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The Exquisite Corpse
His torso rose from the bathtub like a barren island – his skin stripped of hair and sweat glands. Steam swirled about
the mountain peak of his head before slipping into the invisible spaces of the air. His eyes stared out the bathroom
window and a small tanker caught his attention as it moved away from the tiny archipelago. It sailed slowly down the buoy-pocked
sea lane – obedient to the contorted angles bending around shoals and sunken pipeline.
The little radio beside him, borrowed from the nightstand, broadcasted a shrill Arabic voice chanting through
the third call to prayer of the day. Without looking away from the ship, following the sound with his hand,
he grabbed the radio and held it in place on the bathtub ledge.
When he had checked in to the hotel he expected to find everything in his room bolted to something else
– he also expected everyone to gape with awestruck disgust at his face. The fuel fire had left his skin
a fleshy nebula of stretched and twisted scars like stiff melted plastic. His nose was left eroded as
if gnawed by rats, his upper lip a swollen reconstruction, and his remaining clump of hair – newly buzzed
– listed to his left like a tufted yarmulke sliding away. He had survived by rolling himself into the
narrow bilge that had filled with fire suppressing foam. His hose team, of which he had just rotated
back from the nozzle to fourth position behind the others, were too close to the secondary explosion. They burned for too long.
And a year after his medical separation from the Navy, not yet finished with his reconstructive surgery, he traveled to Bahrain
where the amenities in his room were freestanding and the people discrete in their repulsion; to the island port in the Gulf
closest to where his Frigate was attacked; and to where the smoke had risen black and hot from the burning oil and fuel and
from the flesh of his friend's bodies.
He lost himself in the cloudlessness of the sky. The color hung weightless and empty, but with an imposing dust that sat low around
the horizon like a sweat-stained collar. His shipmates were in that collar – they were among the floating particles of pulverized sand.
Not just the ashen atoms of their demise, but also the sound of their beckoning accusation of why?
Had they not all run countless General Quarters drills together and mastered the exhaustion of fighting imaginary fires together? Was
not the taste of warm oxygen rising from the chemical reaction within their OBA canisters their mutual breath? They all suffered the
pain of sleepless fatigue and, with every hour unrested, the pain of holding their decent into animalistic rage at bay. And they never
asked, like their civilian friends asked, why they endured such a life. They all understood and celebrated how the pain made their
jobs exclusive and that the more pain they absorbed the more value they could heap upon themselves.
And when they had had their fill, had they not dreamed together about retiring to their families with grandchildren who would believe
their lies about fighting pirates or about luxuriating in Thailand under the cheap shade of an open-air bar where tourists haggled
with street vendors over ticking Rolexes? Then why? had all perished save one body – grotesque and useless, but living? Why? begged
one widow, cursing his fortune with the shadow of her loss, but later apologizing with a gentle touch.
And why? did he get to touch one of their wives and not any of them? Why? was he deserving of a tiny intimacy and not the others?
His eyes moved from the receding ship to the imposing dust then up into the weightless blue. The voices followed his gaze.
The radio filled his ears. But he had no answers for the sounds he heard. He had only one action in response.
Just before his bathtub's water cooled and the steam stopped rising, he pulled the radio into the water with him.
Kevin Gillispie is currently working to complete his undergraduate degree in English
(with a concentration in creative writing and an unwavering goal of MFA) at Virginia Tech
- because whisking around the country as an audio engineer chasing rock stars and Grammy
winners simply left him empty inside. He has only but started publishing his work – most
recently in Virginia Tech's National Day on Writing online gallery – as it has taken
him twenty-two countries, fifteen years, six continents, and a handful of broken hearts
beyond adolescence to acquire anything worth saying. But even content is fetal without
a crafted delivery. So his literary mentors, Lucinda Roy and Bob Hicok, taught him the
midwifery of literary birthing, as it were, and he has yet to feel so fulfilled as now.
Email: Kevin Gillispie
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