Second draft, chapter 1
Aries hated this shit.
He hated the flies, the mud, the goddamn artillery, and the waiting. Always the waiting.
“Look alive!” yelled the sergeant down the line.
“Oh, fuck you,” snarled the man next to Aries.
“Times like these, you wish they’d get shot,” said Aries. A big, broad man, he took up most of the foxhole. The rifle seemed almost too small for him. He had fiery red hair and piercing green eyes – “a typical Irishman with a typical Irish temper” you would think just by looking at him. He had lost most of that over the years, thank the gods.
“Going over the line!” the sergeant yelled.
Aries whacked the barrel of his rifle against his helmet. “Announce it to the damn Krauts, why don’t you?”
He heard a slap of skin hitting skin. A Kraut shot at them. Then a couple of others did too. Aries lifted his rifle and fired back, not that it did anything.
“Guess we’re not going over the line now,” Aries said. He’d been through trench warfare before, only twenty years ago. Why didn’t anybody learn? Then, he had risen all the way up to lieutenant.
The army was something that Aries lived for. Unlike his brothers, he decided that his life was to be a soldier, and to be alone. It was expected. Unlike some of his brothers, he hadn’t attached himself to an Earthly soul. He’d come, done his work, and gone back to where he was from.
Done. Finished. Kaput, as the Krauts would say.
“Goddamn, Jack,” said Aries, leaning back in the foxhole, “don’t you wish you were back home?”
“Well, some days I do, some days I don’t. Got nothing waiting for me at home but a shack in Okleehoma.”
“If there’s anything left there.” The last newsreel showed Oklahoma as still a desert. “There won’t be work there.”
Jack said, “Don’t need to go to Okleehoma. I can go anywhere I please. I ain’t married. You?”
“Me?”
“What’re you going to do after?”
He smiled a bit. “Oh, I’d go back home.”
“Got anyone waiting for you?”
“Shut up!” someone yelled.
“We c’n hear your yappin’ all the way down here!” someone else yelled.
If Aries thought it would be safe, he would have chucked them the bird, but he leaned over the line and shot randomly at the Krauts. They, obligingly, shot back.
Jack hunkered down more in the foxhole. “Don’ let us do nothin’ out here,” he snarled.
((Not sure about the spirit idea. Getting closer. So… Draft 3))