ENTRY WOUNDS A Collection of Short Stories by Bobby Mitchell A thesis submitted to Johns Hopkins University in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Masters of Fine Arts. Baltimore, Maryland May, 2015 Abstract A collection of short fiction with an emphasis on the war in Afghanistan and it's effects. ii Contents Homecoming – 2 Entry Wounds – 5 Can You Just Tell Me Something? – 13 The Father’s Love – 37 Parabolic Path – 43 This War Will Find You – 55 The Comet – 58 I Could Tell You Any Number of Things – 82 Tinseltown – 88 iii Homecoming We came home in caskets. We came home in airplanes. We came home missing pieces of ourselves. We came home whole. We came home to our sons and daughters waving index-card- sized American flags stapled to dowel rods on the landing strip. We came home to empty parking lots at two in the morning, piling out of the bed of a Dodge Ram. Who needs a drink? I’m buying. We came home to the smell of another man in our bedroom, to his name on our children’s lips. Uncle Johnny bought this for me. We came home to empty homes, to sets of keys resting on hand written notes on dining room tables. We came home to loving wives who’d waited eighteen months without the tenderness of touch, who wore lingerie under summer dresses and sprinted in flip flops as fast they could but not fast enough to wrap their legs around our waists before the tears came. We came home loved. We came home to psychologists, to their endless evaluations. Did you see anything that disturbed you? How have you been sleeping? We came home to mothers wearing Army Mom sweatshirts, sporting gray streaks in their hair and who shook antacids from bottles into their hands at all hours. We came home to little brothers who’d enlisted and little sisters who got engaged to Marines. We came home to discount haircuts and the handshakes of strangers whenever we left the base in our uniform. We came home to fathers who didn’t recognize us. We came home to fathers who recognized the new weight in our faces and the movements of our hands and who knew if we lived to be their age that weight and those movements would still be there. At home, we tried to fit in. We tried to adjust to the sun after being nocturnal for so long. We tried to get used to grass after so long with only dirt and dust and sand as far as we could see. We tried not to panic when we stood up from dining room tables and there was no rifle sling 1 hooked around our boot, no pistol holstered at our side. We apologized for swearing so much. We apologized for nothing. We sat silence so long that when we wanted to speak the people we needed to hear us were gone. We found new religions. We held onto old ones. We went into churches and held our arms high over our head and closed our eyes and sang as loud as we could about a God who still loved us anyway. We stood silent at Parade Rest while people around us sang and waited to feel something. We believed because we needed to believe. We lost our faith, too. We couldn’t see it any more, not in this new light, not in a world where suffering and sin and judgment were no longer abstractions. We threw ourselves into books. We read philosophers. We read fiction. We watched television shows about aliens who made us in their image and left and we thought there was some sense to that, too. Sleeping was difficult, but we found ways. We drank. We drank beers by the six pack, stacking cans into the shapes of our FOBs and our gun turrets and the compounds we’d fast- roped down onto. We drank liquor until our lips went numb and our eyes closed and when we woke up before the sunlight we laced our Nike’s and did laps on Long Street. We had dreams of faces. We had dreams of body parts. We had dreams of wounds that we could never close. We had dreams of Sergeant Matthers, draped across our shoulders, and of Chinooks in the distance that would carry him to the medics, but our boots grew into the ground and our bodies became trees and our limbs and branches grew all around the friend that could never be brought back. We reenlisted. We volunteered for missions, for our first chance to go back. I can’t take being in garrison another day, Top. We got out. We got medical discharges and paychecks in the mail for the rest of our lives. Staff Sergeant Rodriguez, this panel has determined that you are ninety percent disabled. This entitles you to a number of benefits. We carried our limps and scars 2 and half-limbs into corporate offices and were trained to make spreadsheets and word documents and became fascinated by the idea of white space, of the potential in things yet to be filled. We went to colleges. We took courses with children who were only four years younger than us but who moved and spoke in ways we couldn’t make sense of. We graduated with honors. We failed every class. We argued with professors. We ate in their homes. We got married. We found women and men who would love us. We found the ones who asked the right questions. We found the ones that didn’t ask anything. We found the ones who wanted excitement, the rush of a wild life. We found the ones who wanted quiet. We spoke softly to them in the middle of the night. Do you think any of this is real? We woke up from memories and pressed ourselves on top of them until they choked and screamed because we wanted to keep them safe. Stay down! They’re still firing. We drank with them. They watched us drink. We made them cry, and they did the same to us. We got divorced. We stayed single. We played the field. We lived in our basements. We called hotlines. We called our war buddies. You have reached Adam Carter. Please leave a message after the beep. 3 Entry Wounds The tough box had wheels, rubberized, thick and ideal for dragging through gravel and sand. On special order at the hardware store on Skibo, thirteen of them, the black ones, hard, reinforced plastic with telescoping handles and wheels for a Psychological Operations detachment pushing out in May of ’08, slated to makes their home in Afghanistan for the next year. You’re going to want tough boxes when you get over here, that’s what the detachment in country had told the outbound soldiers, you’re going to want them when you have to lug your gear all over this goddamn country. So they get the tough boxes, this outbound detachment, load them up in the back of a couple pickups and drive them back on to Fort Bragg, doing 70 on All American Freeway with the boxes sliding and slapping in the back so hard they damn near lose one, knocked around so bad this one’s got a nice scuff across the lid before it even gets unloaded in the grass behind Alpha Company Headquarters. The tough boxes are getting hoot-and-hollered over by the soldiers, all except this tough box, the one that’s all scuffed up, all except this soldier, the one who reclassed to Psychological Operations, a non-combat occupation, after he quit during phase two of the Special Forces training pipeline. He gets stuck with the scuffed box because, the rest of the detachment, they aren’t too keen on this guy on account of his history. They make a night of it, a few cases of Yuengling from the Class VI and stencils and spray paint borrowed from Supply. The soldiers get good and shitty while they put their name, rank, and social on their boxes, fat block lettering in yellow that drips and bubbles on the hard black plastic. When they talk about what they’ll pack in the tough boxes, they really talk about 4 what they’ll leave behind. X-Boxes. Whiskey. Dogs. Wives. They talk about the things they’ll need to survive over there. Spare boots. Kevlar. Bibles. Socks. My box, a couple of the soldiers say, like the spray paint makes it true, like the name on the box makes it that way. The scuffed box says DAVIS now, DAVIS ANDREW J. SGT 3380, and it gets loaded in the bed of a silver Dodge and driven to Eagle Point Apartments and dragged up three flights of stairs before the first thing goes in. Three months Davis has lived here, since the lease went up at Cross Creek and his roommate got stationed at Fort Carson. Barely out of the boxes, but the battalion will help him break this new lease and set his bed up in storage. Davis packs a poncho liner and a pair of boots into the tough box before racking out on the couch for the night. The tough boxes get packed three days before the deployment. Mostly this is standard issue, a laundry list of clothes and gear, nonnegotiable and well defined, twelve pairs socks, green, rolled. Ten shirts, khaki, in Ziploc bags. Seven magazines, not loaded. There’s room enough for personal effects, for deviation.