she came inside. John stayed outside, watching the rain. “Are you seeing what I’m seeing?” he heard Bobby ask his mother from in the house. Bobby pointed to a rapidly spreading dark spot on the kitchen ceiling. “I can,” John murmured, looking out at the falling rain but seeing something else. Neither Bobby nor his mother heard him, as they hunted for a pot to catch the drops from the leaking roof. Early the next morning, Bobby left for basic training. hree months later, he was deployed to war-ravaged Vietnam. His letters came infrequently enough during training, then even more so after he left the country.
“I worry about him. You’re not there to watch out for him anymore,” their mother told John. “I wish I knew how he was doing right now.” John didn’t look at her. He had a slight frown on his face as he stared straight ahead into space. “Doing ine,” he told his mother. With a sigh, he blinked and inally faced her. “He’s doing ine,” he said, and smiled. Some things are harder to take than others. On a nerve-wracking march through the bush (and whose brilliant idea had that been, a night march?), the jungle is so black, each soldier keeps a hand on the pack of the man in front of him. When they were younger, John always asked to have the door to their room open a little to let in the light from the kitchen. John didn’t mind the dark, but he knew Bobby did. Sitting on his porch, an unread book open on his lap, John can just make out Bobby’s hand clutching the pack strap of the soldier in front of him. Instead of cooking smells from the kitchen, John has the wet, heavy stench of the jungle in his nostrils. Stumbling on the knotted roots of trees he doesn’t know the names for, Bobby looks past the porch railing at their Kentucky neighborhood. Instead of the low-level, constant fear, punctuated by spikes of panic, he feels safe in the arc of lamplight coming from the open door to the house. When the march is inally over, they slip back into themselves. John feels the tinge of Bobby’s panic, every time, and he knows he’ll have to return to protect him. He never leaves him alone in Vietnam for too long. Rattle of machine guns and the taste of red dust. John sits on the whitewashed porch, his bad leg, twisted since birth, outstretched on a stool in front of him, his mind in Vietnam. Bobby crouches in a hastily-dug foxhole in the tall grasses of Vietnam, his mind in Kentucky. Brothers can’t be separated. As long as they are together, everything is somehow better: this is the right way of things.
Stephanie Ricker is from Cary, NC. Her previous publications include an honors thesis on Tolkien, mythology, and naming in the 2009 issue of Explorations: The Journal of Undergraduate Research and Creative Activity for the State of North Carolina. In 2008, her short stories, “Life of the Effervescent” and “Sharps,” won irst and third place, respectively, in The Lyricist, Campbell University’s annual literary publication. She was nominated for and accepted the position of editor for The Lyricist the following year, and that issue won irst place in the 2009 American Scholastic Press Association Contest.