Pawl: A Fictional Narrative

"I put my needle sticking it through and through and over and over laying the lacerated parts together as nice as I could with my hands."

“At about the same time, I was comforting the man who had been hit… He wanted to hold my hand because it was hurting him so bad.”

“…dragged from the house on his knees. His face was bloody and when he tried to speak he cried with pain.”

He turned his head toward me and peered at me through swollen eyes. “I begged her not to go with him,” he said quietly. “Do you hear me, I begged her!”

suggests, “...for the man trampled the calmly over the child’s body and left her screaming on the

“It’s nothing, Mother! There’s nothing there… Please sit down…” He pained me even more than did his mother’s cries.

“There, we can see your beautiful face again,” she says, depositing the washcloth into the murky water, and extracts the bandages and tape from the medical kit. “It's not bleeding, but knowing you, you'll figure a way to open it up again.” She grins.

“All right.” Percival rubbed his hands together, trying to figure out how he might best move Gawain without causing further issue. Tossed over the shoulder, the typical way to carry a wounded man, was out of the question. He would need to carry Gwaine supine in his arms, much like a sleeping baby might be carried. Gwaine was sure to hate that. But Gwaine’s eyes had begun to drift close and his face appeared more bloodless than ever, so Percival lifted his injured friends into his arms.

There was a hiss from both boys in pain and empathy, and another from the malevolent glowing tip of the gasper. The marred arm recoiled and was comforted by its twin, and their owner inspected the sanguinary crater. “Fuck. What the hell, J, you know I hate those things as it is.”

“I hear it was a frenzied attack,” she goes on. “There wasn’t much left of her neck by the time he was finished with her.”

When he’s in his cell for the first night, stripped of his armour and with cuffs of steel on his legs and arms he sleeps only fitfully.

“Gawain,” said Joan, still adjusting his nose, “the more you talk, the longer this’ll take. I’m almost done. I’m sorry this hurts so much, but there’s no other way.”

At least she’d drawn blood. It was Quade that she’d stuck, and she was glad for it, even if the damage was minimal. It hadn’t been Quade’s first time on the wrong end of a blade, either. The man was built like a lugnut, and he had a thin, shiny canyon of pink scar tissue snaking down across his face, from above his right eye to the edge of his left jaw. It must have been a real feat just to keep that pug nose intact. “You won’t be so feisty once you meet Mr. Talmidge, miss,” he drawled. He’d torn a section from his t-shirt and tied it tight over the gash she’d made in his forearm with the little pocket knife Brian had given her for her birthday so many years before. She’d finally had a chance to use it for something other than picking splinters.

She dipped the cloth into the bowl of water and faltered momentarily. The plausible thing to do was clean his wound first, right? Then bath the rest of his body?

I sat in my chair with a mug of tea nestled in my hands. The missionary ladies had all left for their homes, which left me with silence around the house. The sweet aroma of tea relaxed my taut body. It had been a long day - too long.