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This writing was accepted for publication
in the 84 page perfect-bound issue...
 Down in the Dirt magazine (v106)
(the May 2012 Issue)



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Shrapnel

Kristopher Miller

    Your words were so much like grenade shrapnel. They exploded and they took a good chunk of my flesh but they did not kill me. But your words left shrapnel pieces embedded into my skin. No matter how hard I try to pull them out, the metal pieces just go deeper and deeper into my muscles, into my bone marrow, and into my nerves. I writhe in agony at the shrapnel you gave me and I grip my body to put pressure on somewhere else to relieve the pain but it does not go away. Those pieces eat into me as maggots eat into a corpse. And the next thing I know, I am a corpse with the shrapnel finally digging into my heart and my spine. I am six feet under just as the shrapnel is twenty inches under my carcass. Then without warning, I wake up from the pain and from my death from...I don’t know what. Will? Happiness? Optimism? I break apart the wood holding me in and I dig the soft, moist, maggot ridden dirt like I was some mortician who took the shrapnel out of my body. I burst open the earthly surface and I crawl out and cry like I would have been alive if they were actually ripping the shrapnel pieces out of me. I cry in pain, I swallow the air, but I get up and hold my dirty, bleeding self as I walk in the rain drenching me. It cleans me up, it makes me feel so cold but it makes me feel alive in reminding me that the shrapnel did not completely sever my nerves. I walk to the gate, that rusty gate, and I kicked both the gate doors down. I walk through the rain, out of the graveyard, all healed up and clean, to receive another bit of shrapnel again.



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