The Bandaged Man

By N. J. Greenfield

The bandaged man is a literary novella about a young, parentless brother and sister who find a mysterious bandaged man upon their dry and dying land. The man is near to death and carries with him a bloodstained shotgun. With no neighbours nor family, the siblings take the bandaged man into their home and, despite him being unable to walk or talk, they attempt to nurse him back to health.

As the days pass and the man does little more than breath and take the water and food they give him, memories of their dead father come back to haunt them.

Then one day the man speaks, calling for a bag before trying to force his way out of the house. Weak and still terribly injured, the man collapses but both the boy and girl think of his words, of the bag he was so anxious to recover.

As their dreams find form in what they think the bag contains, the bandaged man's secrets slowly emerge.

• Language: English
• Publisher: N. J. Greenfield
• Release date: Aug 21, 2014
• ISBN: 9781311210463

N. J. Greenfield

Nicholas is an English-Australian writer born in the UK who moved to Sydney, Australia at seventeen and remained there till the call of overseas adventure replaced a sense of complacency at home. Six years later and he has lived in Paris, Düsseldorf, Mexico City, Cottbus, Rome and Aachen. Embracing both the isolation and discovery of such a transient life, Nicholas’ short stories channel a grounded form of magic realism, while his longer works lean more toward suppositional fiction, exploring themes of personal transformation and urban dystopia upon backgrounds of suspenseful mystery.In 2014, Nicholas published his first short story, Persephone, alongside Thomas Ligotti in the international publication, Die Novelle. That short story was a featured read of the influential Wattpad group, Literary Fiction, where it was described as ‘like looking at a painting by a master artist.’ Such attention soon led to it being picked to become part of the International Indie Collection published by Self-e and distributed to American libraries in late 2015. A second short story, Flames, was published on the intercultural writer’s website, www.cecileswriters.com in April 2016, followed by a companion piece to Persephone titled, Hades, appearing in Michelle Jo Quinn’ anthology Hearts On Sleeves, a collection which amassed over 250,000 reads on Wattpad. Later this year, the surrealist Snow, will feature in Katie Wyatt’s photo book, And In My Dreams, to be published by Inspiritus Press, while a contribution to R.S. Kovach and Evan A. Jordan’s new project, The Decameron 2.0, is also being prepared for publication in December. The flash fiction story, Fragment, is to be included in in Centum Press’ upcoming One Hundred Voices’ anthology, Volume 2, while one of his earlier works, The Beat, will be published by the online magazine, Fictive Dream, in early 2017.

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The Bandaged Man

Nicholas John Greenfield

Copyright © 2016 Nicholas John Greenfield - Smashwords Edition

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Cover Image by Selma Kassem

To Selma Kassem,

For whom all my stories are written.

CONTENTS

Part One: Soil

Part Two: Secrets

Part Three: Silence

About the Author

Soil

The Girl, the Boy and the Bandaged Man

Beside the girl stood a small table on which were two plates, both as chipped and cracked as the cups beside them. Though the plates were empty, the cups echoed the eyes of the girl, filled with something recognisable in its form yet mysterious in its substance: bare yet full, strong yet weak. Perhaps it was the man who made them so, the man wrapped in bandages lying beside the plates and cups who appeared dead yet was still breathing. Or perhaps it was the shotgun in the girl’s hands, the barrel aimed at the man’s rising, falling chest while fear clung to the finger resting on the trigger.

The room itself was still save for the rise and fall of the man’s chest, the blink blink of the girl’s vacant gaze, and the black speck of a fly that vanished into the distant pitch of a whistled tone.

The sound was soft at first, nothing but a trick of the wind to which the girl moved only the shape of her eyes. As the sound gained form, she turned to face the silhouette cast by the open doorway and dust-ridden sun of the day beyond.

Glancing at the man before returning to the light, her eyes rose then fell, she having learnt never to believe in something unless it manifest itself in a physical form.

She heard him outside, finishing some activity or another, metal on wood or wood on wood or feet on dust. The silhouette of the doorway was briefly eclipsed as he entered the room and stood beside the bandaged man, his eyes hiding that which was evident in his worn and dusty clothes.

Anything? he asked.

No, the same. He breathes and I sit, but what if…

The boy turned away before she could finish, disappearing into the only other room.

His brown hair touched by sun, short nose and sharp chin revealed him to be her brother, though the likeness stopped there. He was broad where she was slight, the breadth perhaps an illusion born of comparison with his sister, whose thin frame gave weight to the emptiness of the plates.

He, as she, was young, perhaps only fifteen or sixteen, and though it might seem that the bandaged man was their father, the gun in the girl’s hand spoke of a differing relationship.

When the brother finally re-entered the room, his sister knew better than to continue her previous train of thought.

How was it today? she asked.

He stood staring at the man’s rising and falling chest, her eyes following his while the shotgun lay upon her legs.

The same. The ground’s too hard to do anything with and the sky’s got nothing but dust. The boy gestured to the man. Did he eat?

A little.

Ha, he eats yet we don’t. We starve to feed him but we don’t even know who he is.

She said nothing, knowing as he did that they had to feed him, that starving as they were the man was helpless in his current form.

Do you think he’ll die? she asked.

The boy, his youth already fading from work, looked at the rise and fall of the man’s chest.

No. He’s a curse and curses don’t vanish. He’ll get better, the bandages will come off, then we’ll find out where he comes from and why he needs that, he finished, pointing at the gun and the dark stains on both the barrel and stock. Till then we feed him and hope that when he wakes, he has some hidden fortune to share.

A Man Beside a Creek

Evening fell slowly, the hunger that haunted them stalking alongside it. In the light it could be ignored, put aside in lieu of purpose as the boy scoured their land for either existing life or a sign of some to come.

Upon the death of their father, responsibility for the land had fallen to the boy, his first act then being to sell all he could before buying that which he’d insisted would be their salvation. He knew little of farming save that which he’d learnt from watching their father’s attempts, yet he was a boy in which dreams easily found manifest form.

In earlier years, those in which father and son had engaged in what could have been called conversation, the boy had begun to see his father for the weak fool he was, a man broken by the weight of a present unequal to its past, whose land was a reminder of his legacy, incapable of producing more than a series of illusions. It was into such fractured shadows that the boy had stepped, bringing with him the anticipation of the untested, a steadfast determination that had run dry when the land had showed itself to be ignorant to the boy’s grand visions, fluent in a language he had never learnt.

Still the boy tried, still he worked the ground night and day, trekking