The Prayer

by Bill Lapham

The woods were dense with barren trees, their leaves long since fallen and covered with a foot of snow, white as a dead face. Through the trees rose a hill on the far side of a ravine, and there was an icy road along the top of the hill, and a jeep had rolled off the side of the road pinning the dead driver under its weight. More trucks and jeeps creeped along the road, and long lines of soldiers in greatcoats trudged alongside the vehicles passing by the overturned jeep. The soldiers one-by-one looked down at the dead driver and shook their head as if to say, “Poor bastard.” As they continued their march to whatever far off battlefield awaited them, they could hear the distant boom of artillery as they hung their heads in solemn prayer, whispering, “Dear God, please don’t let me end up like him. Amen.”

6S

Bill Lapham is a veteran and a writer from an earlier time in the long life of Six Sentences.