Portions for Sixteen

Out of the thirty-six pilots who left the airbase at Dandong the day before, only twenty returned. As was planned before, they went to the cookhouse, dragged themselves in, and sat themselves down. The chef at duty there could not help notice the expressions that the faces wore: Impassioned, listless faces that stared straight ahead. He called out to them but they distressingly did not bother to respond.

He had expected the mood to be more festive, for goodness sakes. He had slaughtered three full-grown boars to celebrate the victory (and rightfully so, as victory was the outcome), together with a couple of goats and half the garden's worth of greens with it. The portions were hefty and some to spare. Three woks of dishes have just been made ready, seasoned generously with every kind of spice.

Not that these pilots were to blame, if they could not rise up to the occasion: The squadron had met with heavy losses- the sudden appearance of American fighters, for instance, was simply not prepared for. Nor was the fact that the target was found to have unaccountably shifted thirty kilometers west. The squadron CO had confidently promised that all would come back, to reap the rewards for a successful skirmish. But the tired but glorious foodsacks that the feast was designed to fill were far from all available; doubtlessly some of the sixteen, CO included, were strewn over the landscape, crumpled up over the side of Kumgangsan or some other hill like that.

The chef and his assistants made to give the ones present their due portions. Whether they gratefully received it was hard to tell. Given what just happened not long before, the chef surmised, it was probably more than some could summon to even lift up a spoon and start chewing blandly into the chow. When that happened presently he felt a weak ripple of gratitude. As for the others, well, never mind.

Eventually, every pilot were finally coaxed to start eating, since hunger cannot be ignored for long. The chef returned to the portions reserved for the sixteen. He could not help noticing, in the pork, how the bones jutted out at odd angles; or that presently, as he thought, the three boar-heads at the other end of the pantry smiled their accusing smiles at him; or that in the mounds of rice so resembling mountains, the greens made the slopes seem especially verdant (were they undercooked? He thought). The more he pored over the leftovers, the stronger the aura of Death shone from its contents. Soon he was unwilling to look at the food anymore, let alone lift a ladle at it.

And so it happened, at the ceremony commemorating the fatal battle, that the remaining portions were laid out at a makeshift altar. Complaints about such wastage of good food was out of the question, and so the sixteen bowls were left there, virtually ignored, as one by one the ravens descended upon them and fought over them.