Dustin Grella: A Meditation


This morning I walked past a church with a sign out front that read, “Prayers for Peace.” Stretching the entire length of the church was a wrought iron fence with long thin yellow ribbons draped across. They looked like ties on a clearance rack.

I noticed that some of the ribbons had nametags attached. As I walked down the sidewalk I thought the ribbons must be for donors or sponsors or patrons of the church. It was one of those beautiful old stone churches on Fifth Avenue.

The front of the church was long and the ribbons were many and bright yellow and dancing in the December wind, so they easily kept my attention. I read another nametag. This one was of a soldier; the third, also of a soldier. That was when I realized that these must all be names of soldiers; soldiers who had died in Iraq. Thus the yellow ribbons; thus the prayers for peace. I stopped. I started searching for PFC Devin J. Grella.

There were thousands of ribbons. I wasn’t going to be able to just randomly find his, but then I saw that they were in a sort of ad hoc alphabetical order Greka, Gonzalez, and after a long while, Grella.

A heavy cold wind blew through me, tossing the ribbons high off of the fence. I cried. I don’t think of him that often anymore, even though it has only been three years. Even though someone in Iraq was just killed yesterday, someone’s son, someone’s father, someone’s husband, someone’s friend. I miss him. I wish I could say I think of him more than I do.

I wiped the tears from my face and started walking back down Fifth Avenue, crossing through Madison Square Park. I thought immediately of the sound byte on the laptop when his clothes and personal belongings were returned. I thought about that sound file, guns firing in the background, his innocent twenty-one year old voice, oddly more mature since he’d left for Iraq, three months ago. An IED would be detonated beneath his diesel tanker days later, killing him instantly.

I can remember when our family got the laptop out of his personal effects. We were in the funeral home, closed casket wrapped tightly with a flag on the other side of the room. We all huddled around the monitor, as if we were looking into a crystal ball that could deliver a message from beyond the grave. There they were, pictures of Devin and his friends, videos of soldiers in a sporting boxing match, and a sound file of him delivering a tanker of fuel across a Persian desert. We listened to it over and over. We cried. We wanted to know, to be a part of, experience what his life (a life that we all knew so well before he’d left for Iraq) was like those last few months.

We knew that he was somewhere, but it wasn’t until we heard the machine gun fire in the background that we realized he had been off in a very foreign place. Maybe before that we didn’t want to know. Maybe we were in denial. It definitely made it easier to sleep at night.

At that moment, gathered around, listening to his voice, I tried to imagine Devin as something I’d never considered him, a soldier. I knew him as a little brother, an athlete and a sports fanatic, a musician, slightly girl crazed and able to spend hours gaming, but never as a soldier.

He’d only been there three months, hardly enough time to write back home. He’d only been in the army for six months, and honestly, I’d never really spoken to him about it. It wasn’t how I identified him. But here, at the funeral were hundreds of men, dressed in uniforms, straightening collars, and saying what a brave solider my brother was. And there I was, keeping my mouth shut, for fear of dishonoring him.

Mike Geiger

Until the Fingers Begin to Bleed

Keystone wandered through the door smiling like any twenty-five year old that had one hour previous been in the process of ending his relationship of four years upon a tie-formal dinner on the edge of the end of the world. Olive had said that it was time to move on. He had said that there wasn’t anything to move on to, and she replied that if they were all going to die, she didn’t want it to be with him.

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He situated himself before his piano. He looked up to wave to the audience, then cracked his knuckles.
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Perched on the piano bench to one side of him was a half-drunk bottle of wine. To the other side was a plate of peppers. He was allergic to peppers- they caused him to have a violent outbreak of rash. And hours after, his airways would begin to constrict. He took in a mouthful anyway.

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Humanity was going to end tomorrow. It was a bad joke: an asteroid was about to slam itself into the third planet like some kind of angry arpeggio. It left one asking, where the hell were all the engineers? The missile-launchers? The astrologists, the pessimists... did not anyone have a telescope? But it was too late for these questions now. No matter what anyone did, the world would crash.
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"This will be in fortissimo,” Keystone announced. “Because you people love noise. Can’t get enough of it. Make it loud, right? No, make it louder. Noise, noise, noise.” He slammed his fingers violent-down on the keys each time he said “noise.”

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He loosened his tie from his neck and his collar swung free. “I call it, ‘All the Fish in the Sea Could Not Even Manage, a Movement in However Many Parts It Takes.’”
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With a stony face staring straight ahead, his fingers began to race into keys, and a deep, discordant harmony filled the room like a flowery black shrapnel.

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Midway through his fantasia, he looked out into his audience again, and now noticed Olive among the faces. It was at this point that he realized: no one was going to remember this. No one could even see it! The whole world out there was so busy running in panic that they were missing it, all of it. And even in a million days, it would never happen again.
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This made him sad. But it was a beautiful sad. It made every note that much more fragile; that much more lonesome and needed in its own world. And meanwhile, the peppers had begun to cause a rash. But the peppers tasted good and thanks to the wine all he could feel was a sort of red liberation.

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“It’s the notes you don’t,” he said without saying.
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Instead of fortissimo, the piece came in pianissimo. The bright white keys came off softer and softer until not even he could feel them. He might have been proud, but he did not smile and neither did he frown. It was important that it was only music now.

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He and Olive were lying side by side on a grassy campus hill a few years back. They remained, looking up at the fluffed sky with vacant mouths, until Olive spoke:
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“What do you think it’ll be like we die?”

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“I don’t know,” he said, “I don’t want to think about that.”
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“I mean,” she said, disregarding his reply as if he had never said it, “How do you think it’ll feel? Do you think it’ll hurt? Or do you think... maybe God gives us a break?”

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“I don’t know,” he repeated, sighing. “All I know is that I don’t want to be awake when it happens.”
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She giggled, eyeing a particular cloud from the hill. He closed his eyes.

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It hadn’t really sunk in yet that he was now, for all intensive purposes, dead to his once-lover. It was better this way.
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He picked up his bottle of wine.

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“And for my next piece, I give you this one called ‘A Fish with Suntan in All Keys Minor.’” He slammed the keys with an immovable quietness and resumed.