Haunting.

For years, the desk lay at the same place. It's owners were taking good care of it, no doubt, but it was never moved from the place it stood. Time passed by it like a perennial subway train and the desk felt like it was stuck in a station from which boarding the train was impossible.
But it did make some new friends over the years. The lamp, who refused to respond to any name, the ink bottle named Parker ( That was a nice name, the desk had thought ), a paper weight, which was silent as a stone most of the times, and many more who had stayed for a short, but what the desk would note in the future as happy periods.
But the desk always wished he would see the world, travel from the aristocratic homes in London to the bohemian style cottages in Tokyo. Face the icy cold blasts in Himalayas and also the putrid smells of rotten corpses deep in deserts of Nevada.
The unchanging patterns of Nevada deserts. Unchanging over years and years. Unchanging. Like the very place the desk rests. "How ironic", it said to itself.

It lamented, until the day it was thrown out, unceremoniously on the very road the window next to it overlooked. It then saw the harsh realities of life, panic stricken people on the road running for cover. It also felt miserable for it had this horrible feeling that it might have caught some borers and termites in this entire ordeal.


The soldier was running forward, forever sure of his death, in this world that he saw to be nothing more than a big charnel house. He was clutching in his hand a Mills bomb and there across the road, he saw a desk lying in the middle of the road. He had learned his lessons well in a short time, the lessons that usually dawn upon you when you fight in the war.
He threw the bomb, in a practiced over-arm motion, which would have probably been graceful to suit an orchestra conductor, but only in a situation totally antithesis of what he currently was in.


The desk saw a new object land near it and roll around. While it was busy in sublime thoughts of making a new friend, it saw a bright light and before it could realize, it was disintegrated into splinters of wood.


The soldier had followed his learning well. If the bomb could do damage to a small area, but the shrapnels, oh my god, the shrapnels made a hell of a weapon. Piercing through bodies like spade in moist soil, it injured more than anything a bomb could ever do on it's own.

--FIN--