Homeland

   When Muriel was in the shower, she suddenly remembered how being in a combat zone felt. The water reminded her of the many times they had been under heavy fire and how they had narrowly escaped death. Well, how she had narrowly escaped death because there were others who had gave their lives for the cause that they were defending, a cause that Muriel had trouble understanding now that she was home.

 She had arrived just a couple of days ago, being received by her parents and her boyfriend, although she hadn’t seen much of him. Muriel couldn’t explain it but, she had missed John so much in the filed and now that she had seen him again, she couldn’t even make herself hug him or kiss him or say anything sweet to him. She felt as if her heart had dried out in the desert, consumed by everything she had seen, day after day. She hadn’t even hugged her parents and they had tried and she knew they had felt it too, that awkwardness, like a barrier that now existed between them.

 Trying to scare all the negative feelings and memories away, Muriel decided to shampoo her hair and enjoy the nice odors of her parents’ home. Where she came from, she didn’t really have the chance to wash her hair very often. Actually, she had showered a few times the last month and it was always a minute, two at the most beneath the coldest water a country that’s hot as hell can have. But, even so, she had to confess that made her feel alive.

 The smell of chamomile that the shampoo had reminded her of a time that seemed very far in her past now. She had been picking up flowers with her sister near a house her father had rented in some mountains, not very far from the city where she was now. That time seemed like a dream. Because it was almost false, unlike the burned bodies and mutilated corpses she had seen in the last year. Her mind immediately went to the destroyed cities she had seen; the destroyed cities she had helped become a battling ground. Because, the more she thought about it, the more she realized her presence there was also a problem.

 For many people, she was the enemy and even locals, just people that tried to survive, ran away from her when she tried to come near them. It didn’t help that she was the only woman in an assault team and that the rest of her teammates could be considered brutes. They were man built like a mountain, guys that she had managed to control during training. Some were nice enough, she could even talk to them about what she liked and didn’t like in life, about her boyfriend, her parents, her dream to someday become a veterinarian. But other were just beasts that had to be controlled at all times. And some other times, they were released.

 She rinsed all of the shampoo from her head and then just enjoyed the warm water falling on her black, gliding down her breasts and belly and legs. Muriel instinctively touched her breasts, as if she didn’t know that they were still there. She really touched them and got a bit aroused but her goal was not that but to really feel something, whatever it was. She had been numb for so long that she started touching more and more and then put one of her hands over her vagina and… And she stopped.

 Like a pinch to the stomach, memories came running into her brain, once again. One of those beasts, one of those animals she had been to war with, had tried to rape her on the first week. Luckily, Muriel was a good cadet, a good soldier in general and was able to turn his brute force against him. She threatened him with telling everyone and he laughed at her, touching his penis over his pants. She ran away before he could say or do anything else. That image stuck in her head, even though she had been trying hard to eliminate of her mind.

 She grabbed the soap and decided to clean herself properly, every single centimeter of her body. She even sat down in the shower floor in order to feel she was under a waterfall or something like that. She had always done that, fro, the time she was a child, and her mother always told her that was a waste of water and that people in other countries would have loved to have that water to drink and cook and live. And then she would argue with her and loose.

 Now, Muriel had seen the world and the truth was that she didn’t really cared if a family or a boy or a girl had no water to drink because of her. She simply didn’t believe that it made any difference. For her, she had discovered, the world was full of shit. The world was evil and awful and people didn’t really ended up in the bright side of things. People had bad endings, every single day. People died or they were killed, and there were orphans and fear conquered all of their hearts and that was just how things were.

 What Muriel had done in that country, her killing and her helping, was not useful. She didn’t make any difference by doing those things and she was ready to tell any idiot than helping with such stupid things didn’t help anyone. Being kind one moment and awful the next didn’t make you even or something. It made you human and humans are made to make each other miserable, make each other suffer and, slowly but surely, make competition go away because that’s how the world goes.

 Then, she stood up from the floor and closed the shower. The lack of water noise made her tremble but she inhaled deeply and stepped out.

 She took a yellow towel her mother had left her and dried herself with it over the small mat on the floor that was shaped like a hamburger. She liked that mat, ever since she had seen it once, one of those few times she had been able to chat with her mother over Skype. For some reason, she had shown her the hamburger mat and told her it smelled nice and that she wanted the house more fun with it. It was such a silly thing but that stupid mat was a symbol of the home Muriel wanted to go back to. Her goal was to go back home and see that mat in person and now that wish had become true.

 Walking slowly, she got out of the bathroom and walked to the closet in the next room. She had somehow done that automatically, because of a force of habit that came from years of doing so, but her true attire of the day was on the bed. Her father had gone to a special store were they specialized in pressing and cleaning uniforms. And hers now looked brand new, with every single detail in the right place. She removed the plastic and just left it there, on the bed.

 That green, that shade of color on the uniform, had always symbolized so much to her. And now, she was trying to remember what it was that she had felt the first time she had seen it. And she did remembered but, again, she couldn’t feel it. She knew that the uniform had made her and her family happy and proud. She was one of the few people she knew that had decided to join the army. The reasons were many; include the benefits in education and even health but also because Muriel had been a patriot for a long time.

 When she was just a little girl, she was the one that made her father built a small metal thing to put over the front door of the house in order to put the flag there every time there was a holiday. With time, she just left the flag there because she liked to see it move with the wind. She liked the colors and the shape and how it made her feel. Muriel liked to learn more and more about her country and her community and was really admired by many parents and teachers, not so much by her fellow students.

 But now, all of that had left her. Her patriotism had been left for dead in a horrible battlefield filled with charred cars and corpses, were the only noise was the crying of a baby somewhere. Her flag was a rag with which she had cleaned all of the blood from her hands, as well as the blood dripping from her weapons.

 Muriel put on the uniform and didn’t even look at herself at the mirror after putting it on. She just went downstairs where her parents waited for her in the car, to take her to the ceremony where she would be qualified, by all her brothers ands sisters in arms, as a “hero”.

The forbidden jungle

  The waterfall had always been a lonely place, as it was located deep within the jungle. No one would have ever reached it on purpose, instead stumbling into it by mistake. It was said that the waterfall and its lagoon had the capacity to change locations and appear wherever people needed them to be. Many explorers and escapees from a nearby prison wandered into the jungle and got lost for days. Many of them, to be honest most of them, where eaten up by the jungle, whether it was by the fiery creatures inhabiting it or by the secrets that lay beyond the trees and the mossy ground. There were no natives to the jungle that could tell anyone about what lived beyond the first few kilometres simply because no living being, at least of the human species, had ever been able to come back.

 In satellites pictures, the jungle appeared to be dark green and even black in some parts. And it was all trees and trees, no sign of any waterfall or lagoon, which was only none to those few that had wandered into the jungle and survived. But as said before, these people never left the jungle. Instead, they remained in there, slowly transforming into wandering souls that helped protect the jungle and the secret within it. People that suffered this faith would not suffer or deny their destiny. Once they realized why they should give up their natural lives, they gave it all willingly. After all, those who survived were always the best humans, the examples of what was good and admirable about the human race.

 Such a person was Captain Roma Tennant. When she entered the navy, so many years ago, her peers only saw her as one of the women of the ship. But they had no idea she was far stronger and more capable than any of the men that worked with her in any of the Navy’s vessels. She was always the most oriented and the fastest one, also having great skills for shooting. She was prized several times, always involved in missions of war but far from any real battle. When she was finally sent to it, she became easily traumatized. She saw the few friends she had made in the Navy died, blowing up next to her or simply falling to their knees, a bullet in their foreheads. Her mind, however, got to hold on.

 The bit of sanity that remained in Roma was enough to destroy one of the enemies’ battle stations, thereby giving a perfect position for support troops to launch an attack that would make them win the fight. They did win, after many more casualties and Roma was able to survive, killing even more men and hiding in a sewage pipe. She was rescued by her country and brought back home but the truth was that Roma had been devastated by her, her mind almost broken by images of flying limbs and blood tainting every single drop of water. Her recovery took many months and her family thought they had lost her forever.

 And, in a way, they did. When Roma was able to walk again and use her arms and speak, she told them that she couldn’t live in the city anymore, as the sounds there reminded her of the sounds of battle. Cars and cell phones and planes made her very uneasy, very nervous. So her solution was to go and live by the sea, buy a boat with the money they had paid her for her services in the military, and simply live a quiet life in the ocean. She had to win the respect of her fellow men, once again, by proving she could easily manage to control a fishing boat, a cargo ship and even a small ferry to transport people across a small stretch of water.  She did exactly that at first and then travelled across the globe, working in jobs not very different, trying to bring peace to her mind and food to the table.

 She went to every big port in the world but, as she had realized before, cities were not for her, not even their harbours and marinas. She would settle for smaller towns, where she could be around people that she could recognize every day. But that eventually gave her more problems as she was reminded of the many people she had lost in battle. After one of her episodes, she was institutionalized for several months. This time, she had no family nearby and no one apparently notified them of her state. She remained in her cell, receiving shock therapy, which they still thought would be of any good in the country where she was. Eventually, they let her go when they saw she was calmer, less violent.

 Roma left that country fast and ended up in Indonesia, where she established herself as a fisherwoman. The locals there were not very happy to see her, a woman, trying to compete with all the men. She felt so harassed, that she decided to move upstream, through a large river that crossed a huge jungle. There she would finally be alone and she would be able to have a decent life for the remainder of her days, no matter how many they would be. She then noticed that explorers, scientists from all over who saw the jungle as an incredible source of discoveries, frequently visited the region. They said that a new animal was discovered every six hours and a new plant every eight hours.

 It was hard to believe such tales but Roma decided it was business and she dedicated herself to tour the scientists up and down the river and even through some canals and streams she had discovered. All the foreigners that got on her boat always came back as she was more daring than most people of the region and they knew it was because she had seen more of the world than they had. For a couple of years, explorers became her friends and she would always be there to greet them and take them wherever they needed to do their research. She had fun doing it, as she felt at peace for once in her life and it felt good.

 That changed the day she met Alexander Epps, an American scientist that had heard tales of the forbidden jungle and arrived in the region asking loudly for someone to take him there. Everyone said no, even Roma. She didn’t know all the tales, but she did know that the region of the jungle he was asking to go was very tricky in terms of navigability. She was skilled enough to go, she was sure, but it was difficult to live there and ignore the stories she had heard, about teams of twenty people that left for the jungle and never came back. Boats that appeared out of nowhere in the river and people recognized them as the ones that had transported lost souls to that dark patch of the forest. Roma was an adventurous woman, but she was no fool at all.

 However, Epps was a scientist and his research had also dropped the name of Roma. How it was known she lived there now, was never truly explained. Nevertheless Epps came to talk to her and tried to convince her to take him to the forbidden jungle. He insisted for months and she always said no. But then, as intelligent and twisted as Epps had always being, he tricked Roma into watching some images and footage of the war she had been in. He bombarded her with information, facts and so on. Just as he predicted, she snapped. But before she could lose herself to her own mind, Epps convinced her that the only way to purge herself from everything was to make a good deed and that was to tale him to the jungle.

 The next day, she took his team of ten men in her boat and carried them upstream. As expected, the jungle grew thicker, until it was impossible to keep advancing by boat. She told Epps it was her time to return but he threatened her with a gun and made her walk in front of him. None of that mattered anyways as in only one night; all the men of the expedition would be killed. Roma had not seen such carnage, not even in war. There were gigantic snakes breaking the bones of men, jaguars that destroyed a person in minutes and huge birds with beaks that could poke out eyes in the easiest way possible. The last one to die was Epps, who was impaled by a shadow Roma had seen before.

 Alones and in the brink of insanity, Roma wandered through the jungle, trying to get out of there but knowing one of the beasts was probably waiting for her. She was getting impatient, asking for the jungle to eat her, to destroy her life once and for all. But then she heard the humming of the water and, some steps in front of her; there was a perfect lagoon and a great waterfall where she cleansed herself from everything. Even her memories seemed to leave her as she washed her body. And then, beyond the trees, she saw a light. At first she thought it was an animal but then she realized it had the shape of a human being. Whatever it was, it was asking her to come towards him.

 Slowly, Roma did exactly that. The entity was one of the many souls that lived in the forest, one of the oldest apparently. It took Roma by the hand and took her to a trip where she left her body and transformed into a better version of herself. They wandered all around the jungle until the spirit took her deep within the trees, beyond the killer animals and the poisonous plants, beyond the waterfall and its soothing waters. There, in a space covered by plant life, there was a rock. It was the colour of blood and looked harmless. The spirit invited her to touch it and, when she did, she felt complete. And she understood why no one that wasn’t worthy could ever survive the forbidden jungle.