Sent Frag

by Edd

Our tenuous ceasefire ends just before dawn with a barrage of German words in the font they call Fraktur. It’s a heavy bombardment with serifs that explode on impact. Fellow soldiers die, pierced by splinters of ‘t’ and ‘k’ and that weird ‘b’-shape that sounds like a double ‘s’.

The Luftwaffe owns the skies to the east of our position. At any moment I expect bombers to drop those compound words that have so flattened the cities of Poland. But then our proud Spitfires appear and harry them from the sky in bursts of disconnected phonemes.

We cheer, and advance on a bunker, hardened with layer on layer of incomprehensibly jumbled adjectives. A machine gun spits guttural consonants. We assemble a mortar, and lob explosive monosyllables at it. When it crumples we call it a good day’s work and dig in for the morrow’s siege.

Word comes that the Americans have officially declared war. There are rumors of a sneak attack on their naval base in Hawaii. I try to imagine blocky ideograms filling the sky.

Darkness falls, pierced here and there by spotlights. Ack-ack will likewise pierce our dreams.

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This story takes place in the same universe as ‘Subtext‘.