His hand, palsied, rotten like infected and compromised splatted wood
Malformed, it was his right, I think.
Though that is semantics
At this point
For I doubt that to him the side signified.
The torture turned his hand rotten
Like a slow-motion electrocution from a B-level horror movie
Where the hand was wax and wood not flesh and bone
(though I imagine he would object to that analogy if he could).
I saw him only in the end state,
eyes sunken in a peatbog of fear
the past nebulous and ancient beyond an event horizon.
When I first saw it, he smiled at the eighteen-year-old me with a knowing
mocking smile full of wisdom and pain
The break between body and soul
Shattered and fractured still.
In “better days” when he had held the post of Professor of English
At the Baghdad University
when his wife was alive
and children whole
Now his only tenure held with
“liberators,” “warfighters,” kids, naivety itself
who could not fix body or soul
Nor cared about his arm but only his tongue.
Not to lecture, but to translate threats.
“No matter how bad you make it now can’t be as bad as Saddam”
He confided to me once in the early months of my war
Before the internal exploded into a lifetime of soul torture.
I’d like to think he knew what was about to happen to us.
Maybe that was his last lecture.
Paul Warmbier is an essayist, memoirist, teacher, and woodworker living in McMinnville, Oregon. His essays have appeared in various journals and outlets from The Lutheran Hour – Thred, Punctuate, Allegory Ridge, Under the Sun, and Watershed Review. Paul earned his MFA in Creative Non-Fiction from the University of Idaho in 2017 where he was the assistant Non-Fiction editor of the Fugue Journal.