Just Kiss Me One Last Time by Brian Hesse (best ebook reader android .TXT) 📕

end of the war. For three years I helped wash the blood-soaked bandages recently taken from the dead to be used again on the dying. As time passed, I graduated to more intricate duties like dressing wounds already black with infection and smelling like rotting cheese. Most would have to go under the knife for amputation. It is true that after caring for so many wounded, and seeing someone alive and talking one minute, but gone to oblivion the next, you become hardened inside. A numbness creeps into your soul like an alien invader and mimicking who you once were. I looked the same, acted the same, and even felt the same, but something goes missing. You just can’t cry anymore regardless of what you see. Horror does not hold the same definition anymore. This impersonality gives rise to a disturbing nondiscrimination. You stop asking for someone’s name. That is until one day you see that one person who hand delivers you your lost humanity. I was just fourteen at the time, but I was about to have my first hard crush.

 

His name was Corporal Roland Aust.

 

“Karl, I need you to clean these bandages and go around and wrap as many wounds as you can see that needs immediate attention,” stated nurse Berlow. She was my favorite out of all the other nurses. She was smart, pretty, and sassy. She reminded me of my mother. The face of an angel with the devil’s wit lurking just below the surface.

 

“You got it Kitty,” I replied. That was her nickname. I don’t know how she got it, but a cat reference certainly seemed to fit her disposition.

 

“Oh, and Karl,” she whispered. I followed her eyes as she looked to bed number fifteen, hastily placed somewhere around where the fiction section used to be. When I looked back, she was smiling with a very motherly smile, with maybe just a hint of something I would never see in my Mothers expression, something erotic. She again whispered, “they moved the Corporal to bunk fifteen. Go and make sure he has clean bandages.” She quickly turned away as if knowing I was about to blush, sparing me any more needless embarrassment.

I thought to myself, she knows. She knows my thoughts. She can see my dreams. She must have watched last night as I told Roland how I felt. That I wanted to kiss his soft lips and run my finger gently across the scar on his face and tell him that it will all be Ok. But she couldn’t know such things. I decided that this was all just a part of my imagination.

 

I was only fourteen, and still very confused about such things as sex. I watched friends exchanging notes and glances with the girls from the neighborhood. I rounded the corner of Berlin Street one afternoon to see my best friend at the time, Hermann Gunther pressed tightly under an apartment stairwell kissing Gertrude Muller. I believe I saw his hand on her ass, but maybe I was wrong. For me, I always just believed that I was a late bloomer. Maybe asexual, or just plain strange. That is until I watched the stretcher bearers carry in Corporal Roland Aust, the hero of the Western front. At least that’s how I imagined him. Math is not my strong point, but it doesn’t take a genius to count the number of years that separated us. He was just sixteen, four years ago, as I watched him march off to face the horrors of the Western front. Each night I close my eyes, scanning the eager faces of the young and old marching soldiers, hoping to catch a glimpse of Roland in that sea of multi colored uniforms and shining bayonets. But would I recognize him? The faces of the young boys marching off to war on that crisp autumn day on Wilhelm Avenue. Faces of boys still caught between the states of carefree fanciful pubescence and the unimaginative world of manhood. But this was not the face I was looking at now. His face, like so many others, has aged far beyond the years. These are the eyes of shattered innocence. Eyes that gazed into the stone face of death and lived to tell the tale, even if their story is cut short by the trauma of a broken body, a shattered innocence, and a pulverized soul.

 

  I can see that my own stage of development is not nearly as advanced as my Roland. Despite only six years difference in our age, we may as well have been twenty years apart. As my time involved boyhood pranks and the confusion of a budding realization of my homosexuality, Roland’s was one of heroically facing death. At least that is my fantasy. The truth, as I now know, is that everyone who sits at the table of war and willingly, or unwillingly, tastes its tempting fruit, experiences horror, fear, and sorrow. I see the shadow of horror still imbedded on his beautiful stubbled chin. I see the deep lines of fear forever carved into the prominent structure of his elevated cheeks. I see the sorrow in his piercing blueish green eyes. The kind of sorrow that seeps into a person’s soul and forever becomes a part of their fabric. This is the truth of war written on the faces and the soul of every person brave enough to sit at its table.

 

Well that is enough sentimentality for one day. I know I can never utter these words to the man lying before me. But if I can’t, touch his lips as my lover, I will gently dress his wounds and kiss them tenderly in my mind.

 

                                                Chapter III Discovery

“Hey Karl, want to take a piss off your balcony?”

Jurgen Schneider is one of my few friends. I don’t know why he is my friend. We have so little in common. I like the beauty of nature and art. He likes to kill baby bunnies and wouldn’t know a Picasso from his asshole. But nonetheless, he is my friend.

“Not today Jurgen, I just want to sit here awhile,” I replied. I really didn’t want to just sit here, but I really didn’t have an urge to piss off my balcony, or torture Mrs. Koning’s German Shepherd. Three years of working in the, makeshift library turned hospital, on Gunther Street, changed me inside. Endless days of changing bandages stained crimson and brown with blood, sweat, and floating particles of dirt. Endless nights of listening to the screams of those refusing to die and the low guttural moans of those accepting their fate, changes a young man. I am just seventeen, but I have smelled the sickeningly sweet odor of death more times than I can count. I can still smell death sitting here in the fresh breeze of Frankfurt gardens with my only friend, Jurgen Schneider.

 

“What happened to you Karl? You are no fun anymore,” asked Jurgen, looking at me with an expression mixed with wonder and resentment. I felt rage swelling within me like a balloon stretching under the growing pressure. I understand his wonderment of my transformation. I understand his unspoken fear of a potential ending of our friendship. But this did not cause my anger to subside.

 

I blurted out harshly, “maybe I am just tired of these stupid childish games.” I stood up and came within inches of Jurgen’s shocked expression. By now the rage was unstoppable. As if watching an actor play his part on an elaborate set, I was no longer in control. I am a mere spectator now. I continued with my tirade. “Maybe Jurgen, I find it hard to play pranks as I watch men without limbs, without faces, without lives stumble along the street aimlessly trapped in the horror of the past. Maybe I am seventeen and feel guilty that I am not among the dead, diseased, and broken. Maybe, just maybe, you should grow the fuck up also.”

 

I would like to lie and say that I felt regret at having said these words to my best friend. But I do not regret my outburst. In fact, looking at his childish dumfounded expression, gives me the urge to pounce on his face. To just let go of years of pent up sorrow…of pent up sexual aggression. I am not a learned man, but I know my feelings and where they originate. Like any person who has lived for any length of time in their own head, I am truly empathetic to my own sorrow. I missed my crush Roland. I missed caring for his battered body. I missed the feel of running a warm sponge across the hard ripples of his bare stomach. I wanted to die from my loneliness.

“Fine Karl. I don’t want to hang out with a fag anyway. Oh yes, we all know your queer, and your world is coming to an end. You and all your freak fag buddies.”

 

As I watched Jurgen walk away toward Gunther Street, kicking at the long blades of dew-covered grass along his way, I felt numb. I felt confused. I felt scared. How can he possibly know what I have been feeling inside all these years? How can he know my deepest secret fantasies swirling above my bed like torturing demons? I began to ask myself questions that I never considered before. Am I a freak? Is my love for another man wrong, immoral, punishable by hell fire, as preached in every church in Germany and, as I imagine, throughout the world? Are my days numbered? I felt a chill pass through my body with this last question. Although there are no signs that homosexuals are to be officially punished, the possibility of such action is not so far fetched in my mind. People are angry since our defeat in war, and when people are angry, they need someone to blame. Will it be those deemed amoral? Will it be Jews?

 

I sat there under the shade of a large elm with my head resting against its rotted bark. My eyes closed, reliving the past few moments of our falling out, I could feel the back of my head settling gently into a large groove of the bark. I imagined my entire body slowly absorbed into the tree until nothing of my existence is left. My stomach feels heavy like a led weight resting on my bladder. If Jurgen knows about me, then everyone must. I am afraid to open my eyes. I can feel the stares of the passerby’s piercing my mind with their looks of condemnation. Images of hell fire grow steadily out of the blackness in front of my eyes.

 

“Karl is that you?” came a familiar voice from above. I dared not answer. Is this it? Is this my final judgement? Has Jurgen come back to put me out of misery? The hell fire recedes now and is replaced by an image of Jurgen standing above me with a thick log, ready to bring down on my head scattering bits of bone and bloody meat amongst the dew-covered grass.

 

The voice repeats its question, “Karl is that you?” Cautiously I open my eyes ready to face the final blow that will send me to the fiery depths of hell. Because isn’t that what we have been taught is the destination of those who don’t fit in.

 

“Roland, its you!” I exclaimed, but immediately regretting my response. This was nothing like my nightly fantasy of meeting him again. In that lucid dream state, I embrace him tenderly felling his hard muscles under the softness of my fingertips. So, I tried again.

 

“Corporal Aust, so good to see your not dead.” I replied. This responsewas worse than the last, and I instantly regretted it.

 

My mind went to immediate ease as I observed a soft kind-hearted smile take shape from his rose-colored full lips. My heart leapt as I watched the tip of his tongue gently roll across his upper lip, as he sat down