If I Could Tell It

Colorado Springs, America, 2010

Putting on my prescription glasses for the first time was like seeing the world clearly for the very first time.

It reminded me a bit of the moment after a complex algebra equation is solved and the answer is suddenly made clear. Although, with the clarity of the glasses, it was difficult to see that there was even an equation to begin with.

The degrading of vision somehow reminds me of the morale displayed by most people. It has been reduced so slowly and yet so far at the same time that by the time we have received the chance to correct it we have not realized how far south it has gone.

I wonder if this is the case with my father. I wonder if at one time he was a good man. I hope that he was. I hope he treated my mother well when they were young. And I hope that what happened to him will not happen to me.

I thought that Miss Marion forcing me into getting glasses was a scheme of stupidity but as soon as I looked through them I quickly rethought my opinion. Seeing clearly was something I needed to do even if it required a crutch to do so. I decided that I would wear them.

“You look so smart!” Miss Marion said as we sat in the parking lot of the optometrist sector of the hospital.

I just looked at her for a moment. She cocked her head at me and I rolled my eyes and blew my hair out of my face and it fell on the black plastic, square rims of the glasses.

“You need a haircut.” Miss Marion commented.

“No I don’t.” I replied. “My hair is fine.”

“Arthur, I don’t want to fight with you about this anymore. You just look like a mess with your hair unkempt.” She told me. How opinionated. “You can keep it long but you have to at least make it look purposeful.”

I looked at her sideways. “I will cut my hair myself.”

She just looked at me and sighed. “Why do you hate getting your hair cut so much?”

“I don’t know.” I lied. Of course I knew why. I left my hair long and unkempt because there it was a sign of manhood in the Old Ways. If I cut my hair here then it would only transfer there and that was not something I wanted. “I just don’t.”

She sighed again and started the car. “You better have done something with it by tomorrow.”

“Fine.” I said. I did not have a plan yet but I was sure that I would come up with one soon. “Where are we going now?”

“Your Drafting teacher said you needed more tracing paper right?” She asked me. “We should probably get that sooner than later.”

“I guess.” I said and tapped my knuckles against the plastic glove compartment box of the car. “Oh, I forgot to tell you, I need to stay late after football practice tomorrow to help Will with geometry.”

“Just because you’re in high school now doesn’t mean you don’t have to ask permission.” Miss Marion scolded.

I rolled my eyes. “Can I stay after practice to help Will with geometry?”

“Sure.” Miss Marion said. “Thank you for asking permission.”

“Yes.” I said and looked down at my watch. Already six thirty.

“Can we get paper tomorrow morning?” I asked her. “Harrison’s just a few minutes away from Walmart.”

“Why do you need to get home so bad?” She asked suspiciously. “Do you have a girl you need to email?”

“Um.” I said I felt myself blush from the fact that she just asked me if I had a girl I needed to email. The fact that she thought I had found a liking for any girls at my school somehow amused me. “I’m hungry and I want to eat dinner.”

I knew that Viviane had told me that we would never be able to be together, but I still had a shred of hope dwindling in the back of my mind. I loved her and I knew I would always love her. Even here, in America, in this foreign land I loved her. I loved that she was so unlike all of the superficial American girls at my school. She did not care if I was on the football team or if I was taller than six feet or what my shoes looked like. She understood me, and she understood there. That was an impossible quality to come by, and for that I know it will be exceptionally difficult for me to ever find another female that I felt so strongly for, if I felt for at all.

“It’s getting toward the end of September Arthur.” She said suggestively. “Have you thought about asking anyone to homecoming?”

“Not really.” I told her. I would have asked Viviane to homecoming. “Should I?”

“It might be fun.” She turned on to the street that led to the house. At least I would get to eat after the interrogation. “What about that girl that you always talk to after your games?”

“Katie?” I asked. She came to every JV game with two of her friends and sat on the bleachers with all the parents and watched. Afterwards she would always come up to me and tell me how well I did and ask me about seemingly random things. “She kind of freaks me out.”

“She just likes you.” Miss Marion said and pulled into our driveway. She opened the garage, parked the car, and turned it off so all the blue lights faded away. “Her mom’s in my book club, she seems nice.”

“Why would she like me?” I asked her. “She doesn’t even know me.”

Miss Marion just looked at me in the dim light of the cement garage. I looked at her back and cocked my head in confusion. I blew my hair out of my face when it fell in front of the new glasses.

“Maybe she wants to know you.” She told me.

“Why?” I asked. It made almost no sense for a complete stranger to want to get to know someone else for no absolutely reason. As far as I knew we had no commonalities except for the fact that we were in the same Geometry class, even that being a stretch. I saw her get a D on a test once, suggesting that she obviously was not adept at mathematics such that I was.

She made a sound somewhat like a growl at me. “Just think about it. You might regret not going to your freshmen homecoming when you’re older.”

“Don’t think so.” I muttered as I got out of the car. “What’s for dinner?”

“Anthony’s on his work retreat in Denver and I ate with my friend Peggy before I picked you up at practice.” She explained. “So whatever you want.”

“Great.” I said under my breath and walked from the garage to the kitchen to scour the pantry in order to find something that I deemed worthy of consumption.

After I ate, which was a meal of the rather eclectic variety, I wandered up the stairs to my room where I turned on my computer and opened the game I had gotten a few days ago.

The game was based on the air battles of World War II and after my pilot crashed for only the fourth time I exited out of the application and stared at my screensaver. It was just a sketch of the unit circle that I had downloaded from Google images but it still comforted me to look at its perfection, all of its angles that were drawn by computers and devoid of all human flaws.

I do not think that the problems in the world are caused by people. I think that they are caused by humanity. The entirety of human imperfection. Of every single thing that we do wrong. It infuriates me sometimes.

Or maybe it is just because of the war.

Maybe because when I close my eyes my mind is consumed by human disaster and ruckus. By the inanimate people who seem to only be fighting to be killed. These people who I am leading into battle to be killed. I lead them like sheep to the slaughter. I barely even know why anymore. And yet I feel bad for these people who contribute to the human imperfection that has been my insentient nemesis for as long as I can remember.

Arthur

My name is Arthur Pendragon and I am fourteen and a half years old.

I have killed more men than I can even keep track of.

I have a scar for each of them, if not on my body then on my mind.

Central British Battle Camp, Britain, 647

“Lionel.” I told him as I sat against the boulder in the middle of camp. “We cannot keep doing this.”

“I know.” He sat down next to me. “Every man and boy in this camp has been injured if they are not dead.”

“What are we going to do?” I asked him. I picked up a fallen brown leaf in my hand and squeezed it until it made tiny flakes in my hand.

“What can we do?” He replied.

I did not say anything. There was nothing we could do. Battle after battle passed. Some we won and some we lost. It did not really matter whatever the result was, men still died on each side. So I suppose we lost every one. Every one of the seventeen battles I had fought in. It seemed like more than that, every week we fought once, sometimes twice.

I never saw my sister again after we had taken Elaine back to camp. I suppose, as a woman, she did not fight in the battles, she must just sit in their camp and practice her witchcraft. Or maybe she conspired with Setanta while they fought. I never seemed to see him on the battlefield either. If I had seen him he would already be dead.

“I am going to the river.” I told him and stood up. He held out his hand and I took it and pulled him to his feet.

“At supper then?” He asked.

I nodded and walked I the direction of the small stream that had formed when the rain had started in early September. We called it the river even though it was only a muddy five feet wide and barely had a current. It was the closest thing we had to a valid water source since the real river ran red with blood from the battles.

I sat on the stream bank and looked at the brown water and the tiny ripples that formed. The forest floor had turned shades of orange and red since autumn had arrived. Ordinarily I would have admired the fiery colors that the world had become graced with. Viviane would have enjoyed it.

Viviane was my first love because she believed me.

This is the conclusion I have come to after careful analysis of the possible reasons of why I could have felt so strongly for her at such a young age. I knew that we would never marry; it was only the desperation that caused me to ask her. I was so incredibly desperate for anyone, anyone to believe me. I craved the validation that would come from reasonably talking with someone about there. I craved the validation that would come from someone knowing my full truth and not thinking that I was completely insane. I craved it so much that I would even take it from someone who was almost undoubtedly insane herself.

Even though I knew the reason, I still could not help myself from loving her.

I drew Excalibur and stared at it in my pale hands. Tiny red and white scars ran across my hands now, calluses lined my palms.

In America they say that men should be proud of their battle scars. I am not. I have a scar it seems everywhere on my body. I have one across my back from when a horseman’s cavalry sword cut through my chainmail while I was on foot. I have one near my collarbone from where an arrow pierced my flesh, I was so fortunate not to have been hit in a place where serious injury may have been inflicted. My stomach was shredded by a man with metal claws instead of a hand. I had streaks across my face from when a man dragged his mace across my forehead to my cheek. Bloody blisters lined my feet from boots that are too small for me. My thigh has stitches from a shallow wound by a long knife.

It is a miracle and a wonder that I am not yet dead or so injured that I cannot fight.

I remembered Miss Marion’s words there about my hair and I took one lock of my mane and held it up so the sunlight caught in it. Here, at war, my hair was a bit greasy and tangled, however, that was only to be expected. I took Excalibur then and cut about an inch and a half off of it. It fell about to my chin when I let it go. I proceeded to cut the rest of my hair to about that length then and I pushed back away from my forehead so it was out of my face for the most part. Then I slid my sword back into its scabbard and stood to go back to camp.

On the fourth step I took I heard a faint giggling sound and I immediately looked across the river to the source of the sound. All I saw was a bit of white fabric that quickly disappeared from my vision. I crouched down and crawled behind the bushes on my side of the river, listening to the giggling that was accompanied by a few soft whispers. I heard footsteps in the marshy earth and I listened as hard as I could to give myself as much clue as to whom it might be.

The footsteps stopped and I peered through the fern I was behind to see two figures, a girl and a boy, that had just sat down on the streambank. The girl was very obviously Elaine, because of her white dress, pale blonde hair, and the fact that she was the only girl in the entire camp. At first I suspected the boy to be Bedivere, because he said that he found Elaine beautiful and was always trying to get her to wander off with him. However, when I looked closer, I saw that the boy was much too thin to match Bedivere’s broad figure. His coloring was also much too dark and he had a shock of dark, glossy hair that seemed to flow around his head perfectly. He kissed Elaine on the cheek and she smiled and kissed him back on his mouth and wrapped her arms around his neck as if he was her lifeline.

I looked away to the leaf-covered ground for a moment. I wondered how Ellion would feel about one of the men kissing his sister like that. He was so protective of her, he would be furious with whomever it was. I felt bad for Ellion because of it. At least he had finally found his true forte in fighting, he was an excellent archer and he had killed many Saxon warriors helping us by bow and arrow.

Elaine pulled away first and I could finally see who her partner was.

It was Lancelot.

Colorado Springs, America, 2010

“Katie?” I asked as she began to walk down the bleacher steps after the game finished. She had been sitting with her two friends whose names I learned were Jeanette and Sabrina. “Can I talk to you?”

“Um sure.” She said and grinned at Jeanette who ran her hand through her shoulder length curly brown hair and jerked her chin toward me. She walked onto the field and smiled at me nervously.

I pushed my sweaty hair off of my forehead and looked her up and down quickly. It seemed every day she came to one of the games she wore a tighter, more revealing shirt. That interested me. Her philosophy seemed to be that the sleazier she made herself appear the more I would be interested in her. That did not make so much sense to me. In fact, the sleazier she made herself look the more I think I shied away from her. It sort of intimidated me. If I liked the way it looked, that meant the other boys at school and on the football team liked it too. That also meant that if I did want to ask her out, then I would have competition. And, because I was not even sure if I liked Katie, the competition aspect did not entice me at all.

“Do you want to go to homecoming with me?” I asked her. I figured that Miss Marion would pressure me to go one way or another, and Katie did not completely annoy me.

“Yes!” She squealed excitedly. That did annoy me. I asked her if she wanted to go to the dance with me, not offer her a million dollars or a full ride to Stanford.

“Great!” I said, forcing excitement into my voice.

She embraced me then and I hugged her back and counted to six before she let me go. I felt myself flinch, I hated it when strangers touched me.

“Sorry, I think I’m a bit sweaty.” I told her when she pulled away and I felt my jersey practically wet with perspiration.

She laughed a very high pitched giggle and then said. “It’s okay.”

“So I’ll see you in geometry then?” I asked her as I looked to head back to the direction of locker rooms.

“Yep!” She said happily. “You have my email too. We can write!”

I nodded with a plastic smile on my face, then turned away and felt my expression quickly melt into a comfortable glare at the ground.

I wished she was Viviane.