The Engineer
He spent his life traveling the world searching for parts for his final project. His inventory of grace. A yellow star from the belongings of a Jewish girl in Nazi Germany. The barrel of Oppenheimer’s fountain pen. An exhaust from a WW1 Indian motorcycle. A jar of sand from Aleppo. To a refugee camp in Bangladesh, for a thread of saffron. The robe of T.E Lawrence found in an old chest in Dorset. A white feather from Morocco. Shell casings from the beaches of Normandy. The toe of a soldier’s boot washed up at Dunkirk. In Nagasaki, a singed photograph of a Japanese girl. A piece of rope and bark from Georgia. Some charcoal from Dresden. A doorframe from a Romanian orphanage. The canvas of a Bosnian medic’s stretcher. Some helicopter blades discovered in Vietnam in 1970. A wedding ring on the leg of an army hospital bed. Some rubble from a monastery in France. An empty water bottle from Nauru. Blood stained pipes from Manus. Three locks of baby’s hair from a photo album in Rwanda. The side of a wheelchair found in Warsaw in 1939. In Berlin, some love letters locked away in a sideboard for seventy five years. The roof of a home in Afghanistan. The sands of Darfur revealed a child’s toy. A book of poetry was recovered from the side of a road in Baghdad. In Myanmar, a homemade splint trussed together with string. Remnants of a bombed wedding tent unearthed in Yemen. A small handgun found in a church. These were the parts for his final project. His inventory of grace. Discovered beyond time and place. The parts of his heart. His arterial design for a new beginning. He disappeared before he could find all the broken things to finish his life’s work. To build a bridge, at the end of the world. First published in Tuck Magazine 2018.
💖 thank you Mark …….