Yellow Birds Read Free

owners of those names. We didn’t have a time laid out for us, or a place. I have stopped wondering about those inches to the left and right of my head, the three-miles-an-hour difference that would have put us directly over an IED. It never happened. I didn’t die. Murph did. And though I wasn’t there when it happened, I believe unswervingly that when Murph was killed, the dirty knives that stabbed him were addressed “To whom it may concern.” Nothing made us special. Not living. Not dying. Not even being ordinary. Still, I like to think there was a ghost of compassion in me then, and that if I’d had a chance to see those hyacinths I would have noticed them.
    Malik’s body, crumpled and broken at the foot of the building, didn’t shock me. Murph passed me a smoke and we lay down beneath the wall again. But I could not stop thinking about a woman Malik’s conversation had reminded me of, who’d served us tea in small, finely blemished cups. The memory seemed impossibly distant, buried in the dust, waiting for some brush to uncover it. I remembered how she’d blushed and smiled, and how impossible it was for her to not be beautiful, despite her age, a paunch, a few teeth gone brown and her skin appearing like the cracked, dry clay of summer.
     
    Perhaps that is how it was: a field full of hyacinth. It was not like that when we stormed the building, not like that four days after Malik died. The green grasses that waved in the breeze were burned by fire and the summer sun. The festival of people on the market street with their long white shifts and loud voices were gone. Some of them were lying dead in the courtyards of the city or in its lace of alleys. The rest walked or rode in sluggish caravans, on foot or in orange and white jalopies, in mule-drawn carts or in huddled groups of twos and threes, women and men, the old and young, the whole and wounded. All that was the life of Al Tafar left in a drab parade out of the city. They walked past our gates, past Jersey walls and gun emplacements, out into the dry September hills. They did not raise their eyes in the curfewed hours. They were a speckled line of color in the dark and they were leaving.
    A radio crackled in the rooms beneath us. The lieutenant quietly gave our situation report to our command. “Yes, sir,” he said, “roger, sir,” and it passed, at each level more removed from us, until I am sure somewhere someone was told, in a room that was warm and dry and safe, that eighteen soldiers had watched the alleys and streets of Al Tafar through the night and that X number of enemies were lying dead in a dusty field.
    The day had almost broken over the city and the ridges in the desert when the low, electric noise of the radio was replaced by the sound of the lieutenant’s boots padding up the staircase to the roof. Mere outlines took shape, and the city, vague and notional at night, became a contoured and substantial thing before us. I looked west. Tans and greens emerged in the light. The gray of mud walls, of buildings and courtyards arranged in squat honeycombs, receded with the rising sun. A few fires burned in the grove of thin and ordered fruit trees a little to the south. The smoke rose through a gently tattered canopy of leaves only slightly taller than a man and leaned obediently to the wind coming across the valley.
    The lieutenant came up to the roof and lowered himself into a slouch, his upper body parallel to the earth, his legs chugging, until he reached the wall. He sat with his back against the wall and gestured for us to gather around him.
    “All right, guys. This is the deal.”
    Murph and I leaned against each other until the weight of our bodies found their balance. Sterling inched closer to the lieutenant and fixed his eyes in a hard glare that traversed the rest of us on the roof. I looked at the lieutenant as he spoke. His eyes were dim. Before he continued he let out a short, bright sigh and rubbed a rash the color of