March

((Why the fuck am I still awake at 5:30am thinking about VtM shit?  I am rather concerned.))

Marching, always with the marching.  At first the complaints started in boot camp.  Hours upon hours of marching around and around.  'I could be doing so much more with my time,' he'd always claim.  I, of course, didn't doubt him.  Why would I?  He was a man of the armed forces, I just his wife.  Spouse.  Other half.  Our two children knew him better as photographs than a man, and there was always an aura of hushed silence during the short periods of time that he spent at home with us.

He returned home from the frontlines of The Great War on a stretcher.  We were lucky to get him home at all, apparently.  Something about minefields; I was never allowed to know.  It wasn't until many years later that I found out the entire story.  His recovery was long and strained, and attempting to juggle a newborn into the picture too proved to slowly weigh me down.

I was the woman on those motivational posters that kids find 'retro' these days.  Working in the factories between juggling children and that ever present knowledge in the back of my mind that one day I will get that telegram, or the knock on the door.  Hair tied back with a rag to stop it from getting in my eyes, welder's mask over my face to protect me from most of the possible damage as molten metal flicked up in protest at being forced to bond with a foreign sheet of steel to form weapons of war.  I liked the metalworking; the strain on my body forced me to concentrate solely on the task at hand.  For a few minutes at a time, I could focus on the beauty of the red-hot metal, moulding it with my tools to make it into something deadly.  Something to help those out there on the front lines, as it was not a place for my gender to be helping them out directly.

Even civilians march.  March to and from our jobs, our requirements.  Mindless, face down, shuffling along.  Like the dead.  I march to the factories.  I march home.  I march around the house, mewling child in my arms.  I can see why he hated it so much.