perhaps (in dreams)

Perhaps it was never really a grenade that he cradled briefly in his hand, but a pinecone; and the subsequent explosion, merely light bursting through the clouds in a radiant sunrise.

Perhaps his rifle—practically an extension of his arm—was the handle of a broom he used to tidy the modest setting of his domestic bliss. Then afterward, he tipped the dustpan with its fine coating of powdered sugar and chocolate shavings into the waste bin in the kitchen, where his beloved wife stood frosting a fat chocolate cake.

Perhaps the gas that drifted and crept, eerily quiet and lethal along the ground, was merely steam escaping from the warm asphalt as the sun melted last night's rain away like a memory. Then the heat—the unyielding fever that sizzled the air above blistering sand—was merely all of the colors of Jupiter blazing in front of his closed eyelids as he lay on his back in the cool, damp grass.

Perhaps the arm that beckoned his brothers back into the tank instead circled his wife's waist as they rocked gently on the porch swing and she laid her head on his shoulder. And that dull roar—the low rumbling that somehow caused the very landscape to quake—perhaps that was only the din of the tide rushing in to lap at the algae and bring new foam to the shore.

He could almost pretend that the crimson stain that blossomed and spread darkly over the fabric of his fatigues was a bloom; a rose that he held behind his back before slipping it covertly into a small crystal bowl on the dining room table as his wife busied herself with dessert.

Then the darkness— the premature twilight that pressed and pulled at his consciousness—perhaps it was merely the heaviness of night that enfolded him, completely as his beloved's arms, as he drifted off to sleep.