up and share this same fate? Fighting for a world so reluctant to change?

The blood stains our hands red as we work. Our rags soaked to their limits.

We take these thoughts and push them out of our heads.

Our tears silently fall.

The world keeps turning.