JOURNAL ENTRY FROM: I Raised Sea Turtles and Octopi

 

I came up off the ground discombobulated and unsure of what all was happening I believe that enough trauma had begun for my dissociative state to begin and confusion prevailed.  I climbed atop that table since to me it meant a place of safety.  For days food could be found there, and all the children came to this table to eat.  Then I could hear the sounds of suffering, all around me.  These men who had fallen had spread out trying to get away.  They now became a strewn orchestra of critically wounded men.  Like a battlefield scene after the cannons fired grapeshot into what the opposing army offered as cannon fodder for the artillery men.  A heavy scent filled the air it was similar to when you sniff a horse’s coat after it’s been doused with rain but now remains in the barn, but it also had this odd metallic smell like coins in a mason jar.  Then whiffs of that odor that accompanies a large carcass being butchered.  Not the odor of when the innards fall but that other smell after someone has hung it to rest in a refrigerated room.  I did nit know these smells at this age but later in life I accompanied my grandfather Max to many a stockyard and then both a outdoor butcher barn and a refrigerated butcher hanging room.  It odd but I recall how in that smell I could tell Robert was nearby.  When he came home from the oil fields there was some special soap that he used in the shower and then once he was out, he doused himself in some type of powdered and aftershave.  That small frail combination was lofting in the air too just a hint like a single thread in a sewn fabric.  You would have had to have that olfactory memory to have been comforted by that hint of a trace.