Coming to OZ

He stopped a moment at the top of the gangway, looked around with a weary curiosity as a still bitingly cold late winter wind snapped his longish brown hair. It was longish if you compared the present length to what he’d worn in the battlefield, at any rate, which was nearly cut to the skin, damn near shaven clean. Now he had at least a two inch growth. Idly he ran his palm over his skull as he raised his eyes. The sky was china blue where the gray clouds didn’t hide it, beautiful but harsh and brittle, like some woman’s destroyed prized place settings, smashed and broken on the ground, bit of sharp edges and nothing more, and he remembered his Gran’s dishes, felt sorry that they no longer existed as he squinted his hazel eyes and looked around. They’d been fun, he recalled, he’d loved thinking up stories out of the patterns when he was a kid. Jesus, that was a hundred years ago, wasn’t it? Robert Murray had come to Oz, and was kind of puzzled by merely having survived.

He jerked back to the present as someone complained, “Move along, Yank,” tiredly, nodded and he growled “Sorry”, limped his way slowly down the splintered wood planks with the aid of a cheap bamboo cane, his lanky 6 foot 3 inch frame bent slightly due to the continuing pain of his wounds. He gripped the rough rail with his aching right hand like a life saver as he went down, not feeling steady as yet on his battered, still healing legs, and briefly, desperately, he wished he still had some of the precious morphine to take the edge off. Morphine was a blessing, a fucking sacrament, in his opinion, but the Medical Service types didn’t waste pain killers on anyone who could bear the pain well enough to walk without screaming, he knew that, so he set his bristly square jaw firmly, frowned with annoyance and desperation, and concentrated on getting down the gangway without falling. He firmly told himself he could stand the constant, unrelenting ache, at least at this level, right up to the screaming point, and hopefully, it wouldn’t get that bad again. Hopefully, he wouldn’t fall again, either, but he wasn’t sure, it had happened too many times since leaving in country. He was actually healing, he knew it, they’d told him over and over, and so he’d been sent to Australia--“Oz” to the lucky ones who had survived their wounds and had been sent out of the battle zones to recuperate—for R and R, rest and relaxation. Rest and recuperation, really, Robert knew. No one relaxed these days, not really, there was no time for it if you wanted to survive, even in the Safe Zones, like this place. It was well known the Safe Zones had their moments of terror and death and war, too. Only Heaven, if it existed, didn’t have them, but Robert wasn’t much of a religious type, so he wasn’t sure, and tended to be skeptical. If there was a real Safe Place on the planet, it had to be either at one of the poles, or deep within the battered skin of Mother Earth.