of the truck in the background rumbling like the pant of a heavy dog. No more screams resounded, no more kicking nor whining echoed in the bushes and yet there was no muffled thwack of a bullet from a silencer. Only the sound of saliva could be heard, sliding against the boy’s cheeks as he nursed on the silencer’s long black muzzle like a lethal nipple, as if trying to suck the bullet out. Then the sound of urine trickling onto leaves and settling into a puddle on the dirt and soon to be mud, brought Dae-Ho’s attention to the soldier. The man sighed and spit and sighed again, until the flow of piss began to drizzle like leaking faucets onto his boots. Then as haphazardly as he came the soldier staggered back to the truck and his cohort’s chuckles and chatter. The truck pulled off immediately and dragged with it the thousand clanks and chimes from its engine, tires and beaten body and faded off like the last instrumental of a song on the radio, forever lingering. Lingering so long on Dae-Ho’s ears that he felt the noise sounded like low humming earrings that just wouldn’t stop, until eventually they did. The boy still sucked on the barrel of the silencer, now more ardent than before. His eyes began to close and he found a comfortable position on Dae-Ho’s lap. His last gesture before he fell asleep was to wrap his chubby fingers and thumb around Dae-Ho’s index finger, which a moment earlier lay on the trigger of the gun. Dae-Ho sat back and rested his shoulder blades on a stout plant that stood too short to be called a tree and far too tall to be a bush or shrub. As his lips popped open for a sigh he thought he heard himself speak but he didn’t. What he heard was a voice, his propaganda conscience or some other ghost of his consciousness, whispering towards and about the gun placed inside the child’s mouth and saying, “I couldn’t have put it any better myself.” theMeadow 115
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