PodCastle

* Author : Eleanna Castroianni
* Narrator : Danielle Imara
* Host : Stefani Cox
* Audio Producer : Peter Wood
* Artist : Geneva Benton
*
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PodCastle 513, ARTEMIS RISING: We Head for the Horizon and Return with Bloodshot Eyes is a PodCastle original.


Rated PG-13, for war and gore.
We Head for the Horizon and Return with Bloodshot Eyes
by Eleanna Castroianni
August 14th, 1949
Near Kançikon, Pindhos
The heart had already stopped beating — small animal in glistening glory, trapped between rosy lungs. Burgundy liver and sickly gall I passed; bones and marrow hold more secrets. Intoxicated, I shoved my hands into the soldier’s lush entrails — still so warm — and moved them around, making them swish and rustle like mouldy autumn leaves. I sought for patterns; I listened, waiting for echoes of the Next World, waiting for the Voices that Know and Tell.
My breath got caught in my throat and for a few moments I couldn’t find air. As I hastily drew my bloodied hands out of the soldier’s belly, I burst into a cough so strong I thought I’d spit my guts on top of the butchered soldier. Vanghelio, battling her sickness at what I had been doing, turned to face me. She grabbed my wrists and steadied me on the ground.
“Nafsika,” she begged, “what happened? What did you see?”
I won’t write what I saw, not until we are closer to Base. Bones and entrails never lie and I’m not risking the enemy getting hold of this notebook. Before I joined the army I was a butcher’s daughter who saw the future in the remains of dead animals on my father’s table. Every single time I was right, no matter how little the Major wanted to believe me. Now I need to write this story down because I know what I saw in those bones, because our comrades are in danger, because soon the royalist fascists will be here. Because Major didn’t believe me and now I have a chance to save myself, to save Vanghelio.
We’re going back, mission aborted.

August 15th, 1949
We have camped for a few hours out in the mountains, only Vanghelio and I, only the two-person squad the Major sent for the bone reconnaissance. It is the 15th of August, 1949 — the Virgin’s day — and we’re soaked in blood. It would have been a holiday back in our villages, but neither Vanghelio nor I have families any more. I witnessed my home burning down to ashes by the fires of the National Army. I didn’t wish to join the Communists — I didn’t wish to join any faction in this damned civil war — but, really, they left me no choice. The Communists took women in. They trained us at how to carry arms and taught us letters.
Five days ago, the Major sent us to a bone reconnaissance but we never did it. This morning we turned back. That’s when I started keeping this journal — to make a record of what really happened in this mission. Vanghelio is pleading me to reconsider; I won’t. Surely enough, I don’t like the Major, but Vanghelio downright hates her.
“Fucking bourgeois, she is,” she said when we first set camp on this mission. I tried to ignore my aching stomach —  we had nothing to eat and we were used to it. “Did you know her father is a banker in Thessaloniki? A fucking banker, of all things! And now she’s here, trying to teach us how to be good Communists?”
Her words stunned me. I had no idea. Major Kalaitzidou always looked like a model partisan, the only woman to have climbed up so high in the ranks.