So you want to know why I want to take root?

I came home from Iraq missing three pounds, eight ounces of flesh from my right arm and leg, and unable to sleep more than three hours a night. The painkillers I took to get through the day were the real problem. I just kept taking more and more of them.

Trying to get off them was worse. I’d wake up in the middle of the night, convinced I was back on patrol under fire, wedged under my bed and trying to find my weapon.

Eventually, the paperwork for detox finished grinding through the system. I checked into the hospital and took Antagine. I watched bad TV for thirty-six hours, feeling a faint echo of withdrawal, and went back home.

That worked, for a while. The pain in my arm and leg was manageable, but I still couldn’t sleep much. I thought a pizza box by the side of the road was an Improvised Explosive Device, jumped out of the bus and got winged by a passing car.

In the veterans’ hospital, the guy in the next bed told me, “They gave you the weak stuff.” He emptied the bag that came out of his abdomen. “You want the real thing, straight from the bush in Africa, the root, man. I can hook you up.”

My parents dipped into their home equity and I flew up to a house on the British Columbia coast. Twelve hours after my last dose of painkillers, I took my first taste of root. It tasted like bitter licorice.

I lay under the cotton duvet, listened to the seagulls outside and let it take hold. I felt only a faint echo of the withdrawal pains, even less than at the other detox treatment. What was different was when I closed my eyes, I saw memories, as clear as if they were around me, right now.

My mom and dad, trying to connect to a child they didn’t expect. My teenage self, smoking weed in the basement. Myself, filling out the paperwork at the recruiting station, thinking how this would piss off my dad. Myself, opening the thick envelope and realizing that this was all very real. Thousands of people down on their knees praying towards Mecca. What was left of a man’s head after I put two rounds into it. Myself, finger-combing my squadmate’s intestines out of my hair.

And I saw that none of that mattered. The memories were still there, but I had to think about remembering them, like listing state capitals, instead of them being something I had actually done.

Thirty-six hours later, I was… different. I didn’t want percs or anything else. I felt shiny brand spanking new. Take the relief you feel from peeling the dead skin off a sunburn, and magnify that a thousand times. Adam didn’t feel that fresh on his first day in Eden.

I moved out of my parents’ house, relocated to the West Coast and put my engineering skills to use. Luckily I got the job just when the boom in house and car refits started. Plus I met a nice girl.

A year later, the business was dying, my parents weren’t talking to me, and the nice girl and I had screaming fights every other night.

There was only one thing to do: take root again.

I flew back to the BC clinic and signed on for another dose. I had to fib a little bit, tell them I was still having the same problems from before, not an entirely new set of issues.

It still tasted like licorice, but it was different this time. There was no opiate withdrawal to distract me from the review. I saw the same things again, but with the post-root memory tacked on. They went away along with all the others, in the past, compressed and archived.

I got up, ate eleven whole-grain waffles with organic maple syrup and started my new life.

I stayed in Canada this time. I rented a one-bedroom in Vancouver, hooked up with some expats and got involved in anti-poverty work.

Sixteen months later, I couldn’t stand any of it. I spent a fourteen-hour day trying to get one guy at city hall to return one phone call, then put my fist through a wall. While I had my knuckles bandaged, I decided what I had to do.

I called the clinic again. They turned me down. I hunted down a detox outfit in the Carribean that sold root, no questions asked. I cleaned out the rooming house’s bank account, bought a plane ticket and another dose. Then, when I was new, I started another life.

I’ve done a lot over the past few years. I’ve learned new careers to replace obsolete skills, mortgaged my parents’ house, married rich, divorced not as rich, embezzled. I’ve gone by John, Jack, Jackie, JD, Joe, Jonathan, Jacob, Jake, JJ, Johnny and Warren. I’ve married six times (five women, one man) and divorced four times. I started voting: Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, Independent and even started my own party. Years ago, I gave up thinking that this time would be the last time. I’m always waiting to see how long I can last. The shortest time between doses is six weeks and two days, the longest is seven years, two months, four days.

That’s why I found this clinic, why I’m asking you for another dose. There are only two constants in my life, my lives. I take root, again and again, because sooner or later I realize I can’t stand myself, again and again.

I want to take it again so I can become somebody who doesn’t care about that.

Peter Tupper is a freelance journalist and writer in Vancouver, BC, Canada.

Sergeant Smith sat on a bench with his back to busy Eighth Avenue. Cars and pedestrians rushed by him, creating the blur of sounds typical of a large city. His camouflage uniform still harbored dust from some unnamed hill in Iraq where two Marines under his command had been killed less than forty-eight hours earlier. Beside him was the tan duffel he had tossed into the back of the Jeep that rushed him to the hospital. Buried in the duffel, but carefully protected, was a small cardboard box wrapped in pastel blue paper and tied with a ribbon. It was a gift that could sit proudly on a dresser if daddy didn’t come back. Smith had traded a longer leave for this excruciatingly short weekend of leave so he could be home when Rachel delivered their first child. He was going to have a son, and he was overjoyed. He would swear until his dying day that thinking of his son had given him that extra burst of energy that had been the difference between two Marine funerals and three.

Smith’s forehead rested in his hands and his elbows on his knees. Anyone who more than glanced at him would have seen the unmistakable heaves of his back. Only Smith could see the drops on the concrete sidewalk between his boots. Many passed Smith and thought only political thoughts. A few imagined stopping to express their gratitude, but those were only fleeting daydreams of the pontifically patriotic. Instead, they scurried onward while conjuring a multitude of excuses. A small boy wandered toward Smith, but his mother pulled him along quickly.

There were many things that went wrong. She didn’t make it. The child? His son? No. Dead before they even started.

Smith would spend the weekend saying goodbye to the wife he loved more than anything and the son that he would never know. He would board another C-130 for the return trip with a lock of her hair taped to the back of his dog tag.

He raised his head and looked at his reflection in the tinted glass window in front of him. A tired, weathered, twenty-six-year-old United States Marine stared back at him.

Finally, he stood up. He straightened his camos and slung his duffel over his shoulder. He stared into his reflection as people and cars passed and took a deep breath. He stood tall, saluted sharply, and turned away.

Mark Partin writes in Kansas.

This story was sponsored by
Camilla d’Errico: A character designer and artist who dances on the tightrope between pop surrealist art and manga inspired graphics. Explore her paintings, characters and comics: Tanpopo, BURN and Helmetgirls.

The woman sprinted toward their position, black robes flowing around her, yelling as she ran.

He took aim and fired.

***

“Shut up…” he mumbled, reaching for the alarm. Fifteen minutes later he rolled out of bed. As he stumbled to the small bathroom, it hit him.

“Oh shit…”

Shower, shave. Shirt, tie, and suit. He shoved a bagel in his mouth and ran out the door. Walking to the bus stop, he wondered how the hell he’d managed to be outside the barracks in formation on time every day for four years. Guess it was a lot harder when you didn’t live with twenty guys who did the same thing.

He reviewed the notes he’d made the night before. Maybe this will be it. Another day, another job interview. Same as it has been for the last six months.

***

“Sergeant, she’s still alive.”

Of course she was still alive. He didn’t shoot to kill. “Keep your eyes on the crowd.”

“She needs help — ”

“Keep your eyes on the crowd, Private.”

The woman lay on the ground, bleeding, screaming in pain.

***

He woke when the bus stopped and cursed when he realized he’d somehow slept through two stops. Was he going to screw this up too?

Getting out of the bus, he set off at a brisk pace. A glance at his watch — the same watch he’d worn on two deployments — told him he could still make it.

If he were to tell his buddies still serving about this, they would laugh their asses off. His former soldiers, who now led soldiers of their own, would find it particularly amusing.

Stopping at a crosswalk, he checked the map he’d printed off the internet. He couldn’t find the street he was on. How could someone navigate through a desert on the other side of the world, yet get lost in a city back home?

He checked his watch again.

“Fuck.”

***

A couple of civilians from the crowd moved towards the woman, but his men yelled and aimed their rifles at them until they backed off.

The woman’s screams grew more desperate.

“All right,” he turned to the men. “Johnson, you’re with me. Doc, I’ll signal you if it checks out. The rest of you, keep your eyes on the civilians. If somebody moves in, I don’t give a shit how old or how young, you will open fire. Is that clear?” They nodded.

“Johnson, follow me.”

***

A Vietnam vet seated on a bench begging for change gave him directions, and he managed to make it almost on time.

The interview lasted less than ten minutes.

Normally, interviews followed a pattern. Same questions. Same answers.

“Tell me about yourself.”

“What are your weaknesses?”

Most times, he was spared the usual “How do you work under pressure?” and “Are you a team player?” His interviewers had the sense not to ask a former US Army sergeant that. Today, he didn’t even get to that part. The interviewer took a look at his last name and told him flat out that they “didn’t sponsor visas”. He could have corrected him, but the urge to punch him for his stupidity was too great. The idiot saw the “Sánchez” on his application but didn’t see the veteran box he’d checked.

Perhaps next time it would be different, Sánchez thought, as he drank his usual six pack that night. He needed a job. All the money he’d saved from his tours was gone, and his credit card balances kept going up.

Yes. Next time it would be different.

***

He saw it by chance. As they approached the woman, a little boy in the crowd dropped his soccer ball and bent down to pick it up. The man behind him was holding a cell phone.

“Johnson, get down!” Sánchez yelled as he turned and hit the ground. Behind him, the woman’s body exploded. Shrapnel and body parts flew in all directions.

***

As Sánchez fell asleep in front of his TV, his heavy eyes lingered for a second on a picture of himself standing at attention while his commander pinned a medal on his uniform. “Hero” he’d called him.

Sánchez shook his head once and passed out.

Henry Lara is a writer, avid reader, and all around good guy (so he says). He attended the University of Puerto Rico and earned a Bachelor’s in Business Administration, major in Accounting. After serving in the US Army for four years he moved to the area around Boston, Massachusetts, where he lives to this day. He is currently working on a novel as well as several short stories.

Brakes squealed.  Seconds later, the bells above the door chimed .  A skinny, one-armed man walked straight to the counter, where a woman was partially hidden behind a TV.  “Where’s the latrine, sister?”

“It’s for paying customers,” the woman behind the TV said.

The man looked around and saw hot dogs glistening inside a steamer.  “How much for a dog?”

“Ninety-nine cents plus tax.”

The man felt his front and back pockets with his left hand.  “She-it-she-it-she-it-she-it.  Sheeeee-it!”  He tossed back his dirty blond hair and rocked on his worn-down boot heels.

“Damn corporations!”  The man crossed his left arm over his chest.  His hand rubbed the nub where his right bicep would be if he had one.  “Sorry, sister.”  He stomped down aisle 2 and pushed in the whitewashed door with the blue ‘Toilet’ sign.  He stood hunched over, facing inside, nub against the open door.

The clerk, having glanced back and forth between the TV and the overhead surveillance mirror, stepped out from behind the counter and stalked down aisle 2 in knee-high boots.  “No, not this one!  It’s out of order!”  She stopped in front of the salsa rack six feet from the doorway and hugged her left arm under her breast.

When the drizzle of water against water subsided, the man shook and zipped.  He bent his knees and lifted his left leg.

“Stop!  It’s clo – ”

He cocked the pointy tip of his left boot, pushed down the flusher, spun around and looked up.

Under the bright florescent ceiling light, she faced him with a gaunt, symmetric face and prominent forehead.  If her bouffant hairdo was a red kite in the breeze of the overhead fan, her empty right shirtsleeve was its wagging tail.

He blinked and folded his arm across his chest.

She arched an eyebrow.  “It’s rude to stare.”  Wiggling past him, she rushed to the toilet and looked down, her nub against the stuck door, her boots standing where his boots had stood.  The water was rising.  “Dag gummit!  Rajan is going to…  Mister, I need this job.”

The man edged so close behind her that she felt his heat against her hair, her neck, her nub.

Their two good arms swung in parallel, inches apart.

The scent of her red hair filled his nostrils and mouth.  “So, you’re?  You’re also – ”

Water oozed over the rim of the toilet bowl.  She could not step back without falling into him and, so, just watched as the water glided under the soles of her imitation leather boots.

“My boo,” he whispered into her ear.  “I’m sorry.”

“Sorry don’t pay the rent,” she said.

“A hand grenade exploded on me in Iraq,” he said.  “Army is paying for college.  I can’t play my guitar… or do open heart surgery.  You?”

“Rocket propelled grenade penetrated our Humvee,” she said.

“I hate it when that happens.”  The man’s voice stiffened.  “No worries.  I mop as well as a soldier with two arms.”

They both shivered.

His nose edged over her nub to her earlobe.  “I’m Elroy.”

“Rajan comes at five,” she mumbled, swaying her empty sleeve back against where his missing hand would have taken hers.

A student in the Stanford Creative Writing Certificate Program, Kenton K. Yee has placed stories in The Los Angeles Review, PANK (forthcoming), Brain Harvest, Word Riot, Apollo’s Lyre, and Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader, among others.  He imagines from San Francisco.

Mr. Larsen settled into his wheelchair and arranged the blanket over his legs. “How long we been doing this?”

“Eleven — no — twelve years. Started when I was thirteen. The first year you had to use a wheelchair. I missed the last two years.”

He tucked the blanket in beside his thin calves. “Your brother covered for you.” He gave me a bleak smile. I handed him his World War Two Veteran cap. “Stevie came around a lot. Not just on Veteran’s Day. Like you used to do.”

I nodded, remembering. “You warm enough?” It was chilly, with a light breeze. Even with a jacket and his blanket, he might get cold.

“I’m okay.” He ran a hand through his sparse gray hair and settled the cap in place. “Hell.” One hand moved along his jaw. “I forgot to shave.”

“Nobody will notice.”

He shook his head. “I don’t want anyone thinking I’m a homeless derelict. You know where my razor is.”

Nobody in our town would think Mr. Larsen was homeless, but I didn’t argue. While he ran the electric razor over his face, I sat on the steps. A few people were out already, heading downtown. Some carried flags. My sister Irene lived two houses down, in the house I grew up in. She was probably already down at the VFW, making coffee.

He finished shaving.  “Okay, Bill. Let’s go.”

I put his razor away, then grabbed the canvas bag holding my chair and placed it in his lap.

He grinned. “Who carried your junk last year?”

“I carried my own junk in Iraq. Last time I took you to the parade you carried that same chair in your lap — and bitched about it then, too.”

“Well, hell. If the troops ain’t bitching there’s something wrong.” He gripped the bag with pale, nearly translucent hands. “Careful on the ramp.”

“No sweat. It’s a good ramp. Irene’s husband made it, didn’t he?”

“Yeah. He did okay — for a swabbie.”

“Not everyone can be a Marine.”

“That’s the damn truth.” He fell silent. I knew he was remembering another place, thinking of those he left behind. My own memories were of sand, mud brick houses, a relentless sun, and fellow Marines lost along the way.

Our usual spot in front of Tinker’s Hardware was available. Mr. Tinker has a RESERVED sign he puts on the sidewalk to keep strangers away. It’s a good place for watching the parade.

I parked Mr. Larsen and unfolded my chair. The day was gray with a high overcast and no rain in the offing. I unfurled the two flags we liked to display. Old Glory, of course, and the Marine Corps banner.

There was a constant drift of people moving along the walk. Some, usually former Marines, stopped to exchange a few words.

Mr. Larsen pulled a small flask from his jacket and knocked back a slug. He handed it to me. “Where’s your brother now? He was just out of boot camp last time I saw him.”

His memory was an uncertain thing, but Stevie was a Marine. Mr. Larsen wasn’t likely to forget that. “He’s in Afghanistan. Should be home in a few months.”

I sipped the contents of the flask cautiously and was surprised by a decent blended whiskey. I handed it back.

“Stevie will be okay,” he said. “And I’m glad you made it home in one piece.”

“I survived.”

His response was drowned out as the band leading the parade struck up a lively tune. That was my cue. I stood up, drew a flat box from my pocket and opened it.

“Damn you,” he said. “I thought you’d forgotten that.”

“I didn’t forget.” I lifted the medal from the box and lowered it into position. Mr. Tinker came out of his store, like he always does, and arranged the gold medal on the old man’s chest as I secured the clasp on the blue neck ribbon.

“If I had one of those,” said Mr. Tinker, “I wouldn’t be ashamed to wear it.”

Mr. Larsen touched the five-pointed star with trembling fingers. “I ain’t ashamed. It gets so damned heavy.”

He earned it on Iwo Jima. I’ve read the citation. The one time I asked him about it, he just shrugged. “I should have died on that damn island. I think they gave me the Medal because I done something damn foolish and lived.”

The head of the parade neared our vantage point. Mr. Larsen grabbed both arms of his chair and tried to get up.

“Sit,” I said. “You’ve earned it.”

“Help me up, damn you.”

Mr. Tinker and I got him to his feet. I was surprised at how light he was.

The band stopped and played the national anthem. We steadied the old Marine. He held a hand salute throughout the performance. As the music died away, he sank slowly into the chair and sat, eyes closed, breathing hard.

He fumbled for his handkerchief, wiped tears from his cheeks. He looked worn out, worn down, as if the Medal really was weighing him down.

Irene brought coffee. We watched the parade then had pot luck at the VFW.

***

Mr. Larsen died two months later. We buried him in a corner of the cemetery set aside for veterans. The Corps laid him to rest — tired old veterans and somber active duty Marines. They came to stand at attention in the January cold and pay their respects.

We buried him wearing the Medal. I think I understand what he meant now. It was heavy because he bore it for all those unsung dead. For them he carried it out of the bloody hell of Iwo and down the decades to a small plot of ground, a pine-clad hill, and peace.

Because it was what he wanted, his grave marker is plain white marble, just like the man on his left and the man on his right.

JR Hume is an old Montana farm boy who writes science fiction, a little fantasy, some weird detective tales, an occasional poem, and oddball stories of no particular genre.

It’s hard to find needles for the turntable nowadays, but the young orderly at the VA helped. He wrote down a link and I followed it, and I placed the order. I worried that it wouldn’t arrive in time.

The sun shines with obscene glee through the blinds as I start the old vinyl. Joan Baez fills the air just as she has for so many of our decades together that they’re not worth counting any more.

I bring your hand to my lips and your eyes flutter open. For Joan or for me, I don’t know. It doesn’t matter, but I remember a time when it did. You used to tease me about my jealousy and I used to deny it. We were silly in love.

“Is it over?” you ask.

“Yes, babe. It’s over.”

The thin pastel of the hospital blanket rises and falls with your sigh. “I can’t see you.”

I gently move aside the tubes and lines that separate us, and I lie on the bed with you, like we lay for so many years when we were nude and young and on fire.

A small group in mint green has gathered in the doorway. “He’s going,” someone whispers, but I already know that. You’ve been going for years.

Your hand – the one that isn’t infested with needles — reaches up and strokes my face. “Did we hold the Mekong?”

“Yes, love.”

“And Saigon?”

Saigon fell, of course.

“Saigon held.” I take comfort in the suck-hiss respiration of the machine beside us that pretends you’re still breathing.

On your last real exhale, on the outgoing tide that takes what remains of you from me — the pieces they sent home forty years ago — you ask, “The war…?”

“It’s over.”

“Can I sleep now?”

I hold your head and remember how I loved your gleaming blond curls. “Yes, my love.”

Even the machines can’t delude me into believing that it’s your heartbeat I feel.

Deborah Winter-Blood is a writer, dog mom and displaced California Valley Girl. Her work has appeared in various print and online publications over the past 30 years.

My uncle lived in the warehouse district of Toledo, not far from a Pizza Papalis and a Blarney Irish Pub.  He didn’t work, lived on government checks and “gifts” from my parents. My father blamed his unemployment  on a “poor attention span.”

His name was Joe, but my father called him Uncle Grim (behind his back) because he rarely smiled. I spelled it Grimm.

We lived in the Old Orchard district that sprouted lawyers and university professors such as my father. I sometimes peaked at his lecture notes, doted on names like Sartre or Descartes, and wondered if their words had done the world any good. Our neighborhood was safe but dull.

I lived mostly in my room,  inventing puzzles, or pretending I could split into two people and play HANGMAN. The great thing about it was that I couldn’t lose. Imagine, I thought, making the stick figure of a man disappear by spelling a word I already knew.

Imagine if spelling the word, Grimm, would make me disappear.

Did  Uncle Grimm ever play HANGMAN on rainy days?

Uncle Grimm was a Vietnam War veteran who flew bombing missions over Hanoi. His plane was shot down and he spent several months in a Viet Cong prison camp. He escaped with a buddy who later took a bullet for him.

I wondered whether Uncle Grimm wished he had bit that bullet instead.

Growing up bored, lonely, frightened of bullies,  I frequented his apartment more often. Besides the cigarette smoke and dust, it smelled of exotic places. He said it was a mix of Balm of Peru and Ginger CO2 oil. He said it helped him forget.

We often visited the arcade. We played pinball or munched on pizza. We  sat in silence on a park bench, even when it drizzled. It was our way of forgetting.

And one afternoon, sitting on his cheap chintz sofa,  I asked him if he ever played HANGMAN.

“No. Some of the guys back in the service did. Why?”

“No reason. I do. Sometimes.”

The days followed each other like dominoes. I lost myself at the arcade, shooting little metal balls, trying to hit the make-believe lions and tigers.

At school, teachers humiliated me. My parents talked “at” me but never “to” me.  My sometimes girlfriend  broke up with me for good. Back home, I became the greatest solitary player of HANGMAN.

And one day, I found a long stretch of cord on Grimm’s  bed with one end made into the shape of a halo.  I asked him what it was for.

He shrugged, said he was working on something that could reach soup cans on shelves too high.

I didn’t believe him.

I kept thinking about that piece of cord. Was it a halo or a noose?

From then on, whenever I visited, I searched for that cord, wondered whether its loop had grown looser or more taut.  It became a kind of a undeclared game between us. I kept hiding the cord. He kept finding it.

Weeks later, I worked up the nerve to ask him.

“Do you ever wish the world would stop?”

He parted his lips slightly.

“You mean like a yo-yo? ”

“Maybe. Like cutting the string.”

His eyes froze, gave me a chill.

“You mean end it?”

I shrugged.

“Something like that, ” I said.

“Everybody does, sometimes.”

“Why would you want to end it?” I asked. Maybe I was putting too much of myself in Uncle Grimm.

“Sometimes I feel down, but I pick myself back up. I don’t have what others have. Like you. A nice life, a nice mom and dad. ”

“I don’t have a nice life. It’s a nothing life. I get bullied by teachers and jerks. I get dumped by a Brittney Spears wannabe.  I don’t excel in anything. I just keep going in circles around myself.”

“Wow, that’s heavy. Circles, huh? You must be reading those French philosophers your father teaches. Those people live inside their heads.”.

“Don’t most people?” I asked.

I looked down at his brown Oxfords, a size too big for his feet. He once claimed they gave his feet room to breathe.

“The load upon your back is not that heavy,” he said, rolling his eyes.

“My back isn’t as strong as yours.”

“My back is crooked. You just haven’t noticed.”

“Looks fine to me.”

I studied his poker face.

“Say,” he said, “I have an idea. Why don’t we end it together? No fun doing it alone.”

“You serious?” I said.

“Serious as death. We can do it right now. Put an end to all this nothing and suffering.”

He made a cord with a loop at each end. He slung it over a ceiling pipe in the kitchen. Then we climbed upon chairs and placed our heads in each noose.

“You go first,” he said. “This way I’ll make sure you don’t cheat.”

“The pipe won’t hold,” I said.

“You’re chicken,” he said.

“You are,” I said.

“You’re a lazy chicken who’s afraid to live.”

“You sound like dad. An abbreviated version.”

I bit my lip.

“Here goes,” I announced.

I bent my knees and exhaled all my air.

I was about to jump. I faltered.

He pulled me by the shirt.

“Lost my nerve,” I said, “just like with all those bullies.”

He undid our nooses, then reached up, shook the pipe. It rattled and creaked.

“It never would’ve held our weight,” he said with a smirk.  “Wanna play some pinball?”

“Sure.”

Several weeks later, I learned that Uncle Grimm, the once decorated bomber pilot, had hanged himself.

I couldn’t bring myself to attend the funeral. I stayed in my room. My mother mentioned that she always knew something like this would happen. Dad never said much about it, but for weeks, he kept misplacing his lecture notes. I blamed myself for bringing up that conversation about ending it. Maybe he saw part of himself in me — the part he couldn’t save.

Kyle Hemmings has been published in Wigleaf, Storyglossia, Elimae, Match Book, This Zine Will Save Your Life, and elsewhere. He lives and writes in New Jersey. He loves cats and dogs.

Edgar slid through the door of the bookshop minutes before Lady Randolph would flip the sign from “open” to “closed.” Wintergreen and cigarette scented air huffed out between her loose lips as he walked past the counter. He rubbed his cold hands together and nodded hello. His shift at the hospital ended at half past six, and the bus dropped him off twenty minutes later. Months ago, Lady Randolph had stopped complaining about his last minute arrivals. Since then, they limited their conversation to nods and goodbyes.

She sat on a high stool, her back as straight as the mop he wielded at the hospital, a dark green muumuu dotted with red flowers draped indefinitely over her bony shoulders. Her short hair was permed and dyed a garish blond, gray inching up at the roots. Pink lipstick iced her mouth as thick now as it probably had been that morning. Edgar grimaced. One thing he didn’t miss about marriage was kissing lipstick. He plucked at his front teeth with his tongue, almost tasting it.

At the back of the store, softcover books lined sturdy oak shelves from floor to ceiling, the overflow stacked neatly in boxes. Two twenty-five cent books to get him through the night, to help him forget. That wasn’t too much to ask, was it? After returning home from the war, he had taken a bottle of bourbon to bed every night, but his wife and his liver never adjusted to it. In the end, even sober, his wife couldn’t adjust to him, post-war, at all. He understood; most days he couldn’t either.

A fresh batch of Louis L’Amour waited for him. Edgar bent low and searched through the box for unfamiliar titles. Clean books with near perfect covers this time, as if they had been read only once. His limit was two, or he would read through the night. If his luck held, tomorrow would bring new books or a few of these would remain. He bought two books every day, except weekends. On Saturdays he bought four, because the shop was closed on Sundays. What did Lady Randolph do all that long day? He tried to picture her sitting in a church pew, but couldn’t conjure the image.

Some days it was easy to pick two. Some days there were only two books he wanted to buy. Other days there were none, but he bought two anyway and read them. Usually, the words were a balm. Occasionally, a punishment, firing too close to his vest, but he bore them anyway. Atonement. Just like his job mopping up spills in the operating rooms at the hospital. Atonement. He could still, four decades later, see the little girls’ faces after they stepped on the landmine, the one he had wired and buried and been secretly proud of. He still saw their scooped out faces in his dreams. He still — No, not here.

On days like this one when there were too many choices, Edgar’s task was super-human. To pick two and let the rest go, chancing never to meet them again. He never read the backs. Their descriptions would make his decision too hard, make the choosing too personal. How could he turn down a book once he knew what it was about? He couldn’t, so he didn’t. He relied on covers and titles, reminding himself that most of the time in life, all you ever saw were covers anyway.

Tonight, he lingered, his two books in hand. Lady Randolph was tidying as she did every night, wiping down the counter, pushing books back from the edges of shelves, retrieving strays. She had already turned the sign. He heard when she shuffled to the door, heard the muted bell as the sign brushed against it.

Reluctantly, he returned to the front. As always, she read his titles and skimmed the back covers, nodded, as if she knew every book intimately. Nodded, as if she were sending another one home. He always avoided her curiosity, carved a scowl onto his face so she wouldn’t read any further than the books. Neither spoke as he paid his nightly amount.

What did she do after he left? He knew she lived alone above the shop. Faded blue curtains hung from the windows that faced the street, but what did her rooms look like? Did they mirror the decade when she had moved in, like his mother’s house had, cracked green linoleum and rough tweed couches? Or more like the house where he rented his room: fragile end tables with crocheted doilies, tinged yellow and spotted with knickknacks that made more dust than sense?

“Do you cook supper?” The words slid off his tongue before he could stop them.

Behind thick horn-rimmed glasses, Lady Randolph’s eyes widened and locked on his. “Yes.” She answered slowly as she nestled his books in a brown paper bag. “I cook supper. Pork chops tonight, and collard greens. White rice because it’s cheap.”

He nodded, grabbed his bag off the counter, and hurried to the door.

“And I’ll read two books before I turn down the light.”

Two books. Edgar froze in place, his hand anchored to the cold doorknob, his inner world rocking at its base, reminding him of the four Richter earthquake he had felt in California during week three of boot camp.

“Two books, you say?” He couldn’t look at her, but tasted the hopeful syllables on his disobedient tongue. He felt her nod before he opened the door and walked through it.

The bell clanged a warning — don’t look back – but he didn’t obey it. Instead, he stood next to the door and watched Lady Randolph lock it. She studied him, her eyes squinting, her long bony fingers pressed to the glass. Edgar raised his hand to wave, but saluted instead. Her mouth shifted, curved. Ever so slightly, his lips curved back.

Von Rupert lives in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. where she homeschools her children and carries far too many books home from the library. On the web, she’s a writing mentor at Writer’s Village University and F2K.

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I never wanted to visit the Wall. For years Vietnam veterans had only each other; as a memorial the Wall seemed too little, too late. Besides, there were so many names — so many memories. I often dream of one night in August, 1968.

***

All was black. I rubbed sweat from my eyes. Under the wavering light of a parachute flare squat bunkers and tangles of concertina wire emerged. I smelled blood, hot weapons, burned powder. My back was against a sandbag wall. Someone hunkered down beside me.

“Hey, Teach, I hear the bastards got a piece of you.” It was Doc Wills, platoon medic. He drew a knife and slit my trouser leg. “Hold still.”

“I ain’t goin’ nowhere. Hurts like all hell when I move.”

“Don’t move then. Damn, Teach. I gotta get a tourniquet on this.”

My head ached. Gingerly I checked it out. Warm blood coated my fingers. “What about my head, Doc?”

He glanced up. “Later. That one ain’t gonna kill you.”

A dull roar filled my head. I drifted into a black tunnel. Sharp pain drew me back.

Wills let go of my shirt. “Don’t drop out on me, man!”

I tried to concentrate. “How bad — we get hit?”

“Danforth took a direct hit from an RPG. Lieutenant Burns got killed. Riley. Miller.”

“Miller? Jesus, he was about to go home.”

“Yeah. Ain’t that the shits?”

Riley was in my platoon. Doc moved my leg. I jerked. “Jesus Christ! That hurts!”

He grinned. “You got one fucked up leg. Surgeons will fix you right up.” He started rigging a blood bag. “I’ll give you some morphine when I get this going.”

I gripped his arm. “I don’t wanna die, Doc.”

“You ain’t gonna die.” He shoved me back against the sandbags. “Get that through your thick head. I ain’t gonna let you die.”

He wiped blood off my face and scalp. “Just a nick, Teach.” Deft fingers secured a bandage. “Relax. Evac choppers are inbound.”

The pain seemed less. He must have injected morphine when I wasn’t looking. “I ain’t gonna die?”

“You ain’t gonna die. Okay? Concentrate on one fucking thing: Doc Wills says I ain’t gonna die.”

***

Next thing I remember was looking up at the interior of a Huey. A door gunner knelt over me. He held a bag of blood.

“Doc Wills says I ain’t gonna die.”

“Sounds like a good fucking deal.” Dark splotches stained the gunner’s flight suit. He handed the blood bag to a wounded man sitting on a web seat. “Don’t fucking drop it.”

The guy clutched the bag to his chest. “I got it, Teach.” I didn’t recognize him. A field dressing covered half his face.

Engines screamed. Door gunners raked the slope as we took off. Rotor blades pounded a frantic beat. I faded into the dark and awoke to find a man who looked as if he hadn’t slept in a month standing over me.

“Doc Wills promised I wouldn’t die.”

He glanced at me then went back to reading a tag tied to my shirt. “Hold on to that thought.”

They saved my leg, but the muscle damage was permanent. I didn’t see Doc again.

***

In 2008 my wife persuaded me to attend a unit reunion. In the process of swapping lies, I met the guy who held my blood bag. Hansen was his name. He was a rifleman in third platoon. He told me about Doc Wills.

“I was back with the company about a month after you were hit,” he said. “They gave me a squad.” He paused to sip his beer. “A few weeks later we got into it with an NVA regiment. On the second day we were in a treeline exchanging fire with some bad guys in an abandoned village. You know how it was.”

I did know.

“We started taking mortar fire. One of the new guys got hit. Doc headed down that way. Four or five more rounds came in.” Hansen paused and stared down at the bar. He rubbed the palms of his hands on his jeans. “Doc was kneeling beside the wounded guy. A round hit a couple feet away. He was killed instantly.”

“Damn.” For a long moment we sat in silence.

Hansen coughed. “The reunion committee worked up a list of unit KIA.” He handed me two printed pages. The list had Wall panel numbers beside each name.

***

A few months later my wife and I went to Washington for a week and toured the usual sites for five days. The morning of the sixth day she handed me the creased casualty list. “We leave tomorrow. If you want to visit the Wall…”

It was time to confront those tall black panels — and all those names. Doc Wills. Riley. I owed them that much. “Yeah. I been thinking about it.” I opened my suitcase. “Couple things I got to take.”

***

Half a dozen gray-haired men moved along the path below me. Two wore faded boonie hats. One had on an equally worn field jacket. The others wore black Vietnam Veteran caps. For the first time in over forty years I felt out of uniform.

My wife joined two women standing near some statues. Black granite drew me down into the shadows of my past. Panel height increased as I descended the path. A dark weight lodged in my chest.

The panel I sought was near the lowest part of the Wall. High up on the slab I found Burns, Danforth, Miller, and Riley. Doc’s name occupied part of a line halfway down. I touched it, reliving our last conversation.

***

People leave things at the Wall. Flowers, letters, medals, guilt. I placed a unit patch and one of my dog tags at the base of the slab. “Thanks, Doc.”

Stepping back, I saluted smartly. My old drill sergeant would have been proud.

Then my wife came down and held me while I cried.

JR Hume is an old Montana farm boy who writes science fiction, a little fantasy, some weird detective tales, an occasional poem, and oddball stories of no particular genre.

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It’s the house I was raised in, and nothing has changed. The grass around the flowerbed is cut short and neatly edged like me. My father’s ‘67 Camaro is in the driveway, plum-crazy-purple, recently waxed. He leaves the cover off on sunny days to flaunt it. The driveway is paved now, but I’m on the old root-buckled sidewalk by the street, looking around. Autumn oaks outline everything like grim escorts.

My combat boots are too big. I can’t even feel my feet in them. They fit right a month ago in the mountains of Afghanistan. I’d rather be there. I’d rather feel my heart beating out my chest, bullets chasing my flesh across miles of desert stubble and dust, smoke rising from a village on fire.

The only smoke here is chimney smoke and the charcoal fumes from a neighbor’s barbecue. I listen, hoping to hear a voice from the kitchen window or a kid’s laughter next door, something to convince me I’ve come home. I try to think about the dad who loved car stereos and cheese dip and Monday night football. Not the one who would hit Mom and then get drunk in the basement.
It’s been three years since I wheeled out of here, gravel peppering the garage door like shrapnel. I spent my first two weeks R&R in Okinawa painting C-130s with a two-inch brush. My second in Germany pretending I knew what I was drinking. My third tour I just stayed. There were times when I wanted to be home, but now that I’m here I keep remembering all the reasons why I left.

I’m ashamed I never called anyone, not even Grace, and she tried so hard to be a mom. Dad didn’t want me to enlist, said I’d die out there. Said he missed Mom too, although he never talked about her, especially not around Grace. He said he needed me to run the auto repair like it’s what I was born to do. I was ready to never come back, and here I am, without even an email to warn them. I’ll walk in and apologize for myself. I’ll hold them both if they’ll welcome me, even Dad.

The neighbor’s screen door shuts. A dog barking. Fur boots coming down the sidewalk. It’s a woman in a knit cap and red gloves. Her hair is black and straight and she lets it show without fear. I hope to God she doesn’t know me. She’s walking a chocolate lab and it sniffs my ankles. She thanks me for my service as she passes.

I nod, head down. I want to ask her why. What could I have possibly done for her, or her dog, or her family, or anyone in this silent town, this painfully quiet place where women walk dogs without worry and windows open to let air in, not to let AKs out? When she turns the corner, I’m still standing, not quite on the lawn, not quite in the road, just on this long broken sidewalk between where I grew up and where I belong.

I follow after her, knowing the bus stop is another mile, the airport ten more. I’ll write. I’ll write them a letter. It will say how sorry I am, how I was angry after Mom died and needed to think I wasn’t helpless. It’ll even say why I can’t come back: how when I’m out there in the desert, the enemy can be killed. And that makes all the difference.

A silver pickup pulls up beside me and the driver calls through the passenger window. “You coming or going?” he asks, seeing my pack and uniform.

I stare. It’s the hardest question he could have asked me.

“You need a ride somewhere?”

“Wherever you’re going,” I say.

“You sure?” He laughs. “I’m going to McGuire’s to meet my ex-wife.”

“Maybe just drop me at the bus stop.” I unsling my pack, set it in the bed, and get in.

“You shipping out?” he asks.

“Just got here, actually. Day one of two months I’ve built up.”

“Shit, son. What’s your name?”

“Isaac.”

“Francis,” he says. “You seen your folks yet?”

“Not yet.” My voice sounds brittle. “They don’t even know I’m here.”

“Boy, are they in for it.” He thumps the steering wheel with his palm. “Gemma, my oldest, has been off at college since August, and it’s all I can do not to drive up and visit her every weekend.”

“When I went overseas for the first time I told myself, I’m dead,” I say as the bus stop comes into view. “The second time I said it again just so I wouldn’t forget. The third time I believed it. How can you stop believing something like that?”

Francis parks in the bus lane and gives me an appraising look. “Believe what you want when you’re over there. But you’re here now. Something brought you back. Maybe it’s time to let your enemies be.”

“Maybe,” I say. “Thanks for the ride.”

“Sure thing.”

I retrieve my pack and stand alone in the gathering dusk. I rub my hands together to warm them. I clap in the air, and the sound is a report, clear and sharp, echoing past the borders of the lane, past the houses and the still oaks, past the highway and the barns and into the far off smog.

Something turns over like a trench shovel inside me. I know the last bus will pass at seven, but I’ve made up my mind. I start walking back the way I came, up the hill toward my house. Before I know it I’m running, faster and faster. I run until the streetlights blur. Until my legs and shoulders burn. Until I feel my feet again.

Brian Toups studies Creative Writing and Philosophy at Florida State University. When not discovering the everlasting novel, he enjoys rope swings, root beer, and chasing frisbees with as much enthusiasm and slightly less aptitude than a Labrador Retriever.

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There’s lots of green, and it’s very bright, and that seems wrong. My head feels like a beehive, and there’s a slight hum, from crying or maybe gritting my teeth. There are lots of words, most of them heartfelt but they just seem empty. My grandma looks very small, which I’ve never noticed before. Then again, everything seems insignificant today. She sits just a row in front of me, a tissue crumpled in her hand, and my mother and her sisters perched on either side of her. My uncle sits at the end of my row, just behind them, with a hand on my mother’s shoulder. Somehow, I’ve never thought of them as kids before. They’ve never been brothers and sisters to me; until today, I only ever knew them as aunts and uncles.

The space between my mother and I is physical now, and I wonder how we are supposed to find each other again without Grandpa there to be the buffer between us. I remember the night we got the news. How it felt to have my mother need me just as much as I needed her. And I remember feeling a little left out as she called my aunts and uncle, just a few hours later. Because she had a greater claim to Grandpa than I ever would. She’s his daughter. No matter how many fish I catch, or cribbage games I win, they’d belong to each other more than they ever would to me. Today though, that kind of thinking seems small and petty.

They talk a lot about God and Heaven, and normally that would irritate me, but Grandpa believed, so it seems right. It must be okay, for today at least, to pray to a God that I don’t really believe in. I don’t know why I don’t believe. My mind just doesn’t work that way because I’m too much like my father. He thinks church is a waste of a Sunday morning, but I’ve never actually heard him say he doesn’t believe. Dad’s a private person, but I know he’s been thinking about all this lately. Just a year ago, his mother was diagnosed with the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease. It’s just like God to keep those who suffer alive, but take those who loved and lived as the Bible commands. I do wish that I could have what Grandpa had, though. Blind, unadulterated faith that everything would work out in the end.

On my right, my little brother sits rigid, staring at his hands in his lap. His eyes are a little red-rimmed, and there’s a few wet spots on the front of his dress shirt. We bought it new for him before we came, because he’d already outgrown the one he wore for his baseball banquet. The banquet was only a few weeks after he played his last game of golf with Grandpa. I wish I could see those memories from inside his head, from his own perspective. I wish he could see mine too, because I want him to understand what Grandpa meant to me. I want to steal everyone’s memories and perceptions and put them together like a puzzle, a full snapshot of Grandpa and his role on this earth.

The chaplain closes his little red Bible. There’s a shout, and seven men in uniform fire their rifles in unison. The sound is more like a firework than a gun shot, but I don’t flinch. A tear falls and I sit straighter. There’s another shot from the men, but again, no flinch. My chin comes up and Grandma seems to notice as she glances over at my brother and I. The last round, another shout, then everybody is silent. My tears blur red, white, and blue with rich mahogany as the edges of the flag flutter on top of the casket. A man in uniform behind the chaplain raises a trumpet to his lips as two more move to the head and foot of the casket. The trumpet belts out the painfully familiar starting note of Taps, the flag comes up off the curved surface of the casket. Beside me, my brother’s shoulders start to shake. I hear him sniffle, and without a word he slips his palm beneath mine and intertwines our fingers. I hold on.

To me, this part seems so sad. My grandma, my mother, and my aunts and uncle all watch with tears running down, as they fold the flag. The trumpet falls away as they tuck in the last corner. I wonder why I’ve never seen any pictures of my grandfather in uniform. Why he never talked about Korea, or Vietnam. Why the only time we ever heard stories about that time in his life was when his buddy Flip came to visit. I understand the shadow surrounding the memories of those wars, the bad taste those stories might have left in his mouth. But it makes me wonder if he thought we weren’t proud of him.

A uniform presents the flag and three casings to my grandma, with a few words. His words seem to stick with me. “Each of these three casings stands for something: Duty, honor, and country.” Three words that seem as sturdy as Grandpa. I look around and see what Grandpa saw. Four generations of the Chapman family, and their own families. All of us drifting apart, all the time, distance, and differences between us. And yet, we all know instinctively just how we fit together. I see what he built, what he raised from the ground up. I see what he was proud of, what I am proud of.

Kelly Castillo is a Civil Engineering student looking for a creative outlet and a little extra cash.

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He looked across the breakfast table, knowing that soon he’d have to choose his words carefully. It was the same every year. First the flags popped out along their quiet suburban street. Then the television broadcasts of news, parades, observances and picnics, special sales on sheets and shoes and gardening implements. Finally, there were human interest stories, an interview or two, and then it would all be forgotten until Memorial Day.

Twice a year he had to watch his step, watch his mouth, not say anything he knew would upset her, not let the memories of war long past come between them.

Every year the war itself receded. It was someone else’s turn now, and young kids had their own war to think about, dread, and hope to return from.

Hardly anyone thought about the Gulf War, Desert Storm, with the horrors of the Iraq War on everyone’s mind. Gulf War vets were older now, most of them staring down their forties, although so many reservists had gone that there were plenty in their fifties and even sixties now. It had been a short war, so there weren’t that many disabled, not like the masses of disabled Iraq War vets. Not like the last of the disabled Viet Nam vets, either, with their hollow eyes, at the ragged ends of their ruined lives.

He looked at her with a mixture of affection, exasperation and pride. They had been separated during that short war, and both of them had done things they regretted, things they wished they could erase from their experience. He had been lonely and scared, looking for comfort and order, and some kind of reassurance. It had been his first real experience of war, as he’d been just a kid when Viet Nam was the nightly news.

Veterans Day and Memorial Day — they always brought back all the old pain and resentment.

He cleared his throat. “Want to visit the kids this weekend?” he asked with what he hoped was the right amount of casualness.

She looked up from her paper, over her steel-rimmed reading glasses and smiled. “Sure,” she said. “Let’s see if they want to go out to dinner or something.” Then her eyes clouded as she remembered it was Veterans Day. Everything came flooding back in a wave of pain.

He watched helplessly as her memories took her back to a bad place, to a desert road backed up for miles with trucks and family cars, the blades of her chopper whipping up children’s toys and the smell of burned bodies. The blinding heat and noise passed over her face and she was gone for a few minutes.

“Yes,” he replied. “Dinner. Let’s try that new sushi place, okay?”

She nodded. Okay.

Kate Thornton is a mystery writer in Southern California. She is also a retired Army officer and a Gulf War vet.

A gun blasted and the living room window shattered, glass showering Hassan. He ran to the couch. Auntie Fatima grabbed him and held him close with the other two children. Someone screamed in the parking lot outside. Tires screeched and a car roared away, followed an instant later by a wrenching crash in the street beyond.

Hassan trembled and tried burying himself in Auntie’s bosom. The camps had been like this, people yelling, screaming, smashing things. The memory filled Hassan with grief. All those people.

More screaming erupted outside. Hassan pulled himself away from Auntie Fatima’s comforting embrace and rubbed the tears away from his eyes.

He had been watching the asteroid mission on TV when everything stopped working, the TV, cell phones, even Tanika’s old laptop.

“We need to do something,” he said. Auntie shook her head, still clutching Tanika and Little Mohammed tight against her red dress, rocking back and forth. Her head scarf was crooked.

“But if the world’s going to end I want to know. I want to know if they stopped Loki or not.”

“No,” she said.

“People are panicking because everything is broken, no electricity, nobody knows what is going on, they think it doesn’t matter, just like back in Somalia.”

Aunt Fatima raised her head and stared at him like she saw a stranger. “How do you see these things?” she said. “You’re so young.”

“How can we find out what is going on?” Hassan asked Little Mohammed. Little Mohammed was very smart for a ten-year-old. He loved computers, and was a wizard in school. He didn’t remember Othman and the others they left behind.

“Mister Russo.” Little Mohammed said. “He has a ham radio, and a generator. I’ve heard it.”

“You stay away from that devil.” Auntie spit out the words in Somali.

Hassan took a deep breath. “He has a radio.”

“He’ll shoot you himself.”

“I have to try.”

Maybe, if people had known what was going on, they would not have come with guns and machetes. Hassan went to the patio and slipped out, Auntie screaming at him to come back, Tanika and Little Mohammed crying. Mister Russo’s house was across the back field, behind a hedge eight feet high, roof poking above it like a castle he’d seen in a library book. The Ham radio’s aerial loomed skyward, offering silent hope.

Pillars of smoke rose all around the city, police sirens wailing, more gunshots in the distance. Hassan’s legs felt like they would turn to rubber. It felt like he was back in the camp outside Nairobi, the summer hot around him, hearing the children scream as men fought with knives.

If they were going to die, he wanted to know. He didn’t want to die like his father had in Mogadishu, never knowing.

Mister Russo hated kids. Hassan didn’t know if he hated black kids more then any other kids — he hated everyone. Russo kept dogs, he had guns, kids said he was crazy. Some kids said Russo had been in the Vietnam War, others said he’d been in World War II, but that would make him too old.

Hassan took a shaky step, then another and began running toward the house.

The hedge was too thick to crawl through. Hassan ran around to the front of the yard to the steel gate. The dogs snarled at him, jaws snapping as they lunged behind the gate, making him jump back and his heart race.

Iron screens covered the house’s windows, the curtains drawn. He hefted a rock, hurled it at the door, the rock missing and skittering along the grass. He picked up another and threw it at the door. It hit with a loud bang. He threw two more at the door. The sirens, the screams, the gunshots faded as he waited. Nothing. He threw a rock at the iron screen; somehow it missed the mesh, breaking glass.

The door flung open. Mister Russo appeared, a short stocky bald man holding a shotgun.

“What the hell are you doing?” Russo yelled, pointing the shotgun at Hassan.

“Please,” Hassan said, “I need to know.”

“Go away.”

“I need to know what happened. People are scared. They are fighting, they think the world is going to end.”

Russo swore. “Idiots,” he said. “Well, it isn’t.”

“You heard it on your radio?”

Russo stared at him. “How the hell… yeah, I did.”

“Please, we need to tell the others.”

“You tell them.”

“They won’t hear me.”

“That’s your problem.”

“You have those stereo speakers,” Hassan said. Those speakers were legend at Sylvan Hollow — marching music had blared on them first thing in the morning for a week after the big party some of the older teens and grownups had one Saturday night a few months ago.

“I told you we’re going to live. The asteroid was deflected. Damn idiots hit it again at the last minute with more nukes. That’s where the EMP came from.”

“Please.”

Russo’s eyes narrowed. “You’re bleeding.”

Hassan reached up and felt glass from the shattered window in his scalp, his fingertips wet with blood.

“I can’t leave people behind again.” Hassan swallowed heavily, fighting back tears at the memory. “I can’t. I left Othman and his family behind in the refugee camp.”

Russo looked away.

“I told the UN about the terrorists,” Hassan said. “They let me, my auntie and cousin go, but not Othman and his family. I still dream about Othman in that bad place.” Blood trickled down into his eyes.

Russo’s face twitched. “I was in a bad place in ’Nam.” He met Hassan’s gaze. “I know about leaving people behind.” He sighed. “Okay, let’s tell the idiots.”

He called his dogs, tied them up, and then let Hassan inside to help set up the speakers, and play the message from the Australian Ham operator on full volume. Then Hassan ran back to the apartment to tell the others to listen.

Dale Ivan Smith grew up in the Pacific Northwest, and works for the largest public library in Oregon, where he has the privilege to work with patrons from a wide variety of backgrounds, including many many immigrants from many different countries, including Somalia. He recently sold his first story which appeared in the January 2010 issue of 10Flash magazine.

My uncle lived in the warehouse district of Toledo, not far from a Pizza Papalis and a Blarney Irish Pub.  He didn’t work, lived on government checks and “gifts” from my parents. My father blamed his unemployment  on a “poor attention span.”

His name was Joe, but my father called him Uncle Grim (behind his back) because he rarely smiled. I spelled it Grimm.

We lived in the Old Orchard district that sprouted lawyers and university professors such as my father. I sometimes peaked at his lecture notes, doted on names like Sartre or Descartes, and wondered if their words had done the world any good. Our neighborhood was safe but dull.

I lived mostly in my room,  inventing puzzles, or pretending I could split into two people and play HANGMAN. The great thing about it was that I couldn’t lose. Imagine, I thought, making the stick figure of a man disappear by spelling a word I already knew.

Imagine if spelling the word, Grimm, would make me disappear.

Did  Uncle Grimm ever play HANGMAN on rainy days?

Uncle Grimm was a Vietnam War veteran who flew bombing missions over Hanoi. His plane was shot down and he spent several months in a Viet Cong prison camp. He escaped with a buddy who later took a bullet for him.

I wondered whether Uncle Grimm wished he had bit that bullet instead.

Growing up bored, lonely, frightened of bullies,  I frequented his apartment more often. Besides the cigarette smoke and dust, it smelled of exotic places. He said it was a mix of Balm of Peru and Ginger CO2 oil. He said it helped him forget.

We often visited the arcade. We played pinball or munched on pizza. We  sat in silence on a park bench, even when it drizzled. It was our way of forgetting.

And one afternoon, sitting on his cheap chintz sofa,  I asked him if he ever played HANGMAN.

“No. Some of the guys back in the service did. Why?”

“No reason. I do. Sometimes.”

The days followed each other like dominoes. I lost myself at the arcade, shooting little metal balls, trying to hit the make-believe lions and tigers.

At school, teachers humiliated me. My parents talked “at” me but never “to” me.  My sometimes girlfriend  broke up with me for good. Back home, I became the greatest solitary player of HANGMAN.

And one day, I found a long stretch of cord on Grimm’s  bed with one end made into the shape of a halo.  I asked him what it was for.

He shrugged, said he was working on something that could reach soup cans on shelves too high.

I didn’t believe him.

I kept thinking about that piece of cord. Was it a halo or a noose?

From then on, whenever I visited, I searched for that cord, wondered whether its loop had grown looser or more taut.  It became a kind of a undeclared game between us. I kept hiding the cord. He kept finding it.

Weeks later, I worked up the nerve to ask him.

“Do you ever wish the world would stop?”

He parted his lips slightly.

“You mean like a yo-yo? ”

“Maybe. Like cutting the string.”

His eyes froze, gave me a chill.

“You mean end it?”

I shrugged.

“Something like that, ” I said.

“Everybody does, sometimes.”

“Why would you want to end it?” I asked. Maybe I was putting too much of myself in Uncle Grimm.

“Sometimes I feel down, but I pick myself back up. I don’t have what others have. Like you. A nice life, a nice mom and dad. ”

“I don’t have a nice life. It’s a nothing life. I get bullied by teachers and jerks. I get dumped by a Brittney Spears wannabe.  I don’t excel in anything. I just keep going in circles around myself.”

“Wow, that’s heavy. Circles, huh? You must be reading those French philosophers your father teaches. Those people live inside their heads.”.

“Don’t most people?” I asked.

I looked down at his brown Oxfords, a size too big for his feet. He once claimed they gave his feet room to breathe.

“The load upon your back is not that heavy,” he said, rolling his eyes.

“My back isn’t as strong as yours.”

“My back is crooked. You just haven’t noticed.”

“Looks fine to me.”

I studied his poker face.

“Say,” he said, “I have an idea. Why don’t we end it together? No fun doing it alone.”

“You serious?” I said.

“Serious as death. We can do it right now. Put an end to all this nothing and suffering.”

He made a cord with a loop at each end. He slung it over a ceiling pipe in the kitchen. Then we climbed upon chairs and placed our heads in each noose.

“You go first,” he said. “This way I’ll make sure you don’t cheat.”

“The pipe won’t hold,” I said.

“You’re chicken,” he said.

“You are,” I said.

“You’re a lazy chicken who’s afraid to live.”

“You sound like dad. An abbreviated version.”

I bit my lip.

“Here goes,” I announced.

I bent my knees and exhaled all my air.

I was about to jump. I faltered.

He pulled me by the shirt.

“Lost my nerve,” I said, “just like with all those bullies.”

He undid our nooses, then reached up, shook the pipe. It rattled and creaked.

“It never would’ve held our weight,” he said with a smirk.  “Wanna play some pinball?”

“Sure.”

Several weeks later, I learned that Uncle Grimm, the once decorated bomber pilot, had hanged himself.

I couldn’t bring myself to attend the funeral. I stayed in my room. My mother mentioned that she always knew something like this would happen. Dad never said much about it, but for weeks, he kept misplacing his lecture notes. I blamed myself for bringing up that conversation about ending it. Maybe he saw part of himself in me — the part he couldn’t save.

Kyle Hemmings has been published in Wigleaf, Storyglossia, Elimae, Match Book, This Zine Will Save Your Life, and elsewhere. He lives and writes in New Jersey. He loves cats and dogs.

He looked across the breakfast table, knowing that soon he’d have to choose his words carefully. It was the same every year. First the flags popped out along their quiet suburban street. Then the television broadcasts of news, parades, observances and picnics, special sales on sheets and shoes and gardening implements. Finally, there were human interest stories, an interview or two, and then it would all be forgotten until Memorial Day.

Twice a year he had to watch his step, watch his mouth, not say anything he knew would upset her, not let the memories of war long past come between them.

Every year the war itself receded. It was someone else’s turn now, and young kids had their own war to think about, dread, and hope to return from.

Hardly anyone thought about the Gulf War, Desert Storm, with the horrors of the Iraq War on everyone’s mind. Gulf War vets were older now, most of them staring down their forties, although so many reservists had gone that there were plenty in their fifties and even sixties now. It had been a short war, so there weren’t that many disabled, not like the masses of disabled Iraq War vets. Not like the last of the disabled Viet Nam vets, either, with their hollow eyes, at the ragged ends of their ruined lives.

He looked at her with a mixture of affection, exasperation and pride. They had been separated during that short war, and both of them had done things they regretted, things they wished they could erase from their experience. He had been lonely and scared, looking for comfort and order, and some kind of reassurance. It had been his first real experience of war, as he’d been just a kid when Viet Nam was the nightly news.

Veterans Day and Memorial Day — they always brought back all the old pain and resentment.

He cleared his throat. “Want to visit the kids this weekend?” he asked with what he hoped was the right amount of casualness.

She looked up from her paper, over her steel-rimmed reading glasses and smiled. “Sure,” she said. “Let’s see if they want to go out to dinner or something.” Then her eyes clouded as she remembered it was Veterans Day. Everything came flooding back in a wave of pain.

He watched helplessly as her memories took her back to a bad place, to a desert road backed up for miles with trucks and family cars, the blades of her chopper whipping up children’s toys and the smell of burned bodies. The blinding heat and noise passed over her face and she was gone for a few minutes.

“Yes,” he replied. “Dinner. Let’s try that new sushi place, okay?”

She nodded. Okay.

Kate Thornton is a mystery writer in Southern California. She is also a retired Army officer and a Gulf War vet.

A gun blasted and the living room window shattered, glass showering Hassan. He ran to the couch. Auntie Fatima grabbed him and held him close with the other two children. Someone screamed in the parking lot outside. Tires screeched and a car roared away, followed an instant later by a wrenching crash in the street beyond.

Hassan trembled and tried burying himself in Auntie’s bosom. The camps had been like this, people yelling, screaming, smashing things. The memory filled Hassan with grief. All those people.

More screaming erupted outside. Hassan pulled himself away from Auntie Fatima’s comforting embrace and rubbed the tears away from his eyes.

He had been watching the asteroid mission on TV when everything stopped working, the TV, cell phones, even Tanika’s old laptop.

“We need to do something,” he said. Auntie shook her head, still clutching Tanika and Little Mohammed tight against her red dress, rocking back and forth. Her head scarf was crooked.

“But if the world’s going to end I want to know. I want to know if they stopped Loki or not.”

“No,” she said.

“People are panicking because everything is broken, no electricity, nobody knows what is going on, they think it doesn’t matter, just like back in Somalia.”

Aunt Fatima raised her head and stared at him like she saw a stranger. “How do you see these things?” she said. “You’re so young.”

“How can we find out what is going on?” Hassan asked Little Mohammed. Little Mohammed was very smart for a ten-year-old. He loved computers, and was a wizard in school. He didn’t remember Othman and the others they left behind.

“Mister Russo.” Little Mohammed said. “He has a ham radio, and a generator. I’ve heard it.”

“You stay away from that devil.” Auntie spit out the words in Somali.

Hassan took a deep breath. “He has a radio.”

“He’ll shoot you himself.”

“I have to try.”

Maybe, if people had known what was going on, they would not have come with guns and machetes. Hassan went to the patio and slipped out, Auntie screaming at him to come back, Tanika and Little Mohammed crying. Mister Russo’s house was across the back field, behind a hedge eight feet high, roof poking above it like a castle he’d seen in a library book. The Ham radio’s aerial loomed skyward, offering silent hope.

Pillars of smoke rose all around the city, police sirens wailing, more gunshots in the distance. Hassan’s legs felt like they would turn to rubber. It felt like he was back in the camp outside Nairobi, the summer hot around him, hearing the children scream as men fought with knives.

If they were going to die, he wanted to know. He didn’t want to die like his father had in Mogadishu, never knowing.

Mister Russo hated kids. Hassan didn’t know if he hated black kids more then any other kids — he hated everyone. Russo kept dogs, he had guns, kids said he was crazy. Some kids said Russo had been in the Vietnam War, others said he’d been in World War II, but that would make him too old.

Hassan took a shaky step, then another and began running toward the house.

The hedge was too thick to crawl through. Hassan ran around to the front of the yard to the steel gate. The dogs snarled at him, jaws snapping as they lunged behind the gate, making him jump back and his heart race.

Iron screens covered the house’s windows, the curtains drawn. He hefted a rock, hurled it at the door, the rock missing and skittering along the grass. He picked up another and threw it at the door. It hit with a loud bang. He threw two more at the door. The sirens, the screams, the gunshots faded as he waited. Nothing. He threw a rock at the iron screen; somehow it missed the mesh, breaking glass.

The door flung open. Mister Russo appeared, a short stocky bald man holding a shotgun.

“What the hell are you doing?” Russo yelled, pointing the shotgun at Hassan.

“Please,” Hassan said, “I need to know.”

“Go away.”

“I need to know what happened. People are scared. They are fighting, they think the world is going to end.”

Russo swore. “Idiots,” he said. “Well, it isn’t.”

“You heard it on your radio?”

Russo stared at him. “How the hell… yeah, I did.”

“Please, we need to tell the others.”

“You tell them.”

“They won’t hear me.”

“That’s your problem.”

“You have those stereo speakers,” Hassan said. Those speakers were legend at Sylvan Hollow — marching music had blared on them first thing in the morning for a week after the big party some of the older teens and grownups had one Saturday night a few months ago.

“I told you we’re going to live. The asteroid was deflected. Damn idiots hit it again at the last minute with more nukes. That’s where the EMP came from.”

“Please.”

Russo’s eyes narrowed. “You’re bleeding.”

Hassan reached up and felt glass from the shattered window in his scalp, his fingertips wet with blood.

“I can’t leave people behind again.” Hassan swallowed heavily, fighting back tears at the memory. “I can’t. I left Othman and his family behind in the refugee camp.”

Russo looked away.

“I told the UN about the terrorists,” Hassan said. “They let me, my auntie and cousin go, but not Othman and his family. I still dream about Othman in that bad place.” Blood trickled down into his eyes.

Russo’s face twitched. “I was in a bad place in ’Nam.” He met Hassan’s gaze. “I know about leaving people behind.” He sighed. “Okay, let’s tell the idiots.”

He called his dogs, tied them up, and then let Hassan inside to help set up the speakers, and play the message from the Australian Ham operator on full volume. Then Hassan ran back to the apartment to tell the others to listen.

Dale Ivan Smith grew up in the Pacific Northwest, and works for the largest public library in Oregon, where he has the privilege to work with patrons from a wide variety of backgrounds, including many many immigrants from many different countries, including Somalia. He recently sold his first story which appeared in the January 2010 issue of 10Flash magazine.

My uncle lived in the warehouse district of Toledo, not far from a Pizza Papalis and a Blarney Irish Pub.  He didn’t work, lived on government checks and “gifts” from my parents. My father blamed his unemployment  on a “poor attention span.”

His name was Joe, but my father called him Uncle Grim (behind his back) because he rarely smiled. I spelled it Grimm.

We lived in the Old Orchard district that sprouted lawyers and university professors such as my father. I sometimes peaked at his lecture notes, doted on names like Sartre or Descartes, and wondered if their words had done the world any good. Our neighborhood was safe but dull.

I lived mostly in my room,  inventing puzzles, or pretending I could split into two people and play HANGMAN. The great thing about it was that I couldn’t lose. Imagine, I thought, making the stick figure of a man disappear by spelling a word I already knew.

Imagine if spelling the word, Grimm, would make me disappear.

Did  Uncle Grimm ever play HANGMAN on rainy days?

Uncle Grimm was a Vietnam War veteran who flew bombing missions over Hanoi. His plane was shot down and he spent several months in a Viet Cong prison camp. He escaped with a buddy who later took a bullet for him.

I wondered whether Uncle Grimm wished he had bit that bullet instead.

Growing up bored, lonely, frightened of bullies,  I frequented his apartment more often. Besides the cigarette smoke and dust, it smelled of exotic places. He said it was a mix of Balm of Peru and Ginger CO2 oil. He said it helped him forget.

We often visited the arcade. We played pinball or munched on pizza. We  sat in silence on a park bench, even when it drizzled. It was our way of forgetting.

And one afternoon, sitting on his cheap chintz sofa,  I asked him if he ever played HANGMAN.

“No. Some of the guys back in the service did. Why?”

“No reason. I do. Sometimes.”

The days followed each other like dominoes. I lost myself at the arcade, shooting little metal balls, trying to hit the make-believe lions and tigers.

At school, teachers humiliated me. My parents talked “at” me but never “to” me.  My sometimes girlfriend  broke up with me for good. Back home, I became the greatest solitary player of HANGMAN.

And one day, I found a long stretch of cord on Grimm’s  bed with one end made into the shape of a halo.  I asked him what it was for.

He shrugged, said he was working on something that could reach soup cans on shelves too high.

I didn’t believe him.

I kept thinking about that piece of cord. Was it a halo or a noose?

From then on, whenever I visited, I searched for that cord, wondered whether its loop had grown looser or more taut.  It became a kind of a undeclared game between us. I kept hiding the cord. He kept finding it.

Weeks later, I worked up the nerve to ask him.

“Do you ever wish the world would stop?”

He parted his lips slightly.

“You mean like a yo-yo? ”

“Maybe. Like cutting the string.”

His eyes froze, gave me a chill.

“You mean end it?”

I shrugged.

“Something like that, ” I said.

“Everybody does, sometimes.”

“Why would you want to end it?” I asked. Maybe I was putting too much of myself in Uncle Grimm.

“Sometimes I feel down, but I pick myself back up. I don’t have what others have. Like you. A nice life, a nice mom and dad. ”

“I don’t have a nice life. It’s a nothing life. I get bullied by teachers and jerks. I get dumped by a Brittney Spears wannabe.  I don’t excel in anything. I just keep going in circles around myself.”

“Wow, that’s heavy. Circles, huh? You must be reading those French philosophers your father teaches. Those people live inside their heads.”.

“Don’t most people?” I asked.

I looked down at his brown Oxfords, a size too big for his feet. He once claimed they gave his feet room to breathe.

“The load upon your back is not that heavy,” he said, rolling his eyes.

“My back isn’t as strong as yours.”

“My back is crooked. You just haven’t noticed.”

“Looks fine to me.”

I studied his poker face.

“Say,” he said, “I have an idea. Why don’t we end it together? No fun doing it alone.”

“You serious?” I said.

“Serious as death. We can do it right now. Put an end to all this nothing and suffering.”

He made a cord with a loop at each end. He slung it over a ceiling pipe in the kitchen. Then we climbed upon chairs and placed our heads in each noose.

“You go first,” he said. “This way I’ll make sure you don’t cheat.”

“The pipe won’t hold,” I said.

“You’re chicken,” he said.

“You are,” I said.

“You’re a lazy chicken who’s afraid to live.”

“You sound like dad. An abbreviated version.”

I bit my lip.

“Here goes,” I announced.

I bent my knees and exhaled all my air.

I was about to jump. I faltered.

He pulled me by the shirt.

“Lost my nerve,” I said, “just like with all those bullies.”

He undid our nooses, then reached up, shook the pipe. It rattled and creaked.

“It never would’ve held our weight,” he said with a smirk.  “Wanna play some pinball?”

“Sure.”

Several weeks later, I learned that Uncle Grimm, the once decorated bomber pilot, had hanged himself.

I couldn’t bring myself to attend the funeral. I stayed in my room. My mother mentioned that she always knew something like this would happen. Dad never said much about it, but for weeks, he kept misplacing his lecture notes. I blamed myself for bringing up that conversation about ending it. Maybe he saw part of himself in me — the part he couldn’t save.

Kyle Hemmings has been published in Wigleaf, Storyglossia, Elimae, Match Book, This Zine Will Save Your Life, and elsewhere. He lives and writes in New Jersey. He loves cats and dogs.

I never wanted to visit the Wall. For years Vietnam veterans had only each other; as a memorial the Wall seemed too little, too late. Besides, there were so many names — so many memories. I often dream of one night in August, 1968.

***

All was black. I rubbed sweat from my eyes. Under the wavering light of a parachute flare squat bunkers and tangles of concertina wire emerged. I smelled blood, hot weapons, burned powder. My back was against a sandbag wall. Someone hunkered down beside me.

“Hey, Teach, I hear the bastards got a piece of you.” It was Doc Wills, platoon medic. He drew a knife and slit my trouser leg. “Hold still.”

“I ain’t goin’ nowhere. Hurts like all hell when I move.”

“Don’t move then. Damn, Teach. I gotta get a tourniquet on this.”

My head ached. Gingerly I checked it out. Warm blood coated my fingers. “What about my head, Doc?”

He glanced up. “Later. That one ain’t gonna kill you.”

A dull roar filled my head. I drifted into a black tunnel. Sharp pain drew me back.

Wills let go of my shirt. “Don’t drop out on me, man!”

I tried to concentrate. “How bad — we get hit?”

“Danforth took a direct hit from an RPG. Lieutenant Burns got killed. Riley. Miller.”

“Miller? Jesus, he was about to go home.”

“Yeah. Ain’t that the shits?”

Riley was in my platoon. Doc moved my leg. I jerked. “Jesus Christ! That hurts!”

He grinned. “You got one fucked up leg. Surgeons will fix you right up.” He started rigging a blood bag. “I’ll give you some morphine when I get this going.”

I gripped his arm. “I don’t wanna die, Doc.”

“You ain’t gonna die.” He shoved me back against the sandbags. “Get that through your thick head. I ain’t gonna let you die.”

He wiped blood off my face and scalp. “Just a nick, Teach.” Deft fingers secured a bandage. “Relax. Evac choppers are inbound.”

The pain seemed less. He must have injected morphine when I wasn’t looking. “I ain’t gonna die?”

“You ain’t gonna die. Okay? Concentrate on one fucking thing: Doc Wills says I ain’t gonna die.”

***

Next thing I remember was looking up at the interior of a Huey. A door gunner knelt over me. He held a bag of blood.

“Doc Wills says I ain’t gonna die.”

“Sounds like a good fucking deal.” Dark splotches stained the gunner’s flight suit. He handed the blood bag to a wounded man sitting on a web seat. “Don’t fucking drop it.”

The guy clutched the bag to his chest. “I got it, Teach.” I didn’t recognize him. A field dressing covered half his face.

Engines screamed. Door gunners raked the slope as we took off. Rotor blades pounded a frantic beat. I faded into the dark and awoke to find a man who looked as if he hadn’t slept in a month standing over me.

“Doc Wills promised I wouldn’t die.”

He glanced at me then went back to reading a tag tied to my shirt. “Hold on to that thought.”

They saved my leg, but the muscle damage was permanent. I didn’t see Doc again.

***

In 2008 my wife persuaded me to attend a unit reunion. In the process of swapping lies, I met the guy who held my blood bag. Hansen was his name. He was a rifleman in third platoon. He told me about Doc Wills.

“I was back with the company about a month after you were hit,” he said. “They gave me a squad.” He paused to sip his beer. “A few weeks later we got into it with an NVA regiment. On the second day we were in a treeline exchanging fire with some bad guys in an abandoned village. You know how it was.”

I did know.

“We started taking mortar fire. One of the new guys got hit. Doc headed down that way. Four or five more rounds came in.” Hansen paused and stared down at the bar. He rubbed the palms of his hands on his jeans. “Doc was kneeling beside the wounded guy. A round hit a couple feet away. He was killed instantly.”

“Damn.” For a long moment we sat in silence.

Hansen coughed. “The reunion committee worked up a list of unit KIA.” He handed me two printed pages. The list had Wall panel numbers beside each name.

***

A few months later my wife and I went to Washington for a week and toured the usual sites for five days. The morning of the sixth day she handed me the creased casualty list. “We leave tomorrow. If you want to visit the Wall…”

It was time to confront those tall black panels — and all those names. Doc Wills. Riley. I owed them that much. “Yeah. I been thinking about it.” I opened my suitcase. “Couple things I got to take.”

***

Half a dozen gray-haired men moved along the path below me. Two wore faded boonie hats. One had on an equally worn field jacket. The others wore black Vietnam Veteran caps. For the first time in over forty years I felt out of uniform.

My wife joined two women standing near some statues. Black granite drew me down into the shadows of my past. Panel height increased as I descended the path. A dark weight lodged in my chest.

The panel I sought was near the lowest part of the Wall. High up on the slab I found Burns, Danforth, Miller, and Riley. Doc’s name occupied part of a line halfway down. I touched it, reliving our last conversation.

***

People leave things at the Wall. Flowers, letters, medals, guilt. I placed a unit patch and one of my dog tags at the base of the slab. “Thanks, Doc.”

Stepping back, I saluted smartly. My old drill sergeant would have been proud.

Then my wife came down and held me while I cried.

JR Hume is an old Montana farm boy who writes science fiction, a little fantasy, some weird detective tales, an occasional poem, and oddball stories of no particular genre.

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It’s the house I was raised in, and nothing has changed. The grass around the flowerbed is cut short and neatly edged like me. My father’s ’67 Camaro is in the driveway, plum-crazy-purple, recently waxed. He leaves the cover off on sunny days to flaunt it. The driveway is paved now, but I’m on the old root-buckled sidewalk by the street, looking around. Autumn oaks outline everything like grim escorts.

My combat boots are too big. I can’t even feel my feet in them. They fit right a month ago in the mountains of Afghanistan. I’d rather be there. I’d rather feel my heart beating out my chest, bullets chasing my flesh across miles of desert stubble and dust, smoke rising from a village on fire.

The only smoke here is chimney smoke and the charcoal fumes from a neighbor’s barbecue. I listen, hoping to hear a voice from the kitchen window or a kid’s laughter next door, something to convince me I’ve come home. I try to think about the dad who loved car stereos and cheese dip and Monday night football. Not the one who would hit Mom and then get drunk in the basement.

It’s been three years since I wheeled out of here, gravel peppering the garage door like shrapnel. I spent my first two weeks R&R in Okinawa painting C-130s with a two-inch brush. My second in Germany pretending I knew what I was drinking. My third tour I just stayed. There were times when I wanted to be home, but now that I’m here I keep remembering all the reasons why I left.

I’m ashamed I never called anyone, not even Grace, and she tried so hard to be a mom. Dad didn’t want me to enlist, said I’d die out there. Said he missed Mom too, although he never talked about her, especially not around Grace. He said he needed me to run the auto repair like it’s what I was born to do. I was ready to never come back, and here I am, without even an email to warn them. I’ll walk in and apologize for myself. I’ll hold them both if they’ll welcome me, even Dad.

The neighbor’s screen door shuts. A dog barking. Fur boots coming down the sidewalk. It’s a woman in a knit cap and red gloves. Her hair is black and straight and she lets it show without fear. I hope to God she doesn’t know me. She’s walking a chocolate lab and it sniffs my ankles. She thanks me for my service as she passes.

I nod, head down. I want to ask her why. What could I have possibly done for her, or her dog, or her family, or anyone in this silent town, this painfully quiet place where women walk dogs without worry and windows open to let air in, not to let AKs out? When she turns the corner, I’m still standing, not quite on the lawn, not quite in the road, just on this long broken sidewalk between where I grew up and where I belong.

I follow after her, knowing the bus stop is another mile, the airport ten more. I’ll write. I’ll write them a letter. It will say how sorry I am, how I was angry after Mom died and needed to think I wasn’t helpless. It’ll even say why I can’t come back: how when I’m out there in the desert, the enemy can be killed. And that makes all the difference.

A silver pickup pulls up beside me and the driver calls through the passenger window. “You coming or going?” he asks, seeing my pack and uniform.

I stare. It’s the hardest question he could have asked me.

“You need a ride somewhere?”

“Wherever you’re going,” I say.

“You sure?” He laughs. “I’m going to McGuire’s to meet my ex-wife.”

“Maybe just drop me at the bus stop.” I unsling my pack, set it in the bed, and get in.

“You shipping out?” he asks.

“Just got here, actually. Day one of two months I’ve built up.”

“Shit, son. What’s your name?”

“Isaac.”

“Francis,” he says. “You seen your folks yet?”

“Not yet.” My voice sounds brittle. “They don’t even know I’m here.”

“Boy, are they in for it.” He thumps the steering wheel with his palm. “Gemma, my oldest, has been off at college since August, and it’s all I can do not to drive up and visit her every weekend.”

“When I went overseas for the first time I told myself, I’m dead,” I say as the bus stop comes into view. “The second time I said it again just so I wouldn’t forget. The third time I believed it. How can you stop believing something like that?”

Francis parks in the bus lane and gives me an appraising look. “Believe what you want when you’re over there. But you’re here now. Something brought you back. Maybe it’s time to let your enemies be.”

“Maybe,” I say. “Thanks for the ride.”

“Sure thing.”

I retrieve my pack and stand alone in the gathering dusk. I rub my hands together to warm them. I clap in the air, and the sound is a report, clear and sharp, echoing past the borders of the lane, past the houses and the still oaks, past the highway and the barns and into the far off smog.

Something turns over like a trench shovel inside me. I know the last bus will pass at seven, but I’ve made up my mind. I start walking back the way I came, up the hill toward my house. Before I know it I’m running, faster and faster. I run until the streetlights blur. Until my legs and shoulders burn. Until I feel my feet again.

Brian Toups studies Creative Writing and Philosophy at Florida State University. When not discovering the everlasting novel, he enjoys rope swings, root beer, and chasing frisbees with as much enthusiasm and slightly less aptitude than a Labrador Retriever.

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Getwright and I were in the DFAC one day — this was before deployment, pre-mob maybe. He looked over and said to me, And every year when the goslings hatch dad lets the hounds after them. Separate mother goose from her young. Otherwise they just shit all over the place. Nest any-damn-where. Doggone things. Sounds cruel but it’s to keep things on an even keel you know. Believe me. It can get real out of hand real fast.

I drank my kool-aid that tasted like water. Hm. I can imagine.

So what about you, sir? Where you from?

Wichita, I told him. Oklahoma. Not Kansas.

Getwright’s dead though. And so is Becker. Miles. They were cousins from Idaho. And I lost Drinkwater too. Lookingbill.

It’s Wednesday again. And the shrink tells me that I’m making progress. Tell him that’s probably the line he feeds to all of his patients. He says that it works with the Marines that he sees. We’re in a room devoid of anything. I ask him for another cigarette and as he shakes one out of his pack he goes: I hope this isn’t the reason you come down here, LT. For the free cigarettes.

I shake my head. Don’t be crazy.

The shrink says, Take it from the top.

Inhale, exhale. Okay.

We were just National Guard attached to a Brigade Combat Team that was in theatre. Didn’t think shit happened in country if you were part of that outfit. Hell, we were weekend-warriors to the full-timers. FUBAR. They usually kept their distance. The way I saw it though, we were cut from the same cloth.

The whole thing started when Force Command sent down the order to begin including Automatons on platoon MTOEs. The new standard. Fundamentally they were indispensable assets and would only enhance mission readiness. It was a proven algorithm. Numbers and dashes drawn up by some nerd sitting at a desk running R&D modules and reporting directly to some airtight panel out of Washington.

Each platoon was allotted four. One to each squad. The Automaton would serve as the end-all-be-all in any situation, combat or otherwise. Needless to say it was a wash. An Automaton was a robot and nothing more. A shell made of metal and blinking lights for a brain. No one felt comfortable with the things. I sure as hell wasn’t impressed. Just another initiative to prove the soldier could always be perfected. A dick-showing contest.

We ran patrols with them. Got our feet wet. But all the while, in the back of our minds, we were thinking, when the shit hits the fan, we don’t want to be within a hundred kliks of these bastards.

Our platoon had Roger, Harry, Kyle, and Mark. Their voices were tinny and when you asked them a question you either got this textbook excerpt or: Cannot compute. But according to the TM their fortes weren’t talking, rather reacting. They weren’t meant to share a beer with you. Take a bullet, maybe. Find a mine, sure.

Was 2203 hours on a Thursday. Our Tactical Operations Center called in a Quick Reaction Force. Patrol from Charlie Company was reacting to contact and on the verge of being overwhelmed. They requested reinforcements and medical attention stat.

My squad was next in the chute. I got them out of their racks and we put our boots back on and slung our rifles and I checked everyone out the door.

Ten men. Two Regular Army Specialists I barely knew and then Becker, Miles, Drinkwater, Lookingbill, Iniguez, Johnson, Murphy, and — according to SOP — one of the Automatons. Harry.

I told the team to mount up and when Miles asked me about Harry I looked over at the hunk of metal charging in the corner and said, Fuck Harry. I’m tapping Resendez for one of his guys.

Road was black as pitch. The temperature had dropped. Everyone had their night optics on but since we were in a tunnel of dirt they were practically useless. The tires were kicking up rocks and the sounds the big ones made tapping against the doors of the Humvee startled me. A line of sweat from the back of my neck was cool as it traced down my spine.

Johnson was on the radio, picking up chatter from Charlie Company. I asked him what the status was and he said we were coming up on a sharp right that would take us directly to their position. Three mikes.

I asked for the radio. Sent up a SITREP to the TOC and got a good copy from the Commander.

It happened too fast but right about that time both Becker and Iniguez’s Humvees were vaporized by the IED. Our Humvee rocked from the shockwave and we swerved into the brush but Johnson managed to keep it on all fours as we came to a stop.

An intense ringing in my ears.

I shouted in the dark, Is everyone alright?

Looked around the cab and when my eyes fell upon Foley from Resendez’s team I saw that he was missing half of his face. The door was off and the radio was out and all I could smell was rotting meat. Johnson and Murphy pulled security while I held Foley until he was cold and still and I thought: You shouldn’t have even been here, man. Harry would’ve seen this coming. It was one of his parameters.

The shrink nods and writes on his steno. Chews on the end of his pen. Regards me, the former lieutenant in the orange jumpsuit, with apathy, knowing that at home is the missus and the kids and dinner’s warm and waiting and Spot’s barking in the backyard.

At night, I tell him, I wonder if in that desert we were the goslings. And when sleep never comes the tears do. And through the lucid haze there’s Getwright and me in the DFAC, and he’s still saying: It can get real out of hand real fast.

Joshua Joseph Barella is a husband, father, banker, citizen-soldier. He writes from New York’s capitol-region.

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