Folks,

Committing literaturicide is but a painful concept. A concept nevertheless that you will now be all too familiar with. Lucky for me, literaturicide is neither a real word nor is committing it against the law as far as I know. Yes, Dux, I looked it up just to be safe. I am feeling relatively safe from prosecution, so here is episode 2.

Just One Drop
Episode 2
BY: JRT
Original HWH
Page 3
5/27/01

A brilliant dawn is just breaking through high, thin mare’s tails clouds streaked with gold. It casts a wondrous glow over the quiet British countryside. A lone figure, a young woman, has paused for a moment along a country road. She stands quietly watching as the sun rises over the spires of a distant church. The spires turn from brown to yellow to almost blinding gold. The young woman stands there in awe still astride her bicycle. She is a nurse on her way to work.

There is a small pond just between her and the spellbinding view. The still waters reflect and seem to magnify the beauty radiating across the sky. Her blue eyes are fixed, reflecting only the surrounding scene. Her mind is grappling with a paradox. She wonders, out loud, how such irresistible beauty can co-exist in a world so filled with the cold, bloody, brutality of war.

The grass along the dusty road is long and luxuriant. There is a sweet scent of earthiness clinging to the air. As the young woman watches something unseen disturbs the waters of the pond. This sends ripples through the golden reflections to lap at the grassy bank. The dew glistens on the tall grass round the pond’s edge. To Jenny they sparkle like the rhinestones on her mother’s party dress.

A light breeze begins to stir a young oak that has volunteered to grow its rough branches just ahead near a bend in the road. There, the rutted, narrow road runs in an easy arc to the right, around the pond and on toward a cottage she can clearly see in the distance just to the left of the church and across the pond now filled with gold. She can stay only a moment. There are many waiting; too many.

Jenny feels the air tickle her cheek and ruffle her kerchief. It makes her think once again of Johnny. The kerchief she wears was a gift from him. She treasures it so much that she usually wears it only on special occasions. As she tenderly caresses its soft, silkiness she remembers.

Jenny and Johnny were planning a September wedding. Then the war reared its ugly head to cast a shadow over just about everything that was wonderful in her life. How she hated this bloody war! Johnny was seldom able to see her now. The wedding had been postponed. If Johnny knew her secret, she wondered if that might have made a difference? Probably not in wartime. No matter.

What the PM had called the Battle of Britain is now in full swing and her Johnny is a brave Spitfire pilot posted to the nearby airfield. He has already been wounded twice. How much more would he, they, have to endure before this hateful mess was over?

She is doing her bit, as a trained nurse. All the women all over England are doing their bit. They stand defiant, in the rubble of their lives as it crashes down around them and they shake their little fists at the enemy filled skies above as it continues raining death all about them. Then they quietly go about the, sometimes grizzly, business of putting it all back together again. They are women that are in every sense worthy of their men. “They also serve who only stand and wait.”

Just then, there is a rumbling, whirring, rushing sound as if all the bees in the world were coming her way. Looking up and to her left she sees them coming just above the trees they are climbing toward the sun in three vics of three each. Nine Spitfires flew toward her and swept hurriedly across her peaceful sky rending the air with a horrible noise. They did not tarry; they did not seem to notice the lone figure looking up at them. They droned onward and upward climbing as if drawn to some distant appointment. On into the sun they flew.

Jenny wondered if Johnny might be in one of those planes. She prayed that he was not. If he was, she prayed he would come home again safely. With a sigh and before the fighters were out of sight her chilly left foot was already on the bicycle pedal and pushing it down hard.