Parade of the Unremembered [Wraith]
Hell throws a parade at sunrise, or whatever passes for morning down where clocks have quit and calendars just curl and smoke,
The sky is the color of old bandages stretched tight over bone, and the marching band is a line of tanks with their barrels bent like a bad joke.
Trumpets blare from ruined turrets, drums pound from hollow chests that once wore uniforms pressed flat and proud,
Now the beat comes from ribs like rusted xylophones as a broken platoon limps in step through sulfur fog that passes for a crowd.
Instead of confetti, spent shell casings rain from the clouds, tinkling on black rock in a stuttering hail,
Each one stamped with a date and a city and the name of a politician no one will speak here, not out of respect, just stale.
The ground is a patchwork of battlefields welded together, trenches stitched to jungles, desert scrub glued to barbed-wire snow,
And every step the veterans take swaps the terrain under their boots—Fallujah into Normandy into Khe Sanh into some hillside no one bothered to know.
Their medals hang heavy, no longer shining but dripping molten brass that sears their spectral chests,
Little metal lies awarded for surviving long enough to be shot again tonight in another rerun of their finest tests.
Each ribbon on their breast carries a small voice that whispers propaganda slogans in a loop,
Lines about honor and homeland and glory recycled like plastic bags, choking the whole troop.
On the sidelines, the VIP section is packed with grinning devils in immaculate dress blues tailored from the flags the soldiers died beneath,
They sip something red and expensive from skull-shaped flutes while they trade casualty figures like sports stats between their teeth.
Behind them sit the war profiteers, faces blurred, still counting ghost money with blood-slick thumbs,
Every time they flip a spectral coin, another soldier drops, riddled with invisible rounds from silent guns.
A boy no older than nineteen lurches forward with a hole through his neck that never quite closes,
Whatever words he tried to shout back then still spill in bubbles of mist, naming streets and brothers and broken promises.
He clutches a melted dog tag that rattles around his fingers like a ring that never fit,
On one side, his name; on the other, a country that promised him parades and instead shipped him here piece by bit.
An older man marches beside him, hair gone white in death, though he died young,
He still wears the grin he used to fake for photographs, a smile that held like a bayonet between his tongue.
He remembers three wars and four flags and a stack of speeches that dressed bullets up as roses,
Now each word from those speeches drifts above his head as smoke that burns his already scorched noses.
Hell plays back their greatest hits on screens stitched into the burning clouds,
Highlight reels of hero shots and slow-motion fallings that once thrilled stadium crowds.
You can see the grainy footage of them arriving home with banners and bands and politicians leaning in,
Freeze-frame right before the camera cut away from the nights spent staring at ceilings, hearing the mortar rounds again.
Here, there is no off switch, no discharge papers, no final salute that lets them stand down and sleep,
Every time someone tops off a drink on earth and says “they knew what they were signing up for,” another one of them wakes up to keep.
Hell’s recruiter wears every decade’s uniform at once, sleeves from one war, boots from another,
It pats them on the back, calls them son, calls them sister, calls them brother.
On Veterans Day topside, kids draw paper poppies in classrooms that still smell like disinfectant and dry-erase,
Teachers talk about sacrifice in tones that smooth the edges, no mention of bone dust or missing face.
Here, the poppies bloom from the cracks in the lava, petals made of old letters never mailed,
Red as exit wounds, their stems curling around rifles that once jammed when it mattered and failed.
The veterans sit on those bent guns like benches when the mock parade ends and the band dissolves into ash,
They light cigarettes that burn backward, smoke curling into scars that rewind every crash.
They swap stories that start funny and end in silence, trade jokes like grenades that misfire and roll away,
They laugh about the recruiters’ promises, about the commercials that made war look like a video game you could pause and walk away.
One woman in a tattered flight suit traces the outline of wings on her chest where they used to pin her rank,
Here she flies every night through flak she cannot dodge, her cockpit made of the thin line between loyalty and blank.
She remembers the medal placed in her mother’s shaking hands, followed by a folded flag,
Down here that medal is welded to her skin, hot as shame, heavy as a body bag.
Around them, the walls of Hell’s VA clinic sag with peeling posters that still say things like Ask for help,
But the phones are melted, the chairs nailed to the floor, and the doors loop back into the killing fields themselves.
Triage nurses with horns and tired eyes hand out paperwork made of barbed wire and smoke,
Every box checked “denied,” every claim stamped with a signature that reads like a joke.
Still, in the ugliest corners, some stubborn softness won’t die,
Two soldiers who used to be on opposite sides lean back-to-back, staring at the same hateful sky.
They share a cigarette made from old ceasefire treaties, dragging on its bitter roll,
Each inhale tastes like the same sand, the same mud, the same frostbite stealing toes and parts of soul.
They don’t salute the flags here; they salute each other,
The kid who dragged a buddy through shrapnel, the medic who held a stranger closer than any lover.
They know God, if there is one, isn’t in the speeches or the flyovers or the polished stone,
If God ever showed up in that mess, it was in the shaking hands that didn’t let go when someone died alone.
Hell knows this, which is why the place works so hard to warp it,
To turn every act of courage into fodder for a propaganda pit.
On Veterans Day in Hell, the devils host a ceremony with all the trimmings: flags, hymns, a moment of silence that doesn’t heal a thing,
They call each name wrong on purpose, mispronouncing syllables like bullets ricocheting off nothing, a cheap, mocking ring.
And yet, in the blurry edges where fire burns low, the veterans carve their own memorial in the rock with fingernails and teeth,
An unauthorized wall of names and stories that belong to them, not to any country, not to any wreath.
They etch jokes between the lines, graffiti insults to the generals who never bled,
Draw crude cartoons of politicians hiding behind podiums while kids painted the sand red.
When the devils march past, wearing their fake medals and smirks, the soldiers stand anyway,
Not for the show, but for each other, for the ones who never got even this broken holiday.
They raise phantom fists, not in salute but in a stubborn, weary defiance that hell can’t fully bend,
A thousand ruined throats chanting nothing in unison, yet somehow the sound still reaches whatever passes for wind.
Up above, some poor family lays a small flag on a grave and walks away,
Wondering if anyone still hears their whispered thanks or if it all just frays.
Down here, those words drift in through cracks in the basalt and hang in the air like weak little stars that refuse to quit,
The veterans grab them, tuck them into their pockets with the dog tags and the letters, and sit.
Veterans Day in Hell is not stars-and-stripes and marching bands on screen,
It is rust and smoke and the grinding of memory between gears that were never cleaned.
But in that grinding, in that ruined groove, you still hear something that sounds a lot like love turned inside out and scorched,
Sacrifice scorched, yes, scorned by systems, burned by leaders,
Yet held sacred by the only ones who ever paid it in full—The ones still marching through the fire, shoulder to shoulder,
Refusing to let each other vanish, even in this place built to forget them all.