When you collaborate with other authors it’s a good idea to get a hold of whatever notes or hard copies they are dumping to make room for the incoming pile on their desk, to help you better gauge how your styles will mesh. Dominick is the creator of the Hemavore Serial I‘ve been publishing on this site. The rest of his stuff can be found on deviantart.net under single_leg. I don’t even know if he realizes he gave me this piece. It seems out of place in the collection he handed me.

I am calling this piece an epigram, though one might label it a momento. Ancient Greek athletes did what they could to memorialize the men in their line on their victory plaques. Indeed you could say that much of ancient athletics revolved around a contest to tell a fragment of your family story. I think this might be a fragment belonging to one of his WWII serials, one of which is about a Polish-American tanker on the Western Front.

The Old Kraut is 29 lines that border on poetic, in the form of an ode to a passing survivor of the Nazi/Soviet conflict, about legacy and family, and how men who have survived the hideous firestorm of modern main battles have such a difficult time meshing with their civilian descendents.

Nice work Dominick.