Recruitment, or the Eternal and Unbearable Ridiculousness of Neverending Foreign Policy
David Morgan O'Connor


He shoved the barrel into my mouth and I swallowed my two front teeth. His left hand had my left ear and some hair. His eyes were dark brown. He wore military boots and an army-issued balaclava. He had a Yorkshire accent.

“Tell me now ye’little papal prat, where’s your fucking father, the colonel?” He kept repeating the same phrase, but my mouth was full of gun and every time I tried to speak he would yank my neck so hard I couldn’t make a sound. My sisters, Agnes and Deirdre screamed from separate rooms. The soldiers had pulled Bernard from the bed we shared and dragged him down the stairs. I heard the back door open and I imagined him lying face down in the garden grass, taking kicks and punches, hopefully, not bullets. I prayed. I couldn’t hear my mother but imagined her in the kitchen. After a dozen whacks on the side of my head the soldier took the gun out of my mouth and threw me into the rocking chair. He smacked my nose hard and started tying my ankles and wrists with shed-rope. My tongue took the blood from my upper lip. It felt the holes where my teeth used to live. The soldier pulled his mask up and lit A Sweet Afton, the same brand my mother smoked.

“Where the fuck is your father? I won’t ask again.” the soldier yelled.

“Went to the pub.”
 
“Which pub?”
        
“The Crown.”
        
“What time?”
        
“After supper.”

He rocked the chair, withdrew a knife from his boot and held it low beside his prick. Rocking, I went closer and closer to the knife or his prick, depending on how he moved his hips. The prick was enjoying his power.
        
“You’re lying.”
        
“Am not.”
        
“You are, you little Republican fucking terrorist.”
        
“I am citizen of the Free State and you’re an occupying army.”
        
He stuck his cigarette into my cheek.
        
“So he went to The Crown, did he?”
        
“He always goes there after dinner.” I said what my father had told me to say. But deep down, I knew he was on O’Neill’s lobster tug meeting some Basques off the coast. He wouldn’t be back for at least two days. They were buying arms and I wasn’t suppose to know. In fact, I wished Paddy hadn’t told me. I never asked. Paddy The Mouth. Paddy the postman, whose lips had sunk more ships than Napoleon’s navy. If more than two people know something, it isn’t a secret.
        
“What’s your name?” the soldier asked. 
        
“Cullen.”
        
“Well little Cullen, what do you say we go visit your sisters and watch the lads plough some bog? You’d like that, wouldn’t you? Can you hear them now?”
 
I stared at the painting of Sir Oliver Plunkett above our bed. I pictured his shrivelled and jarred head on the altar in Drogheda. I imagined him telling old Cromwell to fuck right off in the name of Jesus. I imagined the sword slicing through his neck-meat. The soldier’s foot stopped rocking the chair. He opened his belt and dropped his pants. I closed my eyes. The rope burned my wrist.“
​
Well little Colleen, I’m not going to queue up for shoddy-seconds, when your little mouth will do just fine, go on then and open your mouth or I’ll open it for you.”
 
The back of the chair was wedged against the wall. I was closing my eyes and mouth as tight as I could. He jammed his finger and thumb into each side of my neck below the jaw and I had to open my mouth. He jammed his cock in and began pushing where my teeth used to be and his hands were on the back of my head, which meant he had put his gun down somewhere. I tried biting down, but with no teeth I couldn’t give pain. He was pounding my head hard against the wall. The chair was banging the wall. Then the door opened and I heard close gunfire and the soldier crumpled onto me and the chair and slid onto the floor. I heard his last words “Christ, you fuck,” were atoned, as he lay bleeding, on the floor. The man who had fired the shot was wearing the same uniform as the dying man. He pulled a knife from his boot and cut my wrists loose. I undid my ankles as he dragged the dying man out of my room. I picked up the gun from my bed. It was heavier than it looked. I had no idea if it was loaded or ready or what to do with it. The soldier with the balaclava opened Deirdre’s door and fired three shots, then Agnes’ door and fired five. Then he aimed his gun at me because I was watching but decided not to shoot. His decision was slow. He entered Deirdre’s room and returned dragging a body with each arm. He rolled them corpses down the stairs. There were nine dead soldiers on the floor by the coal box by the time he went out the back door.
 
I went down the hall to check on Deirdre and Agnes, who were both in bed covered in blood and crying. I went down to the kitchen. There was no sign of my mother. The front and back doors were open. Her purse was by the kettle. In the garden behind the house, I found my older brother Bernard. He was face down in the grass and someone had shot  off the back of his head. I still had the soldier’s gun in my hand. I put it to my own head, but then thought better, and lowered it. I put it against my skin and the back of my pyjamas. The metal was ice. I heard some men shouting in the street and some car engines. I walked through the empty house again and went out the front door and onto the street. Not a soul.
 
I left home and a few minutes later, I walked into The Crown and devoted my life to The Cause.

About the Author:
David Morgan O'Connor is from a small village on Lake Huron. After many nomadic years, he is based in Albuquerque, where a short story collection progresses. He contributors monthly to; The Review Review and New Pages. His writing has appeared in; Barcelona Metropolitan, Collective Exiles, Across the Margin, Headland, Cecile's Writers, The Great American Lit Mag, Bohemia, Beechwood, Fiction Magazine, After the Pause, The Great American Lit Mag (Pushcart nomination) , The New Quarterly, and The Guardian.  Find him on Twitter here.

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