An Experiment in Scotch

A girl, pos­si­bly 15 or 18 or 21, it is hard to tell because her face is cov­ered in thick, dark grease­paint, stands in the right track of a two track dirt road that runs off into the dis­tance. She wears olive green pants and a dark brown flan­nel shirt, untucked. Her hair is brown, pulled back in a tight pony­tail. She has clear slate gray eyes that blink quickly and infre­quently. The grease­paint fails to con­ceal her beauty. There is a look of defi­ance and grim con­cen­tra­tion to the girl, a cer­tain tight­ness in the mus­cles of the mouth and cor­ners of the eyes as in one who is in the mid­dle of an ardu­ous task. She holds a small pis­tol with a long bar­rel in her right hand, held with a gen­tle famil­iar­ity of a butcher and his knife. In her left hand, a rab­bit dan­gles by the hind legs, a small red hole behind one ear seep­ing crim­son into the dirt of the road. The girl faces the far side of the road, watch­ing intently a mil­i­tary con­voy dri­ving on the main high­way in the medium dis­tance. Hun­dreds of trucks and tanks lum­ber along the road as thou­sands of men in vivid red uni­forms march along­side. The rum­ble of the trucks is muted and faint. The sun rises harshly above the hori­zon beyond her right shoul­der, begin­ning to illu­mi­nate the bit­ter land­scape, chas­ing the dawn away. A faint scent of acrid smoke tinged with cordite hangs in the air. Long grass lines the side of the road she stands in but there is a path imme­di­ately behind her into the under­growth. Dew glis­tens on the grass. Far off in the dis­tance from the direc­tion the mil­i­tary trucks move, hardly intel­li­gi­ble, an eerie chant drifts, ephemeral and spec­tral, the sound of a thou­sand weary voices joined together in praise of an unseen god.

A sin­gle sol­dier peels off from the ser­pen­tine con­voy, fol­lowed by another and another, mov­ing quickly in the direc­tion of the girl. The entire con­voy grinds to a halt. Ten sol­diers fan out, a ver­mil­lion pack of human wolfhounds run­ning towards the girl. A tank tur­ret turns and a puff of smoke appears from the bar­rel. Sec­ond later, the ground a hun­dred feet in front of her explodes send­ing thick chunks of dark clay silently scream­ing into the sky.

“They always under­fire”, she says.

The sol­diers are still a thou­sand meters away as she turns and dis­ap­pears into the under­brush, the only sign that she was ever there a dark­en­ing of the dirt where the rab­bit bled out.