Read Song for Night for Free Online

coming down the road from a hidden bend. I don’t hesitate, loping across the short grass between me and the forest, gaining cover quickly. There is no point in waiting around to find out if they are friend or foe. I need to get to a town and get some food and drink, so I plunge deeper into the forest, moving fast if not silently through the undergrowth. At this point, silence doesn’t matter anymore. Even if they hear me, they will imagine it is some animal. I press on until I break through the cover into a circular natural clearing in the forest. It has been widened and I can tell from the cut shrubbery where nature stopped and machetes moved forward. There are a couple of open and empty metal shipping containers, a few bombed-out vehicles, including an ambulance and a ruined armored car. Something about the ambulance fills me with a nostalgia that makes my eyes water from the sweetness of it. I stop and scan the clearing. Apart from a few crows, the place is abandoned. Something about it is very familiar though and I realize I have been here before. The entire platoon has been here. Just before Ijeoma got blown up, after the church incident, after I shot John Wayne. There is no mistaking the statues the guys liberated from the church—the wooden Jesus in a peeling red tunic with one leg missing where Nebu had chopped it off the day we killed a monkey and needed firewood to cook; Jesus’ leg was the only dry wood anywhere on that rainy day, the rain had made it possible to catch the monkey as it slipped on a wet branch. I couldn’t eat it because it reminded me too much of the dead child in my dreams, and of that night we stumbled on that gory feast, those gorgons, and I left the campsite as the others cooked and ate it. Later, Ijeoma brought me an open tin of Spam from a box we’d liberated from some rich man’s house.
    I look around, eyes meeting those of the sad-looking Virgin whose white-painted concrete body has turned green from rain. She is mottled from the bullet holes we inflicted with target practice. I approach slowly. I am on the right track, this much is sure. It seems I am retracing my steps through places we passed. Something is off about it though, and yet as much as it is nagging at me, I cannot pinpoint what it is exactly, but I know it has something to do with the chronology of my memories. The time between them is shrinking, I think. If I didn’t still have this damn concussion I might be able to figure it out.
    I approach the containers. Buried under them in a metal box is a cache of food we left here. It is probably bad, but it’s worth trying. Like a chicken, I scratch in the dirt under it until I pull out the metal box that used to house the rounds for the M60 machine gun we had mounted on the roof of the bombed-out truck. There are several tins of food and I quickly drive my knife through the top of one lid into the soft meat inside. Even as I do it I think it is stupid that I didn’t check to see if the contents were booby-trapped. If the cache had been disturbed it would be impossible to tell because the ground was old.
    There is no booby-trap, no explosion, just the sweet taste of stale sardines in olive oil filling my mouth, my knife still embedded in the smile of the woman on the tin. Queen of the Coast , it says.
    I have happy memories about this place. We spent a long time here, hiding out from the war, being teenagers, and in that forest idyll, the change the war had wrought on us seemed very subtle. When we first stumbled on this oasis, the rain had collected in a seasonal pond and we lived in the burned-out trucks and armored vehicles, feeding on the forest’s grace and swimming in the pond. Ijeoma and I lived as a couple in the back of the old ambulance, making love with desperation tinged with the foreknowledge of loss. If we could have, we would have waited out the war here We didn’t want to move on, didn’t want to press on to the front. We weren’t stupid and we were