Excerpts - Time, Gentlemen

A wireless operator sought respite from the wider machine. He dwelt on the static between unfriendly voices to loose his thought on un-glimpsed moments far above earth, where white hot shells decelerated towards apogees of inaction, and by quirk of angle and rate flew briefly beside Vs of geese. Or maybe punctured the cloud line, recalling the twitch of surfacing fish to the pilot passing above. Things of programmed intent appearing briefly as things of volition, wild and free.

He couldn't cope outside the war room. He was so use to eavesdropping on enemies that amity elsewhere overwhelmed him. Off shift, outside work, his underused senses struggled to assimilate the sudden mass of benign information that sought him as a target: Those customary loners that mistook him for the evening's listening ear, and read into his uniform whatever missing piece they'd lost. Those young women of departed men, those last living witnesses of another war's woes: Ready confessionals his secrets could never grace. Different types of wounded, wrecking his evening off.

With only the freedom of a town far enough from foe to evade also civilization, he unfailingly found his way to this same pub.

Here the rattle of the gambler, the chinking glasses.

Sometimes the shell would hurtle through a flock at terrific speed, knocking many to earth, so that its parabola could be marked by the dead birds beneath, he imagined.

The passing zip of the school cane, then twisted and deafened they'd be, in the ringing wreckage of the breached target.
His role was to serve a purpose only as it was the dead's to warrant copulation.