Time froze on that arid and smoke-choked beach. ‘Where am I?’ asked the boy.
‘Dead,’ said the man smoking on a rock not ten meters from where the boy stands. ‘Or soon to be.’
The boy casts around. The soldiers around him are motionless. Faces twisted in terror and pain. Shrapnel hovers before his face, as if stuck in a resin of air. Thousands of its tuny brethren surge forth from a central nova of heat by his legs. A white spark that ripples the air with its heat. All of it unmoving. Unwavering.
‘I’m dead?’
‘Very nearly,’ says the man. He’s dressed in a nice suit and is wearing tiny, round sunglasses. ‘So why don’t we wind things back a little?’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘You don’t have to,’ says the man standing. He claps his hands and the world slowly starts to reverse. The men run backwards. The shrapnel shrinks back into the shell. The shell flies back into the air.
The boy is borne back against the wave of time. As the man disappears from view, he hears him call out. ‘Come find me in Gallipoli. You can pay what you owe there.’
Paddy Dobson
29th November 2021