First Place Winner: Joelene Heathcote From Sergeant John Payne to his Mother She knew where his letters had been written from: approximate miles inside Japanese borders, the bloom of his parachute, light as cotton carrying his body into the night like a seed. How easy it was for them to find him. A man in a cell is not a man, he told her, so much as a blank check for the army whose lines his downed plane was on the wrong side of. His simply being there, gave them more of what they wanted: to see in the eyes of the other how frightening they were. Often, he felt, it was human currency they wanted, or added ambiguity—anything to keep his country guessing. He tried to forget where he was. So, for a long time he did not write. There was no window and no light so that night went on forever until it was impossible to remember how wide it was or whether there was ever forest floor. His job was to lift the secret meanings of things from foreign papers. But when the patterns did not show themselves, he said they had their ways of shedding light on what he knew. Never any reply, though he’d written home often asking someone to reach into the darkness for him. He must have suspected letters never cleared the high wire fences, burned instead like white moths in the chests of fellow soldiers His words, his mother can see now, were snakes for the throats of the Japanese, dangerous to them in the way they moved across the paper, curved below the lines like the tails of monkeys. Word reached home like invisible ink on the mouths of the ones who made it over the wall and everything else the enemy loosened like a red cravat from the necks of those soldiers whose heads they were now cutting off. * In the last letter to his mother, Canadian soldier John Payne wrote from a Japanese prison “should I not make my escape, know I have departed to a better place (I hope) although it will grieve me to exchange my guitar for a harp even though there is a higher percentage of gold in the latter” (Canadian War Museum). Back to October/04 Winners Home