One Shots in First Person

I've been taken. Taken against my will and forced to suffer in silence halfway across the world. They say I am with my brothers; if that's true, then I have been disowned.

An ancient desert is the omnipresent set-piece that dominates my captivity. Millennia upon millennia of churning sands have buried the blood that has so often stained this hallowed ground, but the air is still heady with the dreams and desperations of better men than I. Men that were taken just as I was, and fought a war more terrible than I can imagine. Their poignant desires stretch across time and taunt me, thinking my efforts futile. How can a lesser man not be claimed where so many have?

But I've been armed, and armored, mentally and physically. Those who took me hardened a soft resolve into a firm will. My will does not stem from where they wish, however. It is not for country nor brother that I defy the whispers of the desert and the wild eyes of my enemy, but for myself. I will not bow. I cannot.

I have entered this desert weak, alone, and afraid, but I will leave it a better man, a stronger man, or I will not leave at all. And if I am truly entrenched in misfortune, this desert will claim a part of me, and I will walk in a limbo between hell and life. Taken forever far away, walking the desert in my home, my dreams, and even in her eyes.

"Ready."

Professor McAllister.

"Aim."

The Ace of Diamonds.

There is what I am, and what I am called. They call me murderer. Insurgent. Revolutionary. I am all of these things. But I should be more than that. I have to be. A man is more than the sum of his parts, and beyond the sum of his actions. It is here that I have failed. My actions served my words, my existence served my actions. I am no more than what I am called by others because of this.

But I wish to be.

I wish to be a father, growing old with my hand clasped with that of another, watching children that bear my name grow, and maybe one day fix this terrible world. I want to pass my life into the hands of someone too innocent to understand.

I wish to be a lover. Little could please me more than having my body and soul entwined with another, sharing in a splendor that words fail to even grasp.

I wish to be a great brother, great uncle, cousin. Enjoy the trials and tribulations of family arrivals and departures.

I'm not selfish, at least I don't think so. For a man as dominated by his belief as I why don't I deserve to have something I wish for? I don't know, and I never will.

Six rifles stared me down from ten feet away. My fingers entwined around each other, bound behind my back. The blindfold offered is at my feet, mucus and spit on the white cotton cloth.

"Any last words, Mr. McAllister?"

My eyes closed and I swallowed a lump in my throat, but not by choice. Dying with dignity was beyond me. The lamentations of a half-life festered in my brain. My mouth gaped open like a fish out of water as I tried to formulate the statement with which I could leave this world. And perhaps be that much better because of it.

I tried so hard to do better.

But the words wouldn't come out. The Sergeant at Arms locked eyes with my mute face, wild with horror, and he smiled.

"Fire."

"I--"

Let it be said first that I have no regrets. I feel sadness and joy just as anyone does. The only difference between myself and you is that I deal with the sadness differently.

I've killed men. These men needed to die. That doesn't mean, however, that they were not good men. Better men. They've never seen my face, but I have seen theirs; albeit only after they've departed.

Never have I seen a more accusing gaze than that of a dead man. He does not blink, and his pupils don't focus on my own, and still he stares all the same. He does not question. He knows the reason for his death. He walked a different road than me.

Is that a valid reason for him to disappear, body and soul? No matter how different they may be from me, and no matter how contradictory our ideals are, no one deserves to leave this world in obscurity.

So they are preserved, fragmented as they are, in my mind. They have their lovers and children, as I do. Wives and kids that one day will wonder why their father hasn't returned, as I one day will not.

I am a collage of monuments to nameless men that died in silence, denied even the surge of DMT to the brain before death. Their souls have been stripped down and added to my own. They will persist as long as I do, and I will repay their lives so savagely taken by giving my silent remembrance. In doing this I know I have lost a part of myself, but that is my price. I will drive my wife and daughter away and die not a man, soldier, husband, or father, but a monumental.

I did not know him, not by name. I only knew his moniker: Padre. I was in the sky with him though, the day the war ended, and I was...privileged enough to coordinate his fighter wing during the offensive on the installation Babylon.

A canyon bristling with more triple-A and AT emplacements than we could care to count, with an active chemical weapon at its center. What we saw from our AWAC couldn't have done justice for how close Babylon was to Hell.

For two hours I relayed air strikes orders for Padre's flight, the usual slow grind of an unstoppable force and an immovable object. We didn't need them to move, though, just give up or die.

As the sun was going down, apparently the enemy ran a risk assessment and didn't like what they saw. With our ground forces less than halfway through the canyon, the silo doors in its center opened, and a single ICBM was just barely visible in the darkening sky. The launch sequence started, and Padre went dark. Didn't say anything, just changed his heading and went full burn.

Before then I had never seen or heard anything more haunting in my life: an F-22 Raptor travelling at Mach 1+ just over the crest of the canyon. Tracers streaked past it through the sky and every second or so a flare flew from the craft. What shook me most wasn't what I saw, though. It was what he said.

"I took off into God's great blue today a changed man. A weaker man. I have lost my faith, my family, my home. All that's left is me, the man, crying out his sorrows at the edge of the earth.

And the angels must kneel down, and hang their heads to low hear me...and they don't. They only watch. They do not hear. They do not judge. They do not love.

So for all their inaction. For all the men they let die. For the world that they let crumble to dust."

Only 3 other people besides me heard that, and I never met any of them. All of us saw the action to match his words, though, as the small speck of his Raptor screamed toward the stars, stalled, and dove. Padre's plane disappeared on its way back down, becoming a silver bullet streaking toward the maw of the silo.

I saw the flash, then got thrown out of my chair from the shockwave. The instruments in front of me sputtered and went out.

When the dust cleared it was over--all of it. Padre was gone. So was the missile and most of Babylon. The enemy had lost their trump card.

Captain Marshall Rourke died at the age of thirty-seven on a cold November morning in a flash of brilliance, and as he said before he disappeared, he left nothing. All that is left is the story that we, those people in the gallery saw and the small soliloquy that four men heard crackle through their radio.

I play many roles in my life, always filling the spots that need to be. My favorite is the lover, but the villain suits me splendidly. Double-dealing, backstabbing, and betrayal come as naturally to me as breathing. I am not evil, nor am I good. It is because of my nature, not my disposition, that I so often stand opposite the hero.

I whisper truths into the ears of impressionable men and women. I warn them of the consequences of failure. I urge them to embrace freedom when conforming is key. Hurting in a helpful way, some might say. I don't know. I'm only telling them the perspective they don't want to acknowledge: there is a choice in everything, and likewise there are those who have made the choice before you.

I'll let you in on a secret. The key to being a villain is the combination of a harsh truth and a genial smile. Composure is also key. No idea in the world matters if it cannot be conveyed calmly.

A natural inclination and years of practice have distilled my ways to a science. Yet I founder on my most favorite of roles as a result. With all the tools at my villainous disposal few work for the lover. The thinking simply doesn't mesh. The words twist and turn in different ways to produce different outcomes.

At the same time is it worth casting the part of the villain to the curb to learn the way of the lover; the sparkling and too often brief brilliance of existing with another? It places me in the most infuriating of quandaries: shall I choose what I am gifted for, or what I desire the most? The decision must be absolute, and I cannot make it. All I can do is be the victim of my own nudging whispers, casting all the possibilities before me and critically analyzing them all to the point that none appear feasible.

There is no resolution in my mind. All possibilities squirm and entangle with one another, and the varying parts of my soul each cling to another chance outcome, hoping against all that it will come to be true.

In the end maybe I'm not suited to be the villain or the lover, but instead the fool, plotting and scheming along the sidelines with only a silver tongue and smile to accompany me.