Quantcast
Channel: veterans – Every Day Fiction
Viewing all 40 articles
Browse latest View live

274 DAYS • by M.A. Scudiero

0
0

Two hundred and seventy-four days. That was how long Samantha had been waiting. Seconds slowly ticked away as Samantha re-checked the clock. Days felt even longer in school. She tried listening to her algebra teacher talk about theorems and equations, but she ended up doodling in her notebook. Much to her relief, the bell rang signaling morning break. Usually that meant snacks and drinks before third period, but today, a Veteran’s Day assembly was scheduled.

Samantha swapped out her books in her locker. An American flag hung near the back surrounded by pictures of her and her dad in uniform. She smiled and tried to fight the tears forming at the corner of her eyes.

“Wanna skip the assembly and head to yearbook?” Christy asked. “Ms. Garner is usually in her room during break.”

“Definitely,” Samantha said as they headed out into the hall. The last thing Samantha needed was an assembly that would only keep reminding her that her father wasn’t home.

“Ready?” Christy asked, shutting her locker.

Samantha nodded and they headed to Ms. Garner’s room down the hall. As Christy had expected, Ms. Garner was there, but she appeared to be in a hurry.

“What are you two doing here?” Ms. Garner asked as she finished locking her desk.

“We are wanting to do some yearbook work during break. We have some drafts due tomorrow and—” Christy said before Ms. Garner interrupted with a wave of her hand.

“Any other time, yes, but we need to get to the assembly and fast,” Ms. Garner said, looking at Samantha. “You’re late.”

“We promise not to let anyone else in,” Samantha said with a smile.

The smile might have worked on her dad, but Ms. Garner was not impressed. “Sorry but no,” Ms. Garner said as she waved the girls into the hall. She locked her door and ushered them towards the gym. “You can’t miss this assembly.”

By the time they got to the gym, the rest of the school had filled the bleachers around the stage while the teachers sat on each side. Samantha and Christy sat near the front with Ms. Garner. There were many American flags lining the stage with a large flag hanging behind the podium. Principal Griffin stood behind the podium waiting for everyone to take their seats.

Once they had, he cleared his throat and spoke into the microphone. “Quiet, please.” Some of the noise subsided, but it was still noisy. “Quiet, please,” he said with a little more volume in his voice. The gym went quiet. “That’s more like it. This assembly has been called to mark a very important occasion. As you know, today is Veteran’s Day and we wanted to do something special to celebrate.”

A few cameramen shuffled from the sides of the stage to film the crowd.

“Please join me in welcoming to the stage Corporal Andre Staggart and Staff Sergeant Jennifer Rogers.”

The assembly erupted in cheers.

“These veterans have graciously offered their time to speak to us during your history classes today on their experiences and what Veteran’s Day means to them. So please give them a warm Bearcat welcome when you see them throughout the day.”

Samantha’s hands started sweating. She eyed the exit door a few feet away. She could probably make it in a few steps and no one would notice.

“Today I’m also offered an opportunity that not many principals get,” Principal Griffin continued. “Today, I get to announce that a hero has come home early.”

Samantha calculated five quick steps and she would be out of this assembly. Samantha glanced over to Ms. Garner, who was crying.

Principal Griffin extended his hand towards the side curtain. “Please join me in welcoming home Sergeant Andrew Williams.”

“Daddy?” Samantha whispered as the crowd stood up and cheered.

Sergeant Williams walked to the stage and shook Principal Griffin’s hand as well as Corporal Staggart’s and Staff Sergeant Roger’s hand. He then turned to look out in the crowd. He saw Samantha and smiled.

The next thing Samantha knew she was running towards him. He jumped down from the stage and opened his arms as Samantha leaped into them. The crowd cheered even louder.

“I love you, daddy,” Samantha whispered into his ear.

“I love you too, darling. I missed you so much.”

Samantha felt herself melt into her dad’s arms. She’d missed his hugs. She’d missed his voice, but most importantly she’d missed him.

Two hundred and seventy-four days. That was how long Samantha had been waiting for her dad to come home. And in his arms, she didn’t mind the seconds ticking away.


M.A. Scudiero enjoys writing for his wife, daughter, and dog in Mississippi. If you hear someone cheering, it’s probably him. This is his first publication.


Thank you for your Patreon support; it means a lot to us.


SOLDIER REASSEMBLING • by Clint Lowe

0
0

If he were to die, it seemed wrong he had to do so on the dirt. But he did. Nolan died on Iraq sand, leg blown off from a landmine. “My leg. My leg’s gone, John,” he said, eyes so wide they could have almost contained the desert. “Find my leg,” he said. “Find it and reattach it for me, John.”

Two years later I’m stateside restoring my boat, sitting in the cabin trying to put the engine back together. I held a screwdriver and leftover screw.

“Stupid screw came out easily but now it has no place to go back to,” I mumbled.

“Keep trying,” a small voice said from behind. I turned to see a boy of maybe eleven, standing on my boat and staring at me, tussled blonde hair they would never allow in the marines.

“You know about engines?” I said.

He smiled. “I know about boats. My uncle’s a fisherman.”

“For sure, kid.” I turned back to the engine. This screw has to belong somewhere. Has to.

“You a fisherman?” the boy asked.

“Nope.”

I banged a pipe with the screwdriver, solved nothing but relieved a bit of pressure.

The boy pulled red and blue plastic blocks from his pockets. “Then why you working on a boat?”

An innocent enough question for a boy; but not an innocent answer.

“It’s complicated.”

“More complicated than finding a place for a lonely screw?”

Funny kid. I looked at the blocks in his hand. “What you got there?”

He held them up. “Lego. I like to put things back together.”

If only Nolan’s body could have been put back together. “Not all things can be rebuilt.”

The boy nodded as if in some peculiar way he understood my pain. Then he switched his attention to my vessel. “Is it your boat?”

Nolan had always dreamed of being a fisherman. Guess that moved me to buy the vessel. “It’s kind of my fisherman friend’s boat, too. Nolan.”

“Is he under deck?”

He’s six feet under dirt in a coffin draped in a flag. “He’s under something.”

The boy traced his fingers along the engine as if it were Lego he wanted to reassemble. “Nolan know how to fix boats?”

I rested the screwdriver down, took a breath. “He did.”

Boy screwed his face in confusion. “He forget?”

“He died.”

Boy looked down, rubbed his chin. “That’s too bad, mister. Dying ain’t good.”

Simple truth. “No, it ain’t.”

Boy looked up. “He die in a fishing accident?”

“A walking accident.”

The boy sat down, back straight like he was listening to his fifth-grade teacher. “How do you die walking?”

The boy seemed like a fine young lad. Not sure if he was ready for this conversation. I kept silent, only touched the tag around my neck. “Again, it’s complicated.”

“He die in a war?”

An attentive young man. “You see the dog tag?” I said.

He nodded enthusiastically. “Yep.”

Boy’s alright. “Yeah well, you guessed right. It’s Nolan’s.”

“Nolan your friend?”

“Yeah.”

Eyes so inquisitive. “The fisherman?”

I smiled. “Yeah, that’s him.”

My eyes drifted over the engine and saw a tiny hole that looked like a place for the screw; I tried to fit the silver piece but it wouldn’t go, didn’t belong.

The boy peered ever onward. “You liked Nolan cause he liked to fish?”

Those slimy, scaly, slippery things? “Nah, never get me near a line. The reason I liked Nolan has to do with me, big teeth, and two Dobermans in Iraq.”

“The dogs bit you?”

Returning to me in a vicious flash was their guttural snarls, ratty fur, foaming jaws. “One had my calf.” I pulled my pant leg up and revealed the teeth marks: all purple, scars from the stitching.

Boy’s face screwed like he ate a lemon. “Eeewww.”

I chuffed a laugh, then showed him the scars on my left forearm, deep, permanent. “The other dog had my arm. I punched it and punched it…” I took a breath. “Thought I was gonna be dog food.”

“Then Nolan came.”

I nodded. “Then Nolan came.”

Boy narrowed one eye like a detective, probing. “Nolan shoot the dogs?”

I shook my head. “No, Nolan wouldn’t do that. He kicked their snouts then threw his fruit bar right in their faces. Unbelievably they took off with it.”

Boy rubbed his nose. “Most men in war would shoot dogs.”

“Most would,” I said. “But Nolan was a medic, never shot anyone. Wouldn’t even shoot dogs unless he absolutely had to — That’s why I liked him.”

Boy scratched his head. “Cause he liked animals?”

I looked the boy right in the eye. “Cause he wasn’t a killer.”

We both fell into a brief silence where the waves gently slapped against the hull, a few seagulls squawked in the distance, and the boat squeaked against the rubber tire on the jetty. The boy was considering my words. Harsh for a boy to have to ponder such things, but hell, I saw boys his age holding rocket launchers.

Boy turned the back of my hands over until he revealed my palms, examined them, examined the many scars. “You a killer?”

I drew a breath of seafresh air into my lungs, a breath that some men I met would never take in. “Yeah.”

“How many you kill?”

“Too many.” I should really tell this boy something more than that, that it felt wrong, that it haunts me, that those men I killed cannot be put back together like Lego, but explaining it feels like shovelling dirt in a hole that can’t be filled. I looked at him and repeated, “Too many.”

I tried fitting the screw into another hole in a bracket on the engine, and the screw fit, but I dropped the screwdriver. I huffed, tricky little things.

The boy put down his Lego, smiled, then handed me the screwdriver.


Clint Lowe writes short stories while working on novels. Watch his latest vids on writing at Write Heroes.


Read EDF every day? Show us you care via Patreon.

VETERANS • by Kate Thornton

0
0

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.


HASSAN’S NEWS • by Dale Ivan Smith

0
0

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.


GRIMM • by Kyle Hemmings

0
0

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.


THE PROMISE • by JR Hume

0
0

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.


Help us keep the daily stories coming with Patreon.

THE UNWINNABLE FIGHT • by Brian Toups

0
0

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.


Regular reader? We need your Patreon support.

MY BAD • by Mike Pemberton

0
0

Bob bent down on one knee and popped the tops on the last two cans of paint. He flipped the lids of “Royal Lavender” onto the canvas drop cloth and stared at a muddled mess of grey and white satin.

“For Christ’s sake,” he muttered, face flushed under salt and pepper stubble.

He mixed the splotchy goop with a wood stirrer and glared at his fifteen-year-old son, Tommy, perched on an aluminum ladder under the eaves two stories above.

Tommy sang a song Bob did not know.

Bob pushed up the battered bill of a camouflaged cap with “Sarge” sewed across the front, a gift from his platoon, the lone memento from a combat-filled tour of duty in Afghanistan.

“Thomas James…”

Tommy winced, stopped painting and singing, and leaned out into the late afternoon sun. Auburn hair flowed from his white painter’s cap and spilled down the back of his neck. His burnt-brown chest and shoulders, dotted with paint, had broadened and thickened over the summer, but a slim waist betrayed a lingering adolescence.

“Pops, I can paint and sing at the same time. Chill,” Tommy sighed.

Bob waved the wood stirrer.

“I said to make sure this paint was mixed well at the store. This crap looks like two shades of pigeon shit.”

“They said they did.”

“Next time, check before you leave.”

“Okay, okay. My bad.”

“My bad?” Bob said. “‘My bad’ don’t change nothin’. Paint’s still not mixed.”

Bob grit his teeth, bowed his head and stirred. Tommy brushed in silence.

They had scraped and painted their century old, Victorian home for two weeks. Bob hoped to finish that day. He hated the thought of cleaning brushes, lugging out ladders, and sweating like a chain gang con over the Labor Day weekend.

THUD!

A paint can crashed onto the landscape river rock.

“Dammit,” Tommy said as he clambered down, flat-soled skateboard shoes skimming the aluminum rungs.

“Hey,” Bob yelled. “Slow down.”

The lightweight ladder shuddered and banged against the wood siding. Tommy slipped and jerked it away from the house.

“Tommy,” Bob shouted.

The ladder arced towards a tipping point. Tommy froze, eyes wide, left leg dangling, right hand clinging to a rung.

Bob lunged, jammed the base into the loose rocks and pushed like a football player ramming a blocking sled. The ladder wavered, then slammed against the siding. Father and son sagged against the vibrating metal.

Panting.

Silent.

Tommy moved first. Bob braced the ladder until his son was close enough to touch, then stepped back.

Two of Tommy’s friends zoomed up on skateboards at the front of the house, their lean, supple bodies undulating like slinkies under the summer sun.

In the shadow of the eaves, Tommy stared down at the lavender splattered stones, ignoring his buddies’ shouts to join them.

“Sorry,” he said, righting the spilled paint can.

Bob tugged the bill of his cap and eyed the boys on the sidewalk then Tommy.

The boys stopped yelling.

Tommy’s blushing skin was as smooth as the silky paint he spilled. A peach fuzz mustache covered his pursed upper lip. His brown eyes glazed over.

Bob had seen that dazed and confused look too many times, with too many young men. Boys, really. Some had not lived long enough to become men.

“Stuff happens,” Bob said, removing his sweat-soaked hat and wiping his brow. “It’s gettin’ late. I’m beat. Let’s finish tomorrow. Go skate.”

“But I thought…” Tommy said, studying his father’s unflinching face.

Bob winked.

Tommy whooped and tossed his white painter’s cap into the blue sky.

“I’m coming,” he yelled to his friends.

Bob hosed off the rocks, cleaned the brushes, lowered the ladder, and tamped down the lids on the unmixed paint.

He sank his bone-weary body into a weathered Adirondack chair on the front porch and gulped a frost covered glass of ice-cold beer.

Tommy and his buddies chattered, chugged Mountain Dew, skated, and broke into song and dance whenever a favorite tune blasted from their boom box.

“Hey, Pops. Watch this,” Tommy shouted.

Long arms stretched wide, he zipped along the sidewalk, shot up a homemade ramp and flipped the board in mid-air. A white smile burst across his tan face when he stuck the landing.

Bob grinned.

He removed the camouflage cap, smile fading, and traced the tightly stitched “Sarge” with a paint-smudged finger.

“My bad,” he said, thinking of other boys on other days.

He tossed the cap onto an empty chair and watched the boys play in the lengthening shadows of a late summer’s day.


Mike Pemberton is a freelance writer and an instructor for Danville Area Community College. His short stories and essays have been published in literary journals and newspapers. He is available for speaking engagements. More of Mike’s work can be found at www.mikepembertonbooks.com or you can contact him at info@mikepembertonbooks.com.


Thank you for your Patreon support; it means a lot to us.


ACRONYMS • by Curtis J. Graham

0
0

It was a sticky glowbowling alley, Burton thought, more so than most. He clicked his fingernails on the scorekeeper’s table and stared into the dark screen of the bolted iPad, waiting for it to activate. Overhead, a disco ball cast puckers of green light that reminded him of stars through night vision.

He didn’t feel well again, and he chewed his thumbnail until it became serrated. He’d kept the habit from nights on overwatch, and returned to it whenever the feeling hit him. His PCP called the problem chronic anxiety. The Navy called it a service-connected panic disorder. Whatever — to him these words were created for high schoolers with anorexia, safe-space liberals.

Still, he felt the sensation coming strong tonight. It wasn’t the alley or the spectators — sometimes he just felt an itch inside his mind, like he’d forgotten something, and whatever it was would fuck with him hard for the rest of his life. Some nights, he cried. He looked at his hands, and they seemed like they belonged to another person, like he was simply operating a body.

He sat still and did the thing where he shut his eyes and pretended he was someone else. When he opened them, he tried to notice things. Breathe. Overwatch.

A crowd of old men in service caps and VFW pins gathered behind the waist-high partition, clutching beers in unsteady hands. He saw the green light like stars, the thumbprints on the iPad screen. His doctor told him he should work on the hypervigilance. It was wrecking his blood pressure. He told him he’d work on it alright, and felt clever, because they’d both meant different things.

The Acronyms began arriving in pairs, dropping their gym bags at the adjacent lane, tugging on shoes by the tongue. The team was a dozen — some amputees, all disabled. A Wounded Warriors grant paid for the tours, the fundraiser bowling. Together they’d decided on “The Acronyms” because Petra had TBI from an IED and Daniels had PTSD. Gomez had tinnitus from CQB with his SAW, that sort of thing.

As he waited, Burton listened to the blood in his ears. He felt his neck cool from the stirred air. Someone clapped his shoulder from behind.

“You’re up. Ain’t just a continent, you know.” Daniels parked his wheelchair and pointed at the iPad, now glowing.

Burton punched in names alphabetically using callsigns — Gargoyle and the like. He took a quick count. Robbie was absent. He was gay, and therefore Skyflair, by consensus. The last name was Mercy. He served as anchor during competitions. Burton spotted him near the partition, performing a backbend stretch that looked like yoga. Burton enjoyed watching Mercy do things — his movements were thoughtful. He always seemed to be somewhere else, and Burton wondered where.

The lights dimmed, and people clapped in the dark. Burton stood to bowl first. He sent two balls downlane and made a spare. Woodard shouted from the seats, “Yo, lemme get that spare!” He waved a stump vigorously.

Burton took his seat and kept score while Gomez bowled as Cartel. Beside him, Daniels sat heavy and sipped foam from his complementary Bud. Some guys lost their legs and learned to run marathons. Daniels collected disability and ordered takeout most nights. He called the league his exercise. Tonight he’d strapped bowling shoes to the places where his legs ended. Burton helped hoist his chair up to the lane, where Daniels bowled as Fallout.

When Burton sat again, moments began to feel immediate. He called this feeling “when things turn to shards of glass.” The ringing in his ears felt like drowning. He went for his thumb, and this time, tore off a corner of the nail. The pain was excruciating, and that made the other feelings settle. Blood came, and he sucked it hard.

People cheered, and Burton bounced his heels. He looked around for Mercy. Sometimes they’d make eye contact at groups — VA huddles, team meetings — and Mercy would hold his gaze steady. Burton didn’t have the right words — it made him think of floating, how the water props you up. All you have to do is keep your lungs full. In those moments, Burton felt like he could be someone else, like he could climb outside his body and stay there.

Mercy was sitting on the partition bench, fingers folded in his lap. Burton watched his chest rise, then fall, and he tried to make his own match. He closed his eyes.

It was the ninth frame. Only Mercy was left. He walked quietly to the lane, resting a ball on his palm like an art display. Its surface was clouded with reds and grays. To Burton it seemed alive with mist, like a storm at sunrise.

Mercy stood on two prosthetics shoed with Chuck Taylors. He began doing Pride Rock, what the guys called his wind-up. He took a bent-knee stance, lifting the ball overhead, his face bowed. He worked the holes with his fingertips, then stood collected. He held the ball near his heart. He swung in backreach, and his arm hung suspended for a moment, parallel with the lacquered pines.

He once told Burton after a practice, “First, pick a single plank. Swing in parallel, and then just — release.”

His voice was soft when he said it, and Burton thought about the advice when he lay awake most nights. He thought about it when his doctor prescribed him medicines, and when he tossed them in the sink. He thought about it when the sickness didn’t feel like it was coming for him, but it was him. He thought about it nearly every day, and he wished he knew just why.

He watched Mercy release. The ball went off. It twisted downlane like a windswept petal.

Burton never waited for the crash — instead, he kept his eyes on Mercy. He was waiting for him to turn. He was hoping to catch his gaze.


Curtis J. Graham is a New Hampshire native and a veteran of the war in Afghanistan. A graduate of the Mountainview MFA program, his work has appeared in Guernica, The Literary Review, The Wrath-Bearing Tree, and Assignment Magazine. He is represented by Alexa Stark of Trident Media Group.


Help us keep the daily stories coming with Patreon.

INEVITABLE • by Margaret Madole

0
0

Grace knew it was inevitable. The second her husband returned home from his deployment, his eyes tired and voice dull, it was clear it was only a matter of time. Joshua spoke then, but his words scarcely reached her. She processed just enough to know it had all gone wrong. “So many gone… Nothing left for me here or there… I barely pulled through… No one would have cared if I’d been one of them.”

Back then, the way he spoke scared her into staying up for hours each night, pulling countless subjects from the ether to distract him. She would only stop fighting once he seemed calm enough to sleep, calm enough that she could trust him not to slit his wrists the second she closed her eyes. She dragged him to therapists, but waiting lists were long, and he never wanted to make a second appointment. The psychiatrists were useless, too. There was no way to medicate away thoughts, no pill for survivor’s guilt. She helped him find a civilian job and nurtured a bond with their son Anthony, but she knew it could never be enough, not when every reason she found for him to carry on lost its power a week later. In the end, she was a life support machine, but she wasn’t a cure.

Grace found her only lasting argument in Anthony. Both she and Joshua knew that Anthony would be devastated by the death of his father. No matter how desperate he was, Joshua wouldn’t risk hurting his son. Still, with every passing year that argument held less weight. Grace knew that before long, Joshua would realize that death, even the death of a father, was a blow that a teenager could survive. There was nothing she could do except make sure that there was always a full bottle of sleeping pills on the counter. At least then it would be easy and relatively painless.

When Grace realized what was ahead, she began to plan on the nights when she lay awake. She plotted out contingencies while riding the subway and waiting in the doctor’s office, going over them for years until the unthinkable become mundane. She knew who to call and what to say, each interaction carefully scripted out until they were like the poems she’d learned in school—memorized, but never truly felt. Indeed, though once her stomach sank with guilt whenever she imagined Joshua’s funeral, after a decade and a half of worries it become a fact, a possibility that would eventually come to fruition. She had already written his eulogy.

Grace came to live with the knowledge that sooner or later she would get up and Joshua would be dead. Then, she would wake Anthony and tell him before calling Joshua’s sister, 911, and the funeral home. She always set her alarm early to make sure that it was not the day that her son needed to be comforted, Joshua’s sister needed to be told, emergency services needed to know the situation and the address, and fifteen years of worry would be concluded in a single moment. As long as Joshua survived the morning, she could put the anxiety and fear aside, only letting it return in the moments she escaped to her balcony, leaning over the edge with a cigarette and wondering when it would all fall apart. She tried to hide her habit from her son, but the smoke blossomed up to fill the air around her, lingering on her clothes and in her hair. Everyone she met was confronted with the stinging scent of tobacco.

But despite her plans, it didn’t happen in the morning. Instead, it was the afternoon as she returned from the grocery store. The apartment was dark, but light streamed out from under the bathroom door, and she knew everything had been ruined even before she opened it and found the tub full of blood. She tried to text Anthony, to keep him from coming home and seeing it all, but nothing could fix the errors caused by her shaking hands. She was supposed to contact his sister, too, but she realized that without her noticing, tears had streamed down her cheeks and stolen her voice. In the end, she curled up in a chair in the room next door, clutching her landline and waiting for her hands to stop shaking long enough for her to call 911.

When Grace was ready at last, her script was long gone. She stuttered out all she could between ragged breaths. “My husband — dead — 3 Park Avenue, apartment 31A — suicide—” The operator began to respond, but she could barely hear him over the sound of her own gasping, and his questions were too difficult to answer. Grace couldn’t talk about her husband’s age or occupation or even explain how he had killed himself, not when everything was just a reminder of how everything had gone incredibly wrong. Instead, she hung up the phone and began to cry.

It wasn’t supposed to be this hard. That was why she planned: so that she could take care of the details quickly and focus on moving on. But all she could see was Joshua’s body in the bathtub, his blood staining the tiles red as a permanent reminder. It didn’t matter how many times she told herself she couldn’t keep him alive forever, that it would end in suicide no matter what she did. She hadn’t accounted for the deep crimson, or the spilling blood, or the impossible vacancy in Joshua’s eyes. It was too much, too fast, and so her plans had crumbled. All she had left to do was weep.


Margaret Madole is a student from Connecticut. Her work can be found in Hobart, *82 Review, and Parallax Online. When not writing, she participates in copious amounts of theater and dance.


If you enjoyed this story, show your support on Patreon.

Rate this story:
 average 3.6 stars • 14 reader(s) rated this

PAYING RESPECTS • by George Aitch

0
0

The homeless man at the interchange is a veteran too and that makes me uncomfortable, especially today. His unkempt beard hangs past his collar and weaves with the fraying strands of his jacket. Headphones adjust themselves over ears, eyes glance elsewhere and lips purse as he drags his trunk across the tiled floor. With his free hand, he holds a cardboard sign telling the world that he’d been in the service, telling them he is struggling and wants help.

I want to give it to him. I really do. An assortment of change jangles in my pocket. Shrapnel, they called it; awful word. My eyes meet this man’s, they implore me. I feel his stinging disappointment. I look away; I can’t risk going short today.

The bus pulls up, the driver sees the service badge hidden on my lapel and salutes. People will be doing that all day. Coin by coin, I slide my fare into the hopper. I need seventy-six cents left over, seventy-six cents exactly. The fare is four dollars. I have four fifty. Now it’s my turn to plead. Hiding the seventy-six cents in my fist, I turn to the bus driver who shrugs.

“Where ya heading, pal?”

“Arlington.”

“All right. Get on.”

He jerks a thumb to the back. I shuffle to my seat and lean against the humming window. The bus whooshes off as I turn the coins over in my pocket, my fingers simmering in the coppery sweat smell. My last look at the interchange sees the scruffy vet pad away, his shoulders sunken. The three coins slide against each other. I try not to think how his need is greater than mine.

Wait, there are only three coins. I count them to be sure. The dime has swum away. Panic swells and a sweat breaks over my brow. I need all four. I stand up sharply and grab ahold of a handrail. The bus spins around a corner. There on the grimy floor, my only dime is rolling away. I dive after it and lodge it in my wallet. It sits next to a photo of Curtis.

I first met Curtis at basic. The rigor of training is designed to form a group out of a rabble of men. Thanks to its pressures, we became as close as the change I’m rubbing together. He was far from my only friend in the unit — I still see the other guys occasionally — but the keen sense of loss I felt when Curtis was gone has never dulled. You never get used to the death of a close friend or family member. It never gets easier. Whenever even the slightest moment reminds me that he isn’t here anymore, I can replicate imaginary conversations we might have had. His death has robbed me of them.

The bus stops outside the cemetery and I pass through its gates and pillars. From memory, I track the grid of white headstones to where Curtis’s memorial is laid. The air is hung with the scent of fresh flowers left by still-grieving family members. They too know that these scars never heal. On a few of the white granite slabs, coins are laid.

At Curtis’s grave, I stop. A service is being conducted on the hillside. Strains of the priest’s final address drift through the trees. I fish the loose change from my pockets and pay my respects. I read once that the Ancient Greeks used to lay coins covering the eyes of the deceased. The Romans placed them over the tongue. These obols were to pay the dread ferryman so that they could cross the river which bounds the realms of the living and the dead. It’s a service tradition to place these on the headstones of those who’ve gone before us, to let their families know that their grateful colleagues are still thinking of them.

The first is a penny, to let them know you visited. Many of the headstones are bearing pennies today, alongside medals and bouquets. One young woman a ways off is washing the tomb with a sponge. I ignore her. These are private observances. The memorial service reading meets my ears. The priest’s intonation is sombre. They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old.

A nickel symbolises the time you spent at training together. Curtis was the troop clown, the loudest to laugh. We got each other into so much trouble. He would scarcely recognise the weary face I bear today, though he might know that some of the laughter lines were his gift. As I have been left to wrinkle and grey, he is trapped in my head as a young man; his vitality is suspended in amber forever. Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.

Aw shucks, here come the tears. I served alongside Curtis, so the next coin is a dime. The elusive ten-cent piece clinks on top of the other two. I can hear sobbing as I try to hold back my grief. It simmers inside me. Our first tour was rough. Neither of us had ever been so far away from home for so long. We were as young then as I am old now. I’ve avoided the usual barbs of booze and drugs. There are still some nights were I wake in a sweat, but how can I describe those relived moments to those who weren’t there? At the going down of the sun and in the morning—

My quarter is the last coin. It is a special token, a badge to say I was there. I remember the moment when life was snuffed out, the split moment when living flesh, rended, fell still. His body caught by a single round, a sniper unseen on the rooftop in some unnamed desert village. An inch to the left and he might have made it. The light in his eyes faded, I knew he was gone. We will remember them.


George Aitch is a writer from Blackheath, London. You may find his work in print and online in places such as Storgy, Litro, Confluence and The Crazy Oik. His essay ‘What Do You Do When It All Goes Wrong’ was recently shortlisted by Ascona.

The quoted poem is, of course, the “Ode of Remembrance” — the fourth stanza of “For the Fallen” by Lawrence Binyon.


If you want to keep EDF around, Patreon is the answer.

Rate this story:
 average 3.6 stars • 14 reader(s) rated this

MAN DOWN • by Sam Payne

0
0

When someone popped a champagne cork at the Christmas party, Carl dived under the table.

No one said a word. The dairy lot laughed nervously, the butchers raised their eyebrows and carried on with their conversations, and the dot.com drivers turned their backs as if Carl’s behaviour might be contagious. They’re a funny lot, the dot.com drivers, they think they’re better than the rest of us on account of getting paid twenty pence more an hour.

I was listening to Frank talking about the cabbages in his allotment so I was glad of the excuse to get up and offer Carl a hand.

He ignored it, of course. Carl used to be in the Army. Afghanistan. Iraq. Everyone joked about how if a nutter walked into the supermarket with a semi-automatic, Carl was the kind of guy you wanted to have around. But not anymore, I guess.

Outside, it was freezer-aisle cold. Carl lit a cigarette and sucked in long and quick like he was gasping for air.

“Shit party, huh?” I said.

He nodded, taking another drag. His hand was trembling and his left eye was twitching. I pulled a small bottle of vodka from my handbag and offered it to him.

He took a long gulp, passed it back and said, “You like working in a supermarket?”

“It’s alright.”

“I just thought I’d be doing more, you know, when I left the Army.”

“Maybe you just need to keep looking for something better.” I didn’t tell him I checked the job pages every day but there wasn’t much else out there.

“Knowing my luck, I’ll be stuck here forever,” Carl said, inhaling and staring up at the sky. “I’ll probably end up like Frank. Trying to chat up a pretty girl with stories about my cabbages.”

I slapped him lightly on the arm.

“Frank wasn’t chatting me up.”

“Yeah, he was. Not that I blame him.”

***

As a rule, I don’t sleep with guys from work. At least, not after what happened with Rob and the harassment order, but I’d been single for a long time and I’m not going to lie, something about the way Carl looked when he was under that table almost broke me. We went back to my flat because it was closer and he said his mother could get a bit funny about visitors at night. It wasn’t what I was expecting. I thought perhaps we’d talk a little more, you know, before. It was alright, though. He was a bit rough, a little too rough sometimes, but after he was softer. He talked about the army. The camaraderie was the thing he missed the most.

“You’re never on your own. There’s always someone who has your back.”

I thought that sounded nice. It was warm under the bed covers and I could see the stars bright outside the window. I was thinking about how there was bacon in the fridge and in the morning I would make bacon butties for us but then Carl said, “I should go soon.”

“Oh, okay,” I tried to make my voice sound light, “you can stay if you want, I don’t mind.”

“Nah, I’d better get back.”

Carl sat up and started pulling on his socks.

“You know, there was this one time when an IED went off right next to us. Our Sergeant’s leg was blown clean off. I don’t know what I was thinking because it was useless really but I ran and got his leg and I held on to it.”

He started laughing. “I knew it was ridiculous, it’s not like we had any ice or anything, but I wouldn’t let go of that leg. I held on to it until the medics arrived.”

Carl was really laughing now. It was the kind of laugh someone does when they find something outrageous or unbelievable, the kind of laugh that can so easily turn to tears.

I put my hand on Carl’s arm. “Why don’t you stay?”

He shook his head. “Trust me, you don’t want this.”

After he left, I lay awake in bed for a long time. It was colder now and I bunched the covers up all around me to keep warm. It must’ve have started to rain because when I looked out of the window there wasn’t a single star left in the sky.


Sam Payne has recently completed an MA in Creative Writing through the distance learning programme at Teesside University. Her stories and poetry have appeared in various places online.


Help us keep the daily stories coming with Patreon.

Rate this story:
 average 3.8 stars • 26 reader(s) rated this

THE MEMORY IS THE ENEMY • by Sue Sabia

0
0

Ivan uses the L.A. Daily News as a placemat because his wife – rest her soul – once told him it is easier to throw out a stained newspaper than to wash a stained placemat.  He prefers the obituary section; it sits underneath his breakfast. Photos of strangers, most appearing younger than their printed ages, look back at Ivan as he sops up his runny eggs with his burnt toast.

He sounds out the names: Maybelle Giano, Teddy Smith, Lucas “Luke” Cassaway. The names mean nothing to him. But the stories! The stories of these now dead souls staring back at him. A sewing factory worker from West Hills, a Vietnam veteran from North Ridge, a floral designer from Moorpark who counted a duchess as her client.

Ivan lifts his coffee cup, and the face of an angel stares back at him from the newspaper. In the back of his dementia-clouded brain, a tentacle of a memory grabs hold. The angel with the comforting smile who had wiped the sweat off his brow with a cool cloth when he lay in a field hospital during the Korean War. Had held his hand as the pain in his shattered leg raged and was the first person he saw when he awoke after the amputation. The angel who held him as he wept for his lost leg. What was her name?

Mei Choi, age 89, it says below the photo. Calling hours start at four. The funeral will be held in Korea next week. He must pay his respects.

He gets dressed. The black suit jacket hangs on him like it is on loan from his father. The pants, with the left leg cinched at the knee, he hikes up with a belt. His one dress shoe has lost its dressiness and found holiness instead. Well, he thinks, I am going to a sort of church so I can wear my shoe with holes, holy shoe! The thought draws a smile from his thin lips which are the color of liverwurst.

His crutches, older than the jacket and shoes combined, fit under his arms as they should, as it seems they always have.

Every evening, his daughter leaves the things Ivan needs for the day next to his satchel on the table near the front door: his bus pass, twenty dollars, a map of the city, and her phone number, just in case. He stuffs the newspaper with Mei’s photo and the visitation address into his satchel before he leaves.

A chatty woman at the bus stop tells him which bus to take.

He tells a fat bald man on the bus where he is going. “Even though she looks like the enemy, I must pay my respects to my angel.” The man ignores him.

The bus takes him cross town to a Buddhist temple. He uses his crutches to hop up its worn steps as men and women in all-white clothing stare at him. He stares back, afraid.

They look like the enemy; they live only a bus ride away. How the world has changed.

Inside it is cool and dark. Strange smells remind him that he is the foreigner here. Someone touches Ivan’s arm and he flinches. A man. Short. Dark haired. Dressed in white. His eyes are rimmed with red. “Would you like to sit down, sir?” the man asks.

Ivan is tired from his journey. He accepts a seat. “In Korea I knew Mei. She was my angel.” Ivan wants to tell the man more but he cannot find the right way. “Can I see her? I am here to pay my respects.”

“This way.” Ivan follows the man to the front of the temple. The smells are stronger here. The man chants as he walks with Ivan and the others repeat the chant until Ivan is surrounded by whiteness and incense and chanting. The whiteness parts and there is Mei, her angel face sallow and wrinkled. A sadness clutches his heart as he bows in front of her. He wishes he could have seen her one more time before they sent him home. He wishes he could have thanked her better than he had back then.

“Thank you, Mei, my angel,” Ivan whispers below the chanting. He turns to leave but the man escorts him back to the chair. Ivan stays where he is put. He nods off. The man wakes him gently. He explains he is Mei’s son and invites Ivan to stay for lunch.

“Yes, thank you,” Ivan replies.

Lunch is food he has never tasted. The couple sitting with him are his age and they tell him stories of their life together. They lived through the war. Ivan is sad to leave when lunch is over. They invite him to return to the temple someday.

On the bus, he tells a teenager that he visited a temple where everybody looked like the enemy, but they were not the enemy. The teenager ignores him.

The next day, another breakfast. Another set of dead faces stare back at Ivan as he eats runny eggs with burnt toast. He sounds out the names printed below the faces: Tom Harness, Lady Joan Winter, Leo Leopold, who is a Korean War veteran. Wasn’t he on the chow line in front of Ivan in Korea when the explosion occurred?

Leo’s viewing is at three o’clock, a church service and reception to follow. Ivan must pay his respects. He decides to polish his shoe for the service.


Sue Sabia has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and has an honorable mention in the Binnacle’s ultra-short competition. Her fiction has appeared in Skyline Review, Literary House Review, and Spinnings Magazine among others. She has also published nonfiction articles.


Patreon makes Every Day Fiction possible.

Rate this story:
 average 4.3 stars • 30 reader(s) rated this

THE ERRANT STRAND • by Amanda Barusch

0
0

Sweat crept down his back as he stepped off the rumbling bus and stood at attention with the other recruits. He’d used a cheap comb to part his hair with what he thought was military precision — on the right, in a thin straight line. But he couldn’t control that one strand growing out of his cowlick. He liked the idea of a wide-eyed cow licking his left temple but he did value order in those days, so he tried hard to control his unruly lock. He tried everything short of hair spray, which struck him as girly and he didn’t like the smell. Nothing did the trick so, as he stood there in the Texas sun, that one strand drew a proud arc and flopped right into his eyes.

A tall guy with clippers sliced off his hair and for one hellish year of jungle warfare the strand lay stifled under a buzz cut. It never arced quite as high after that. He left the Army with his honor intact and his confidence demolished. Still, he got into Berkeley with the GI bill, grew his hair out and learned to roll a joint.

He cultivated a taste for disorder and came to enjoy the simple act of dropping his dirty clothes on the dorm room floor. He made a few gestures towards revolution but he never hurt anyone. A newspaper reporter in a roiling street asked why he was protesting the war. Tears flowed from his stinging eyes and he yelled, “Why the hell aren’t you?”

The next day, his picture was in the newspaper with a caption: “campus radical.”

“I’m no radical!” he yelled and kicked a bike that was locked to a power pole.

When they shot those kids in Ohio his mom cried. She kept saying, “It could have been you!” She wanted him to come home but he hated her when she cried. By then, the strand hung loose down his hollow cheek and people stared at him when he loped down the street.

He majored in sociology because he heard it was easy. They let him graduate, much to his surprise. Then he applied for job after job and they told him he needed skills; more skills; different skills. He figured he needed camouflage so he got a buzz cut and a new shirt. Rubbing his scalp reminded him how much he disliked taking orders.

“But,” Pop said, “you do like to eat, don’t you?”

So he kept looking.

Then he met Debbie in a crowded pub. She and another girl sat at the bar drinking wine and laughing loud, their t-shirts so tight he could make out all four nipples pert and ready. Debbie thought he was square with that buzz cut and Oxford shirt but later she said he had a poetic face, “Sweet, in a sad kind of way.”

He nearly passed out when she reached up to rub the fuzz on his scalp and pressed her nipple into his shoulder. Later he would tell her the first thing he noticed in that bar was her tinkling laugh. He came to believe it was true.

At the wedding, the errant strand once again strayed into his eyes. There’s a picture of him in his tux and her in her gown reaching up to tuck the lock back from his face with her fingertips. He closed his eyes and leaned into her touch.

She tucked that hair back thousands of times. Even after their daughters were born and things got hectic, she always picked him up at work, always leaned across to tuck back his strand with her fingertips. But there’s only that one picture.

Debbie collected travel brochures. She taped a postcard of the Forbidden City to the bathroom mirror. His company moved to China. His unemployment ran out. She threw the postcard away.

By the time leukemia took her, their girls were grown and gone. They came back for the funeral and couldn’t understand why he couldn’t squeeze out a single tear.  

“To hell with them,” he muttered. “To hell with everything.” He sold the house, threw all those damn brochures in the trash, and signed up for Social Security. He kept his grey hair stretched in a ponytail at the back of his neck and started smoking pot again.

“Hey! It’s legal!” he exclaimed with a cough.

He met a biker woman from Nevada in a bar. She thought the strand made him look like Elvis and she never did tuck it back from his face. Joleen wasn’t the tucking back type, with her brown leather skin and unfiltered Camels, but she didn’t mind his mess and she had a good laugh. He liked to rest his head on her flat, little tummy.

Joleen persuaded him to move to Elko and buy a twelve-foot skiff. He found winters cold but the summer fishing made up for it. She loved to angle for trout and he liked to putter with the boat. He found a measure of pride in being a veteran and joined the Rotary. On Saturdays, they drove a pickup to town to drink beer and gossip at The Star Hotel. A quiet contentment snuck up on him.

The afternoon he passed was the hottest of the year. They were out on Ruby Marsh drinking beer with a few bass in the bucket.

“Damn! I wish I’d brought my hat.”

Those were his last words before, as Joleen explained to all who’d listen, “He just leaned over and died right there in the boat.”

No drama and very little mess but Joleen was haunted nonetheless. She kept remembering his head in her lap, how after he died that lock of hair fell into his eyes and how she tucked it back with her fingertips.


Amanda Barusch lives in the American West. She spends as much time as possible either barefoot or on horseback and has an abiding disdain for boundaries. The Errant Strand was inspired by her father’s life. Her work has appeared in Crack the Spine, Stone Path Review, The Legendary, and various academic journals. She is working on a short story collection titled, “Everyone is Singular.”


If you enjoyed this story, show your support on Patreon.

Rate this story:
 average 3.7 stars • 15 reader(s) rated this

HOME • by Tanner Cremeans

0
0

April 30th, 1972

I came home. It wasn’t the warm welcome that I had expected. What I expected was the abundance of romance and cheering that my father had told me about after he returned home from Germany at the end of World War II. When I was a kid, I could sit for hours and listen to his stories. The type of war stories that a kid can hear and be all agog. The stories of war that you live, that I lived, are much different. My father never told me that I would see my friends, my brothers die. He never told me that the only happiness I would feel in the world of war would be at the bottom of a bottle of whiskey.

As the plane landed at Rickenbacker, I peered out the window. I was ready to see red, white, and blue. People cheering and kissing. Instead, I saw signs. Not welcoming signs, but signs telling me and my brothers that we were baby killers and murderers. Before we stepped off of the plane, many of us took our uniforms off. We stuffed anything that could give the impression we were soldiers into our duffel bags and some even left their uniforms on the plane. We were told that if we wore them in town we would be harassed. A tear rolled down my cheek as I stepped off the plane in my civilian clothing. I felt hatred and betrayal from the people that I had risked my life for, and so many others had given theirs for.

Once we walked past the protestors, our families gave us a warm welcome. I hugged my dad and kissed my mom and Emily. We went home and had dinner as a family, but I couldn’t feel happy to be home. Regardless of how happy my parents and fiancé were to see me, I wanted to leave. I didn’t know where I would go, but I wanted to leave. For the next week I woke up with a tight chest. Although I was next to Emily, I felt misplaced.

Everything felt different being back in the simplicity of Ohio. I didn’t miss Vietnam, or being shot at every day, but home didn’t feel the same as it did before. It was last year that Emily and I had gotten engaged, and what was I supposed to do now? Marry her and pretend that I didn’t do what I did? Was everything supposed to fall back in to place and be the way it was before I left? That’s what everyone around me seemed to think, but I wasn’t convinced it was that easy. I couldn’t find the man I was before the war and I wonder if Emily knew. I wonder if she could tell that I had changed, had seen things, had done things that God can’t forgive.

The next morning, I told my family nothing. I just left. It wasn’t that I wanted it to be that way, I just couldn’t look at them and tell them I was leaving. Primarily because they would ask where I was going, and I didn’t know. It wasn’t that I didn’t love Emily, because I know I loved her. It wasn’t that I didn’t love my mom and dad, because I loved them too. It was the war. The war had taken something from me-a part of me. I wonder why it didn’t take it from some of the others that had returned and transitioned back into civilian life. It made me jealous at the time, but I’m over that now.

There were many times that I cursed America after the war. I hated the things they had made me see and made me do. I didn’t want to fight. I wanted to stay home with Emily and get a good job and start a family. Instead, I was drafted and forced to leave. The draft made all the difference, and It made me hate myself.

It’s been a year since I left Ohio without notice. I called home from a pay phone about a month ago. I left a message, but in the message, I didn’t say a word. I didn’t know what to say, and I still don’t. Nobody but me knows where I am, and nobody including myself knows where I’m going. I’ve spent the last year traveling the country like a fugitive running from the law. Like a fugitive I am running, but not from something, rather to find something. I am searching for the man that I knew before, the man that Emily fell in love with so many years ago. I will not be at peace until I find myself, and oftentimes I wonder if I ever will.


Tanner Cremeans is a writer and law student residing in Columbus, Ohio. His fiction has also been published in Night Picnic.


If you want to keep EDF around, Patreon is the answer.

Rate this story:
 average 3.6 stars • 32 reader(s) rated this

THE BETTER PART OF VALOR • by Tad Tuleja

0
0

He had been cut this bad once before.

In the Central Highlands, a punji stick had jabbed him below the knee. It had gone in less than an inch, but the feces that the VC had smeared on it had done its job, and a hellfire infection set in. He had almost lost that leg in a field hospital.

That was eleven years ago. Now, leaning unsteadily against a bar stool as blood darkened his shirt, he grunted “Damn.” To have survived septicemia in the jungle and then lose it to some asshole with a box cutter… 

Probing the shirt he found a four-inch gash. A decade of beer had provided him with a substantial spare tire, and it was this layer, not his gut, that was oozing red.  A few stitches and he’d be fine. Meanwhile, the teenager who had cut him stood ten feet away, blade in hand, with slack amazement on his face and blood trickling from his mouth.

Their encounter had been brief. The bartender, passing the soldier a third double, had said, “Here you go, Sarge.” The teenager had slid off his stool.

“Army guy, huh? Big man, right?”

The soldier set his glass down. The kid started with the insults. The soldier took it for a bit. Then he sent a right cross to the kid’s face that knocked out a tooth. He staggered back. The soldier stood up.

As he waited for the kid’s next move, he remembered: Don’t watch his hands, watch his eyes. The advice had saved him before. But he was older now.  His reflexes weren’t as sharp as they had been in Vietnam. The six fingers of Jack he had downed since noon weren’t making them any sharper. 

When the kid blinked, he made the connection too late, and he felt the knife before he saw it coming. He backed up, leaned against the stool, more embarrassed than afraid. 

With a Kabar he could have taken the kid down blind drunk. But he didn’t have a Kabar. Maybe that was a good thing. It made him hesitate for some situation awareness. He could probably deck the kid with a second punch. But the knife made that risky.

And he liked this bar. Billy was good to him, the customers were friendly to vets, and in the daytime, before the jukebox starting with Haggard and Jones, it was quiet — a good place for sipping bourbon and thinking too much. Why risk that for a punk on a whisky tear? 

Discretion is the better part of valor. He’d read that somewhere and never believed it. But on this warm spring day in Billy’s bar, it sounded better than getting the cops involved. Pressing on his stomach with his left hand, he drained his glass with his right and set it down. 

“Son,” he said evenly, “you just got your shot. Now you got a choice. You can turn around and walk out that door. Or you can get your throat slit with your own knife.”

He tried to say it with the authority of the Green Berets song: a man who meant just what he said. But it came out like a movie line. I sound like fucking Clint Eastwood, he thought.

But it worked. The kid’s eyes flicked with apprehension. He backed up, banged into a table, and made the door. 

The soldier repositioned himself on the stool and tapped the glass.

The bartender poured another two fingers. “On me.” He grabbed a clean towel from behind the bar and handed it to the soldier. The soldier folded the towel twice, undid two buttons of his shirt, pressed the towel against the wound, and redid the buttons.

“You need that stitched, man. I’ll call the EMTs.”

“My kit’s at home. It’s a slow bleed. I’m ten minutes away.”

“Fucking Marines,” the bartender said. “Nothing worry you?”

The soldier smiled. Yeah, that punji stick had worried him. The time Casey took one to the head, two feet away. That worried him. When he asked Patricia to marry him and she took a week to answer. He glanced at the clock over the bar. Two fourteen.

“I’m worried,” he said. “We were supposed be at Wal-Mart an hour ago. Trisha’s gonna kick my ass.”


Tad Tuleja is a folklorist who, fifty years later, is still trying to figure out Vietnam.


Like what we do? Be a Patreon supporter.

Rate this story:
 average 4.3 stars • 16 reader(s) rated this

BOUNDARIES • by DB Cox

0
0

It’s like a jungle in the clouds and there’s this fog — like rain, except it’s not raining. Everything is wet and tangled, and the angles of vision are slightly distorted. Walking point, I can hear sounds that come from somewhere in the past. Ghosts moaning in heartbreaking harmony.

***

When Drake Thomas opens his eyes, the traffic light is green, and the man in the car behind him is sitting on his horn. He waves an apology to the world and drives slowly through the intersection.

How long was he gone this time? He is disconnected — adrift in a netherworld of old times and new drugs. He knows he must find a way to shake this thing — uncover something tangible that he can depend on.

Everything he knows is falling away.

***

Drake has let things slide. “Squalid” might be the word to describe his living quarters. He has gone past the point of ordinary caretaking… housekeeping, basic hygiene, regular eating habits, sleeping — all things of the past.

When the phone rings in the bedroom, he makes no move to answer it. He doesn’t even glance in the direction of the sound. To him, a ringing phone means exactly nothing. Drake is worried — certain that someday soon he will wander into a realm of incoherence from which he will never return.

Nights are the worst. That’s when the voices come. They hover around his bed, whispering into his ear — angry and accusatory. They want to know why he has waited so long to pay a debt that’s long past due. Over and over they chant the same names — a mournful roll call of souls.

Icy fingers are starting to pull at his shirttail. He must get away from this place.

***

Drake stands at the end of his driveway and looks in both directions. He decides to head for the woods. The road is empty. Dead leaves blow in swirls across the asphalt. He sets out along the highway under a cloud-filtered sun.

A quarter-mile down, he leaves the blacktop, crosses over a drainage ditch, and onto a narrow trail that leads into the woods.

Drake walks until he reaches a dry creek bed. This is the spot where he usually turns for home, but today, he cannot will himself to start back toward that “house of waiting.”

He pushes on, losing track of time. Eventually, he comes upon a clearing divided by a barbed-wire fence. The fence runs the length of the clearing and disappears into the tree line. There’s a sign tacked to a rotting post that reads: “Cross At Your Own Risk.”

In the distance, he can see a narrow river that he’s never seen before. Something about this newly discovered river fills him with an excitement he hasn’t experienced for many years — a glimpse of something from the past.

Ignoring the warning sign, he pushes down the top strand of wire and steps over to the other side.

***

He walks along the edge of the river until he comes to a spot where he can see the rocky bottom. He steps in and wades across.

As soon as he reaches the other side, the wind picks up, and it begins to rain. With every step, he notices a dramatic change in the terrain. The trail begins to lead uphill. The short grass gives way to tangled masses of elephant grass. The foliage becomes lush — a deeper shade of green. The trees start to take on an exotic, tropical look. They grow so close together that they overlap and form a canopy that blocks out most of the light.

What is it about this place that seems so familiar? Everything. The look. The smell. The heavy air, making it almost impossible to breathe.

Drake feels more alive than he has in years — adrenaline rushing through his body — every muscle taut — every nerve on edge.

And suddenly, he knows where he is — Dong Ap Bia, “the mountain of the crouching beast,” a mythical spot in the jungle-covered highlands along the Laotian border of Vietnam. In the summer of 1969, a whole platoon had walked in — he was the only one to walk out.

A shiver tracks his spine. It’s right here — the unbroken line that cuts between nightmare and reality. He has to recall everything — exactly as it was then…

He is walking point, about a hundred meters in front of the platoon, when behind him, all hell breaks loose… trip flares, machine guns, AK-47s, RPGs. The jungle is lit up like midday. He can see the men trying desperately to find cover — disoriented — running directly into sheets of machine gun fire. He watches them drop like unstrung puppets — dead before they hit the ground. Should he go back and join the fight? Drake knows it would be suicide. So, he turns and starts to run. He runs and doesn’t look back. He runs as fast and as far as he can. He runs until he drops, out of breath, exhausted. Then he pushes himself to his feet and runs some more…

Now, Drake Thomas is back in the land of ancient legends and lethal apparitions — the ultimate truth seen only in dreams. He feels a horror tempered by a curious joy. He knows the hour he has waited for has arrived — retribution that is at once both poetic and cruel.

He is triumphant at last, here in this remote country, where his soul has lingered. He has returned to a world that exists outside normal boundaries and he is ready to pay the price.

Drake doesn’t see the shooter. He doesn’t hear the rifle that fires the fatal bullet that bores into his chest. Sergeant Drake Thomas is driven backward, into a sitting position, against the base of a tree. Enshrouded by the wind-driven rain, he drops his head to his chest and does not lift it again.


DB Cox is a Marine Corps veteran and blues musician/writer from South Carolina. His poems have been published extensively in the small press, in the US and abroad. He has published five books of poetry: Passing For Blue, Lowdown, Ordinary Sorrows, Night Watch, and Empty Frames.


Regular reader? We need your Patreon support.

Rate this story:
 average 4.1 stars • 19 reader(s) rated this

FINAL VISIT • by Amanda Barusch

0
0

“Your father loves you. He just doesn’t know how to show it.”

The screen door slammed and Dad’s boots pounded down the stairs.

Mom said he wasn’t himself since the war. I never met “himself” but I learned to take the measure of his rage; when to sneak away, when to tough it out.

Dad toughed it out plenty before I was born. Nineteen years old and newly married, he washed up on a far shore, rifle heavy like a grudge on his shoulder. He carried that gun all over the Korean Peninsula, but he never killed anyone.

That he knew of.

Just rabbits.

***

“Hey, Lucy. Where’d all the rabbits go?” he asks today, looking up from his wheelchair at the new aide.

She towers in front of the door with her arms crossed; legs in a wide military stance. She ignores him and tells me, “He’s not allowed to go out front and my name is not Lucy.”

I watch for Dad to erupt, but he just gives a sly grin.

“But we went out front last month,” I insist, my knuckles white on the wheelchair handles.

“That was before he fell. The man is 94 years old and he won’t stay in his wheelchair.” She widens her stance, hands on hips. I stare at her, expletives racing through my mind. She softens. “It’s for his own good.”

I should have known he had fallen, should have been there, should have visited every week like I promised. Chagrined, I retreat, making a wide U-turn. Then, while Dad nods asleep, I make for the back door.

Surely, he’s allowed in the garden.

***

I pause in the shade to admire a cluster of bright purple irises and the stillness wakes my dad. A loose magnolia petal resting on a juniper branch catches his eye, light cream with a fuchsia heart. He curls his back and stretches forward with a groan to pick it up.

“Huh. Feel that smooth.” He slips the petal into my hand. It’s warm with frayed brown edges.

As I hand it back, Dad says he wants fish and chips for lunch.

“Oh, no, Dad. It’s way down the block. Are you sure?”

He’s adamant.

I ease the wheelchair down a narrow path. It barely fits between the fence and the garbage bins. There’s a gate at the end that’s never locked. I speed up, hoping the aide doesn’t know about the gate.

We reach the sidewalk and, as usual, Dad wants out of the wheelchair. He rises, unsteady, gripping my arm.

His feet have forgotten how to walk. They still know how to dance, though, so we wobble down the sidewalk leaning in towards each other, forearms clutched. He steers and I walk backwards chanting, “One two cha cha cha.”

People try not to stare. When we finally reach the fish and chips place, Dad announces in high ringing tones, “You know the owner of this place is a Chinaman.”

“Dad, hush!” I sigh, grateful he didn’t say something worse from his army days.

A tall blond kid with a surfer tan opens the door.

“Hey, mate! Long time no see!” He escorts us to a table like we were royalty.

I ease Dad into a chair and he pats the kid’s arm. The surfer brings two cold beers. Dad takes a greedy gulp and smiles up at him.

“Fair dinkum!” he says.

“Fair dinkum!” the kid agrees.

Savoring my first sip, I lean back and ask my dad how he’s doing.

“Just hoping to pass inspection.”

***

Back at that place. Reeking of urine, Dad sinks into an empty wheelchair in the lobby. Veins pulse at his temples. He leans slowly to the left and stares drowsily at three white-haired women who are marching in place. An exercise video blares on the television and a perky girl in tights paces next to it counting, “One, two, three. That’s it. Keep moving, ladies!”

Behind us, a receptionist adds to the cacophony. She explains to a caller, who must be nearly deaf, “No, Ma’am. As I said before, there is no Mr. Rappaport in this facility.”

Dad mutters, “Fuck you, lady.” I’m not sure who he’s talking to but I have a burning desire to escape.

The aide marches towards us. She sniffs and commandeers the wheelchair. “I’m going to have to get him cleaned up now.” Before she can roll him away, Dad pats her hand, reaches into his shirt pocket, and gives her the ragged magnolia petal.

“Sweet Lucy, I’ll be leaving soon but here’s a little something to remember me by.”


Amanda Barusch completed an MFA in fiction and book arts at the University of Utah. She has worked as a janitor, an exotic dancer, a consumer advocate, and a professor. Her creative work appears in Crack the Spine, Every Day Fiction, Flashes of Brilliance, Stone Path Review, and elsewhere. Amanda divides her time between Utah and New Zealand, where she teaches at the University of Otago.


If you enjoyed this story, show your support on Patreon.

Rate this story:
 average 4.4 stars • 21 reader(s) rated this
Your Ad Could Be Here

DECOMMISSIONED • by C.L. Holland

0
0

From a distance the statue looks like a giant marine in full tac-armour, helmet on and faceplate engaged so you can’t tell gender. There’s a rifle, looks like a Xenon Mark Two, propped against one knee and they’re sat with head in hands and exhaustion etched in every line of their body.

I know that feeling. We all do, every damn one of us filing out of the carrier in civvies towards a future we never expected to see and mostly don’t want. It’s the same as being in service. We went where we were told then too.

Above us shuttles buzz back and forth like flies on a corpse. Tomorrow the gantry at the top will be just another stop for public transport but today the shuttles are just for us. We’re the first to see the thing unveiled, on our way to our new lives, before it opens to the public tomorrow. It’s supposed to be an honour, acknowledgement of the sacrifices we made in defence of Earth, and are still to make. Feels more like a kick in the teeth. No one gave a damn how tired we were during the war.

Up close the illusion starts to break down. The shape gets fuzzy, broken, and I can see the things the statue’s made out of. Pulse rifles, pistols, shock batons, pieces of tac-armour. Like the aftermath of a battle and my vision swims.

I lose a few minutes. When I come back to myself I’m on a bench and the line’s moved on so much I can’t see my place in it. The dark-skinned man next to me wordlessly holds out a bottle of water, watching the line pass.

“Thanks.” I drink, offer it back but he waves me off.

“You ready?” he asks.

“As I’ll ever be.” I don’t want to go, but it’s not like I can stay either. When they send you to war everyone expects you to come back the same, but no one does. It’s tough to watch people mourn you while you’re still alive. Kinder to everyone this way. At least, that’s what the brochure said.

He stands, and I realise he means to walk with me. When I stand the line opens a gap to let us back in. One of the things we’re good at is moving in formation.

The metal steps ring hollow as I climb. If I stare at my feet I don’t have to look at the art beside me, the mockery of a field of bodies. It’s hard not to. Eventually I work out if I look at the individual parts I stop seeing the scale of it. I mentally catalogue them as I go.

“Well fuck me.” I reach out without thinking, seeing a familiar cartoon scratched into the butt of a Mark Two. My fingers trace across my old service weapon before the line sweeps me on. My companion’s face shows he understands.

We climb the endless stairs. There’s a lift for those that can’t manage them but that’s not the point. It’s like they–the people who decided to turn our decommissioned weapons into a big damn statue–want us to face the enormity of the war. As if we weren’t in the thick of it. As if we had a choice about being there.

At the top the stairs open onto a long gantry, multiple shuttles parked along it for boarding. The shuttle at the far end departs and is replaced almost immediately by a new one.

From this height I can see the city stretched out below us. They’ve mostly fixed the damage but a couple of craters remain. I wonder how they’ll feel, seeing the statue every day. A constant reminder they still have to look at, even if they don’t have to look at us.

At the first available shuttle I give name, rank, and service number, and am handed a datapad. As I step inside I hear my companion give his. He sits in the seat beside mine, both of us silent. He browses the datapad. I stare out of the window.

Eventually the shuttle door slams shut and the pilot calls out for seatbelts. As the engines start to thrum I realise my companion hasn’t introduced himself, that he was waiting for me.

“Youniz.” I leave out rank because we’ve been encouraged to engage each other as civilians, but I’m certain there won’t be any officers on this shuttle with us.

“Garvey.” He shakes my offered hand, then gestures with the datapad in his other hand. “You read this?”

“The brochure? Seen it before.”

“Sounds like they pulled all the stops out. Swimming pool, gym facilities, therapists, cutting-edge medical treatment. Like a damn holiday camp.”

I shrug. “Makes them feel better if it doesn’t look like a prison.” Because none of us were coming back from it. Even if we stopped doing a threat assessment of every room we entered, even if the flashbacks and hyper-vigilance and night terrors stopped, the simple fact was we represented something they didn’t want to be reminded of.

“At least they’re not firing us into the sun,” Garvey quips.

“As far as you know,” I reply, and as the shuttle breaks orbit we sit in silence and wait.


C.L. Holland is a British science fiction and fantasy writer, and has been published in venues like Fantasy Magazine and Nature Futures. When not working or writing they can be found playing computer games and tabletop RPGs, or reading about history and folklore. They browses Twitter as @clhollandwriter, and their website is clholland.weebly.com.


If you enjoyed this story, show your support on Patreon.

Rate this story:
 average 4.5 stars • 16 reader(s) rated this
ad banner for E-books Done Right

MAD MICK • by Joseph D. Milosch

0
0

“The helplessness I felt when the bombs exploded, and mustard gas crept like ground fog into our trenches is hard to describe,” my Great-Uncle Leo said as we painted his barn red. After I dropped out of college, I became eligible for the draft, and I did odd jobs for him, such as whitewashing the front porch and sifting pebbles out of stream mud from his creek. My mother told me stories about the Dwyer family farm.

As a boy, Uncle Leo hated farm work and enlisted in the army at the beginning of the Great War. He swore that he’d never return to the farm. After the war, Leo came home hungry to work the land, surprising the entire family. The war changed him, but he refused to speak about it or leave the family farm. His brother ran the business, and Leo tended the crops and livestock. Perhaps he talked to me because I was neither a hawkish war junkie nor an anti-war advocate.

I liked him even though I knew about his post-war escapades. Those spring nights, he ran across freshly plowed fields. What phantoms did he chase, leaping over furrows with his pitchfork carried like a bayonet? At first, his wife, Aunt Iris, checked on him when he worked inside the barn. She dreaded coming across him hanging from the hay loft. The citizens of the small farming town he belonged to said the war made him crazy.

They laughed at him for not driving to town for business, church, or community picnics. When his children attended school, the students teased them by calling their dad the mad mick, an ethnic slur. These memories were still a source of pain for his daughter Martha. She and her husband recently took over the farm. They wanted him to retire, and when I received my draft notice, my family decided to throw me a going away party on the Saturday before my report date.

That day, the creak of the windmill broke the barn’s silence while he cleaned the tractor’s carburetor. I asked about his war. “Killing isn’t what you think it is,” he said softly like a cow mooing. “Living within the battlefield made us afraid. The trenches were always full of water two to five inches deep. It was amazing how fast the rats swam.” Pausing to reset a float, he said, “The hippies are right. War’s evil. Damn evil.” He meant it and knew what he meant.

Later, I joined the men sitting in wicker chairs. They shared a pint of Old Grandad and talked about Vietnam. Uncle Leo walked among the shadows of chestnut trees. His shoulders sloped forward as if he were pulling a heavy wagon. I went into the kitchen. There, women sat around the table peeling potatoes and shelling peas. The house smelled of rain. Out of the dishrack, I lifted a white mug. “Uncle wants a cup,” I said, pouring coffee from the Drip-O-Later.

After I repeated what Uncle said to me, his daughter, Martha, replied, “See, how the war affected his mind.” The cooking paused. A kettle boiled over. The following year, my great uncle died, and I thought how strange it was to survive the trenches of France, and in the end, a short trench became his grave. Still, they buried him on his farm, where he lived a shell-shocked life. Now, I am a survivor and ask who remembers the soldiers lying in graves with their shadows.


Joseph D. Milosch has four books of prose and poetry. A Walk with Breast Cancer was selected for a San Diego City Library Local Poet Award. His book Homeplate Was the Heart & Other Stories was nominated for the American Book Award and the Eric Hoffer, Best Small Press Publication award.


Help us keep the daily stories coming with Patreon.

Rate this story:
 average 4.5 stars • 4 reader(s) rated this
Viewing all 40 articles
Browse latest View live




Latest Images