Fallen Soldiers (A Story For Dan That I Hope Won't Give Him Nightmares)

My fiancé collects bobblehead dolls. Tokens purchased only at ballparks, emblems of true baseball fandom. They sit on a shelf in my living room, visible, eye-catching from the moment you ascend our apartment stairs. It’s like a little shrine to artificial happiness, this shelf. An altar of fake, stretching smiles and unsolicited nods. They remind me of a little army. Row after row of tiny fighters with oversized heads and toothy grins, standing at attention, ready to wage war against good taste and flattering home decor.

But they are precious as well. Delicate. So tender. Like infants that must be coddled and protected, I have to carry them with two hands, one palm supporting their heavy bobbing heads, their necks weak and worthless. I must lay them gently on a pile of blankets, a soft but secure surface, when I wish to dust the living room shelves. Their paint is cracked and chipped from times when I was careless, disinterested. Moving from one apartment to another, I placed them too close together in an unlined box, didn’t think twice when I heard their bulbous heads clink and clack as I set the box on the floor, pushed it haphazardly to the side with the toe of my shoe. A chunk of the neck is missing from one, there’s a chip in the arm of another. Their smiles, in light of these injuries, these rough abrasions, have become menacing, taunting even. They don’t beam stupidly like their agreeable peers, but sneer at me when I pass, their enemy identified.

I am more careful now, gentler, seeking redemption for former abuse. The cat leaps from the floor to the shelf and weaves between the tiny ball players, his tail flicking back and forth. They nod their approval, but I disagree and lift him slowly, cautiously from his perch back to the floor, reach out and steady their bouncing heads. I have given up dusting altogether, hardly move them at all anymore.

And yet, there are errands to be run, work to attend, fresh air needed from time to time. It is when I am gone, when I take leave from the base, that the danger sets in. I come home, in the mid-afternoon, my arms heavy with grocery bags and find a massacre laid out before me. The smiling face of a wide-eyed tiger, the bill of his Detroit hat cracked down the middle, stares up at me from the living room floor, bodiless and alone. The chipped, broken red pieces of a cardinal’s smashed head drift down from the shelf to the floor like an oozing wound. The tiny men, with their wide, silly smiles and their great, bouncing heads lie together in a pile, one on top of another, crumpled, busted, maimed. And right in the middle of all this destruction, triumphant and proud in the center of the battlefield, his back long and straight, his chest puffed out, the cat sits. Seeing me, he mews softly and bobs his head to one side.