Wonders of the Invisible World by Christopher Barzak Page B

below, below this soldier and me, a battle had started.
    A barn was burning, illuminating the night with its fire. There was a steeple, ringed by the low two-story houses of the village the church served. The men who had flung themselves out of the plane circled the burning barn and the bell-tolling church like moths attracted to firelight.
    Where was I?
    In the air.
    You’re in a dream,
I told myself.
    I was in another world.
    Through the black air we drifted, until suddenly a gunshot rang out, and the young man I clung to grunted in pain. He held one hand against his chest, and when he pulled it away, he found blood there, hot and wet in the cool night air.
    Then we hit earth, stumbled, rolling against each other, and came to a stop at the edge of a woods, where we lay stunned, looking up at the sky as the planes cut through the dark on their way back to England.
    That was where he came from, I realized. I could pick that up from the current of his thoughts, like picking up a leaf as it floated by on the surface of a creek. The impressions of his mind had begun to enter my consciousness. But the longer I held on to him, the more I became confused. Couldn’t distinguish between his and my own feelings, couldn’t tell whose memories were whose.
    He’d been in England, training for this moment. That much I knew. I could see the months that had led up to his boarding the plane to jump out into the sky over a field in France. I turned to look at him lying in the grass beside me. As he stared up into the sky we’d just jumped from, the line of his jaw was chiseled against the night, creating a familiar silhouette, the profile of a face I somehow recognized. And I thought,
He looks like my father.
    He tried to stand, got himself halfway up with a good effort of gritting his teeth and grunting. Then he braced himself against the trunk of a tree, pulled a cigarette out of his pack of rations, lit it, inhaled deeply, and exhaled a smoky sigh of relief. When he tried to move away from the tree a minute later, though, something squished inside his boot—the sound of bones moving through jelly—and he winced as pain rang through his body, crippling him momentarily. He stopped, leaned back against the tree again, and waited there, breathing heavily.
    In front of us, the trees thinned out and a field opened, spreading toward the horizon. A dirt path cut across the center of the field, leading toward the village I’d seen from the sky. I could still see an aura of light surrounding the burning barn, most likely a mile from where we stood, but I couldn’t see the barn itself any longer. I could still hear the church bell tolling in the center of the little town, but I couldn’t see its steeple. Instead, I saw the dandelion seeds of young men drifting toward it. I saw one float right into the flames, consumed in the barn’s conflagration within moments, as if it had never existed.
    Click-clock.
The young man beside me had pulled a toy from his pack.
Click-clock
was the noise it made when he pushed on it, this piece of metal painted to look like an insect. A cricket, the army officers called it. I’d seen them before, in the sad and dusty toy aisles of run-down stores in Temperance that carried nothing but pieces of the past for purchase. Bubble-gum cigars, wax lips, lollipop whistles, plastic rings, and crickets.
Click-clock
went the cricket in the young man’s hands. Then he looked around, listening hard, but no crickets but the real ones chirping in the meadow answered.
    The patch of blood on his chest had spread and grown darker as we stood there. I wanted to do something, but I didn’t know how to help him. And since he didn’t seem able to see or feel me near him, I didn’t know if any of this was real or just a dream I’d fallen into. I was somehow there, though, in this other world, even if that world didn’t register my presence.
    “Where are we?” I decided to try asking.
    “Hell,” said the young man after a