Task Two

My choice of painting is Van Gogh's "The Starry Night," one of my personal favorites...

The deep blue walls stayed unchanged on three sides of the living room, like the canvas of a moonlit night frozen in an interior space, but all the stars had gone out of course, and the moon was down, ashamed and broken, literally broken on the floor.

The petals of the yellow roses were scattered wildly on the cream-colored carpet, and the white vases that had held them lay in broken heaps by the walls, the water in them splattered like heart's blood clearly shed.

The moon-golden coffee table was broken in many ways, the halves split up and dragged apart and used as clubs and so broken yet again.

The pale yellow pillows were ripped apart, their cream-colored stuffing scattered with the violence that had destroyed them.

The pale-yellow couch had disappeared into the great mark of burning that had traveled up the northern wall, as water from a shattered vase had found a frayed wire. The water from firemen's hoses had put out the fire, but had left a black, flame-shaped scar, like a rip in the canvas of the night from top to bottom, a rip too broad and deep to merely be painted over.

Task Three

General Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox seeks help for his famous headache, one hour before General Lee sends word about his decision to surrender...

The first mistake for a commanding general with a severe headache was coming to the field infirmary – he had forgotten about that smell.

The Civil War had raged for four long years, but you didn't understand the toll until you stood downwind of all the mingled odors of mangled men … blood, fresh, old, and rotting because of bandages not yet disposed of by burning – and then the burning, started up whenever the Army of the Potomac stopped for long enough to for the medics to get that part set up.

And speaking of rotting – gangrene, sickly-sweet putrefaction on a still-living body, and then little bits and scraps from the surgeries of yesterday and the night before, also awaiting proper disposal, and then the dead of the early part of the night before, the contents of their loosened bowels and bladders 12 hours soaked into a cot, and announcing themselves with the first warmth of the morning, some three days before the whole body rotted.

Fever, too, had a smell, as did all the different reasons for it – not that any man could pick the individual infections out of the general array of odors, but those hot, fetid notes added to the horrors, even without accounting for the drone of early bird flies drawn by the smell, and the cries and groans of General Grant's wounded men, and the medics covered in the mingled tokens of their necessary and horrific tasks, their faces grim and focused and their eyes hollowed out from having seen too much.

Then on came the occasional amputated limb brought by to take to the burial, sometimes still with a scrap of Federal blue uniform still stuck mockingly to the gangrene, black, dead blood, and pus – and all this simply added variety with the bodies carried out at this hour from the night before, that blue seen dangling from a dangling dead limb, swinging and thus disclosing the stench of hard death to foul the fresh April breeze.

General Grant had not been turned from the conquest of Richmond, and certainly was no coward, but his headache increased with every whiff of the field infirmary. Yet there was no escape, no retreat, for a broken voice called out:

"Gen'l Grant has come to see us!"

And his wounded men who could speak all harmonized for one moment in a great "Hoorah!" from which no man, had he a heart at all, could turn and walk away.