Her feet always feel heavy when she gets to the top of the landing. Things like that you never forget.   

I scramble into my room, shutting the door behind me. Keys barely clinging on to the back of the door, almost like my hopes of ever showing my face on the battlefield again. I had run so fast from that sun kissed runway I could barely catch my breath. Each deep exhale, calm escapes, inhales. Panic steps forth. 

I get up from my knees, my jeans faded from the amount of crawling I've had to do and stagger to the window, eyes bulging, nose bleeding, chin trembling from excitement, or maybe anguish. Or exhilarating pain from seeing him die because they shot him, they did, they did,  they shot him in cold blood and I was there I was watching I watched…..I'm going off again aren’t i? War. I battled myself in those fields you know? I mean it, I saw myself in every gaping whole of a man, every man in a hole and either or. My mind is now a paranoid battle ground where my thoughts battle my disfigured memories. On and on and on and on and...Memories are so strange aren't they?  

*THUD*

I knew she was getting closer. On my six.

I carefully come down from my window, the wood turning brown, slowly rotting away, building mold like a pile of bodies. My hands are covered in old dirt. The noise brings me to my knees, whilst muscle memory brings my legs to my chest. I cover my ears with both arms wrapped around my head so that I can have complete darkness. Protection. The air is dense, the peeling wallpaper dampened by the humidity of the rounded walls and the hammering from outside creeping through the stretch marks within those walls. It protects me, my room. 

An orange tinted beam of light hits the side of my face, the way it did the day I was recruited. My head tilts towards the window, the only source of light in my now rotting room. 

The soldiers at the door had spoken crisply, like the unwrinkled poppies hanging from their chest pockets. Or even...never mind...not all memories are supposed to be remembered. As I sat in the safety of the shadows in my room, distant voices crept through the cracks in my glossed over, newly refurbished wooden windows. I still had paint on my hands from the day we painted it.  “His conscription will be temporary but madam understands if you wish to dodge the draft, he will be prosecuted as a draft offender." Words had never rang through my home like sirens declaring a purge before. Until that day. I remember instantly standing, my tie not done and socks that I got on my ninth grade birthday as a temporary replacement for the soon to be well ironed army issue socks, being prepared by my mother before she answered the door. 

"Ma'am i stress. He must enroll."

I figured the soldier saw me by this point as his speech was cut short. My appearance wasn't taken well. I paid it no mind however. My father’s pride was the only concern I had in my life. 

My feet feel heavy on the floorboards in the hallway connecting the front door to the kitchen. Where he was.

For some reason my life becomes blurred in moments of change.

I looked towards dad, in the kitchen. Head held higher than the day he came home. His posture firm whilst sitting in a chair on its last legs. Ironic. His shoes tied tight, almost trying to compensate for the space left in his boot for me to fill. The leather of the boots are worn, with history oozing into every crease within. His pants, as mother taught me, neatly tucked into his black blooded boots. Pants. A faded British khaki green with a black belt holding them by his waist. His walking stick firmly planted on the kitchen floor with both palms planted on top as if pressing a button to a ticking time bomb. His eyes...smoked. Reflecting what seemed to be a war within a man, within a man, within...a boy.

A feeling too close to home for me to go into. 

I crept forward, crouched and in position.

“Dad.” 

The floorboards beneath my feet crumbled almost like soil that has been displaced. As I drew closer to the vessel that is my dad, his silence became thunderous, like a royal platoon of planes, flying above us.

I placed my hands on his shoulder. They seemed cold. Sympathy was all I felt. I then followed his bellowing stare to the chair outside on the porch that rhythmically rocked back and forth. It reminded me of the day he came home.

It reminded me of my mother’s warm arms. 

I remember the long days of flying kites with my boyhood comrades, finishing it off by laying with my mother’s warm aura. On the rocking chair on the porch. The days before the war took my father.

"Mum."

I was timid at first, a small boy, talking to his lifelong role model, her head tilted. Slower than usual actually. I couldn't tell if her shivering was from the cold or something else, I could've sworn my body could keep her warm. 

"Yes son."

Her voice was just so smoothing, so relaxing, I wish to hear it every day. 

I wished.

"When is dad coming home?"

"What do you mean?"

She looked at me confused.

"When is my dad coming home mummy?"

A platoon of silence charged into our conversation.

"He's already here". ...she said reluctantly, almost in disbelief.

But It didn't feel like it.

The man she referred to at that moment, the man sitting in the kitchen, was not my dad. no. He was a man carved from a piece of wood with a knife made from war. 

"That's not dad ma? That's just someone who looks like him...right?”.

Mothers arm hesitantly moved in the darkness, 

I nearly mistook it for a soldier.

She tried to redirect my head from looking through the window of the kitchen. 

I guess it's because my father was there.

“What's wrong with daddy mummy?”...

Memories are such strange things.

Staring at the chair caused my eyes to dry. Dad was still staring at the rocking chair whilst sitting in the kitchen. My hand became numb from the coldness of his uniform. My eyes became crusted over from staring outside the window. Almost endlessly. I nudged him slightly, knocking him out of a daze, whilst still standing in the dust ridden room, we call a kitchen. I realized there's more to the man than what my eyes perceive. The room that resembles my family the most. With windows strong enough to bear the flap of a wounded butterfly's wing. Floors with cracks that ooze history and a smell of a faint but bulging cry. A room with endless memories within.   

Mum came up to me from the end of the hallway. She wanted to “complete my look”, a popular saying of hers. Her eyes with a glimmer of hope, her fragile arms now wrapped around my neck, grabbing both ends of my tie and her ever so delicate perfume filled my nose to the brim. I did not complain. I never do. 

Or did.

Time is an illusion I often confuse.

I bent down to tie the shoes my mother just shined. Fresh for a hero.

Step one, cross, step two pull the ribbon through, step three.

Am I getting these wrong?...WHY!?...get it together, I want her to be proud.

(If I remember right).

Her eyes reflected stars. Her arms bore scars as deep as our family's timid history. And as I admired my mother, her arms began to shake like a volcano that’s learned to have sympathy for the people around it. Undisruptive. I knew not the pressure that her broad shoulders held upon them. But I knew mother was hiding something the minute her gallop turned into a walk, her walk a crawl, her crawl…

But then I found the truth of war. A return is something only God given. And dad was no saint.

"No Man's Land". Man should endure no land that lives between acceptance and rejection. It's the tipping point to a boiling pot of a place god does not reside. A place that holds more unholiness than the men behind it. And within the soil is my father. Along with his kitchen chair. And standing above him. Alone. The sun. The only source of warmth. My mother. 

I am no man. No man would endure the fickle of land that lives between his mothers warm veins and Father’s blood filled soil of which the poppies grow.

Her feet always feel heavy at the top of the landing.

No. no man will go back to the warm soil that was only touched by that of a woman I call mother. 

As of now the soil that I lay in is untouched by any female figure that fails to bear arms with the land I lay upon.

That is why when my mother's feet feel heavy at the top of the landing I bear arms.

That is why with each step she laid a poppy, I followed in stride with the drop of a bullet filled body.

That is why…as she opened the door with eyes filled with warmth. I felt conflicted.

Things like that you never forget.