What is Truth? Bambi, A Short War Story

The first thing Thumper ever taught Bambi about women was that they could smell fear.

“My uncle says it comes out through your skin,” Thumper explained. “Like sweat, only more embarrassing.”

They were eleven years old and lying beneath the apricot tree behind the village schoolhouse, watching Alina Petrov hang laundry in her family’s garden.

Alina was thirteen. To Thumper, this made her a woman of vast experience and unknowable desires.

Bambi squinted through the branches.

“Your uncle smells like onions.”

“That has nothing to do with fear.”

“How do you know?”

“Because he isn’t afraid of anything.”

“He sleeps with a knife under his pillow.”

“That is preparedness.”

Bambi considered this.

“What does fear smell like?”

Thumper frowned. His uncle had apparently neglected the scientific portion of the lesson.

“Sharp,” he decided. “Girls can smell it because their noses are more sensitive.”

“Like dogs?”

“Never compare a girl to a dog.”

“Why?”

“Because they remember everything.”

Bambi took a small notebook from his pocket and wrote:

Women can smell fear. Source: Thumper’s uncle. Evidence: none.

Thumper leaned over.

“Stop writing down everything I say.”

“I’m trying to remember it.”

“You’re making it look stupid.”

“I’m writing it exactly.”

“That is what makes it look stupid.”

The notebook had been given to Bambi by his teacher, Mrs. Varin, after he interrupted a history lesson six times to ask how anyone knew what a dead king had secretly wanted.

“People write things down,” she had finally said.

“But what if they write down something that isn’t true?”

“Then someone else has to ask questions.”

The following morning, she placed a stack of unused composition books on his desk.

“If you insist on interrogating the world,” she told him, “you may as well keep records.”

Bambi had been keeping records ever since.

He recorded proverbs, rumors, recipes, military movements, weather predictions, cures for warts, instructions for attracting girls, and every explanation anyone offered for why his father had disappeared.

His mother said his father had left to keep them safe.

Mrs. Varin said he had gone north with the railway workers.

Thumper’s uncle said he had joined the Liberation Front.

The baker said he had been arrested by the National Army.

An old woman at the well said men sometimes woke one morning and discovered they had never wanted to be husbands.

When Bambi asked his mother which explanation was true, she would continue whatever she was doing as though he had asked whether dust had feelings.

“Your father left,” she would say. “That is the part that matters.”

His father’s name was Stefan Valev. There was one photograph of him in their house, taken before Bambi was born. In it, Stefan wore a dark suit and held a cigarette between two fingers. His expression suggested someone had just asked him a question he considered beneath him.

Bambi had inherited his eyes.

His mother, Katarina, said he had also inherited his stubbornness.

“I’m not stubborn,” Bambi once told her.

“You have been arguing about that for three days.”

“I’m trying to establish the facts.”

“Some facts do not improve with investigation.”

Bambi wrote that down too.

Their village, Drenovo, sat between low mountains and wide fields of wheat. The war had been going on for two years, but adults still spoke of it as though it were weather approaching from somewhere else.

The front was always forty miles away.

Then thirty.

Then twenty.

Each time the fighting moved closer, someone announced that the mountains would protect them.

Mountains had protected Drenovo from invaders, storms, tax collectors, modern plumbing, and nearly every economic opportunity of the previous century. People had great faith in them.

“The army would have to be mad to come through the eastern pass,” the mayor said.

“They’re soldiers,” Bambi replied. “Isn’t that possible?”

The mayor stopped allowing him into council meetings.

Most of the village’s wisdom came from people who were already dead.

Never cut your hair during a thunderstorm.

Never sleep with your head facing west.

Never plant onions after a funeral.

Never praise a baby’s beauty without touching wood.

If swallows flew low, rain was coming.

If dogs stopped barking, soldiers were near.

If your left palm itched, money was coming.

If your right palm itched, money was leaving.

Thumper scratched both hands constantly and remained poor.

Bambi’s mother believed some old sayings and dismissed others.

She did not care which direction Bambi slept. She cut his hair whenever it became inconvenient. But she insisted that he never travel the main road during fighting.

“Roads are where armed men expect people to be,” she said.

She kept a sewing needle hidden in the hem of his coat.

She taught him to recognize the sound of artillery before the shell landed.

She showed him how to follow the irrigation trenches from the village to the river without crossing open ground.

“Why would I need to do that?” Bambi asked.

“You probably won’t.”

“That isn’t an answer.”

“It is the answer mothers give when the honest one would frighten their children.”

Bambi wrote that down after she left the room.

He placed a question mark beside it.

Next Chapter: What is Truth? When Dog's Stopped Barking

Author's note: This new series was inspired by a recent story that took a dark look at a beloved children's story. It made me want to try my hand at one as well. This morphed quickly into the longest story I have written in a while. I have broken it up into 7 chapters which I am editing and refining one at a time while releasing them for you all to read in small neurodivergent friendly chunks (Not because you are necessarily neurodivergent... but because I am 😅). The inspirational story, the challenge that emerged from it, and its author's card are below.