Read Online Pepsi Bears and Other Stories by Anson Cameron - Free Book Online

bizarre visitation a truce can be assumed. This thing, so out of place, so unexpected, an alien come from another planet, takes precedence over the slaughter. They begin to poke their heads up from the trenches to get a better look at her. Silence falls across the battlefield.
    The whole cast of manhood is here. Ranked facing each other, twenty thousand varied guns. The weasel unencumbered by ethics is here, the saint with his God, the idiot agreeing with himself, the scholar shaking his head, the coward with his heart pounding against a daguerreotype of Mother, the hero jollying his mates, the beaten man, the good man, the bad man, the ambitious, the meek, the sodomite and the rakehell, the shell-shocked and the broken-hearted … they are here. None of them fires a shot.
    Every visitor to these trenches until now has been a member of one military or another, officially involved in this war, and as such complicit in the bloodletting. But she is not. This alien is innocent of the crime being committed here and can thus bear witness to it.
    She stands watching this part of the world that men have made. Slowly sinking in the mud. It is doubtful she is disgusted or despairing at what she finds at Passchendaele. Likely she has no thoughts beyond fear and hunger. But for the men of Germany and Australia sheis so exotic, so unlikely and beautiful, such a mysterious presence, they project a spiritual identity onto her. She swings her head slowly this way and that, looking at the ranks of soldiers, and it feels like she is judging them.
    The soldiers of both countries begin to justify their actions. I’m here to save hearth and home, to save my loved ones. I’m here to stop a marauding force of slavering Huns. I’m here to save little Belgium. I’m here because my country needs me. I’m here to fight evil.
    The 3rd Australian Division looks across no man’s land at the zebra, and past the zebra to the Germans who are also staring at the zebra and past the zebra back at the Australians. And, realising she is of a different consciousness, none of their justifications make them feel any better. A zebra, sunk to its belly now, casting about for a blade of grass on the churned earth of war.
    To have this alien bear witness to their barbarity is humiliating. Like having your mother suddenly visit and find, despite your upbringing and education, despite her hopes for you, despite the piano lessons you’d taken and the Latin you’d learned, you are fallen to the most ghoulish pursuit. Caught, red-handed, killing other Latin scholars and pianists. This zebra becomes the embodiment of their shame. Becomes God, mother, lover … conscience. How would you feel if an angel spied on you at butchery?
    Tears emerge on the faces of the soldiers of Germany and Australia. Battle-hardened veterans begin to cry. For themselves. And for their lost selves. Some cry openly with uncontrolled sobs, some silently with quiveringchins and welling eyes. Twenty thousand men. No word spoken. Only crying, until the sun has set and the sight of her dimmed.

    Next day the zebra is gone. Sunk in the mud. In the trenches at first light men peer into periscopes and confirm, ‘Gone.’ ‘Gone.’ And everyone breathes easier. Within an hour smiles bloom and jokes are made. Shots begin to speckle the dawn as snipers take up their duties. Back to killing each other now. Out from under the merciless presence of that zebra.

Eggs illicit.
    A man alone, an explorer, a hunter, tiny silhouette against a backdrop of wilderness, bent sideways with a palm cupped to his ear, listening, scanning the heavens. For he is matching wits with that deadliest, most ingenious bitch … Mother Nature. Matching his endurance against her vastness; his wisdom against her storms, floods and droughts; his toughness against her heat and cold; his courage against her many beasts. Mother Nature, repeatedly insulted by man, has become cantankerous