Mutiny...

June 11, 2014

"In her delirium, she thought of her father.  She thought of war.  She thought of secrets.  She thought of Vietnam. 

It was the dark secret that families didn’t talk about; hidden deep in the back of closets that were never to be opened.  It was something that was hidden behind the veneer of dinner parties, dressed to the nines, putting on airs for the neighbors; it was hidden behind the professional family portraits on the walls, those white, broad smiles never faltering, never giving out their secrets. 

Impotent and plastic; emotionless.  Fake.  It was what the world had become.  And these men, riding off so valiantly and brave to wage war on an unseen enemy, came back crumpled over shells. 

The faces looked the same; the bodies, the lips, the mouths, the noses. 

But the eyes were the betrayers.   They absorbed the world around them like a sponge, soaking in every image, every detail; sprawled bodies of comrades lying in a field, blood and macabre dripping stains everywhere, being told to believe in a goodness, in a reason, for all of this.  But never being privy to what that is.  Fighting for men who went to bed safely ensconced in their big houses, wrapped up with their seductive wives, warm in their beds. 

It was the greatest secret of all.  Perhaps the greatest of all time.  The shells came back from a land where they may face the cold death stone at any moment, with an enemy that held the upper hand, fighting in their homeland, with their own traps, their own trails, their own caverns; arriving back to their homeland with a tirade of people calling them babykillers. 

The reverent hero; returning proudly on his white steed.

Returning to a world of senseless monotony in factory jobs, lunch breaks, useless paperwork, wives that incessantly ask for opinions on the best drapery, dinner parties, free hippie love, The Brady Bunch, helping with homework, smog and traffic, the alarm clock, the 9 to 5, draft dodgers, bosses who didn’t care or understand, rising gas prices. 

They were expected to return to these insignificancies of life and to forget all that had occurred, things that reached deep into the core of man; things that tested the substance of a person.  No debrief.  No triumphant returning victory cry.

Not for these men.  The truths were too dirty, too frightening to face head on.  So they were pushed aside, hidden behind all of these other things.  But they all began to ferment.  Slowly decaying and decomposing. 

As all things do."

Excerpt from Mutiny on the Morning Glory, Tenebrous Volume 2

Angela Darling

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