just something i felt like posting up, to see what kind of feedback i could get here.

Of Myths and Men
By Chris D


Mornings take a while to get there, he’d learned. No matter what time he woke, it was always hours before the dawn. No matter how long he watched the kid there watching him, the morning would still far away once the kid left, and sleep would be the last thing imaginable.
If Randall Smith had taken the time to visit the doctor and tell the man about his dreams, then Randall would have been told it was just PTSD, nothing that serious that could not be handled with some medication and light therapy. Randall never asked his doctor.
Instead, he would awake every morning at just after four o’clock, a faint whimper on his lips at the moment he reached consciousness and what could be sweat or tears wet on his cheeks, him doing the best not to wake Gloria. Despite the effort she was aware of the dreams, though she never asked about them, what the truth behind the pleading grunts in his sleep was about. Something he could never speak aloud, not even to himself in solitude. When Randall would wake, trembling and covered with sweat not tears when that kid was there like a statue to a fallen war hero, watching him with deep dark eyes, when there was no mistaking the past with the present tense and that the kid would never leave the foot of the bed, he would close his eyes so tight not even tears could escape and he would walk out, not stumbling anymore because he had the path to the hallway memorized.
Since his retirement, he had an inordinate amount of free time that he greatly loved despite the boredom that would come over like a depression, a cloud of ether that would leave him staring into whatever space he found himself in front of. He had time enough since ending the career as an architect he was eternally proud of for reading, two newspapers a day and a new novel every three days. He had time for visiting his progeny and their progeny, enjoying every moment with his seven grandkids, the knowledge that sooner or later there’d be a whole new generation to his family was something he treasured. Randall was already fondly love and respected as the patriarch of a well-off family, a title he grew into with no hesitation. Church, family, community, his domain was large.
The pre-dawn awakenings would always leave him alone for some time before Gloria woke or before he’d anything pressing to take care of. He’d developed a routine that he used to keep himself sane. First, a shower to wash away the sweat of the dreams, then a cup of coffee and a cigar while reading the local paper on his enclosed porch with jazz playing softly on the radio and his old pup Bleu at his feet.
If there was one thing he could be proud of more than his career since the war and his family, it was him home. Built on the foundation of the very house he had been born in, the house that had burnt to the ground and taken his father to ash twenty years ago. The house was of his own design, based upon his memories of the childhood home but also an improvement. His father’s house had been one story, a cellar, and a small back porch. Randall’s had two stories, a larger glassed in back porch, nice new brick, and a two car garage. It was idyllic, but there were problems too. There was damage to the foundation, crumbling on the northern end. The pup Bleu hated the cellar. The dog was a coward, whining and whimpering whenever a storm blew through, choosing only those times to break his strict bathroom training. Only once had Randall taken the dog down there to try and force the foolishness out of him. The dog pissed all over himself and then promptly ran up the stairs, slipping on the linoleum in the kitchen, trailing urine out the dog door to the back porch. The cellar door always had to be closed to prevent a repeat performance. Neither Randall or Gloria were necessarily superstitious, but jokes about the cellar ghost as they called it were common between them and their children. Time to time Randall would be reading in the den with the dog at his feet when Gloria would get his attention with a soft sound, pointing at the dog whose head would be up, following something they could not see as it went from one door to the other, the dog trembling but luckily not pissing itself. They’d make a joke and giggle a bit, but they would never talk about who the ghost if there was one could be. There was only one death they knew about on the property.


After the early awakening, the daily routine that follows, and a breakfast of toast and eggs over-easy, Randall Smith had things to do, all of them revolving around Gloria, his wife of near thirty-five years. Another holiday had snuck up on him, like a hunter tracking the perfect buck, though streams, rivers, over hills and down valleys, always downwind and waiting for the perfect moment, a chance to get close enough for a respectful kill praying once the deed was done thanking the animal for its sacrifice. Valentine’s Day, the hunter of Randall, had sprung upon him from what seemed nowhere. Valentine’s Day, which was the most important of the holidays for Gloria, had been for close to four decades, though neither knew why for sure. Whenever Randall questioned this, Gloria would playfully slap him on the cheek.
And that is why he found himself in the greeting card aisle of the third drug store he had been to. This one, like the previous two, was barren, ravaged and picked to the bones leaving only the worst of the Valentine’s cards. Despite the lack of adequate choices, the aisle was full of scavengers like him, trying to find something amongst the scraps good enough for their mates. It was when Randall picked up a funny though wholly inappropriate card with a comic depiction of a polar bear that he felt the man standing there behind him, still smelling of cigars and liquor.
“Now, now, now, to what do I owe the pleasure of meeting you here, Randy?” the voice asked, the sound raspy but the delivery sweet, like the baritone singer of a soul group, the sound of it deep and chest rattling with years of smoke but with the practiced cadence and rhythm of a preacher.


Randall had known the Reverend Tom Ward for seven years. They had met through their visits to the Veteran’s Affairs Hospital. Randall went there to visit his friend Billy, who he had known since before Basic Training. Ward went there to save the souls of the men. He wasn’t a reverend, hadn’t been since he gave a Sunday sermon with a glass of Bourbon in hand, rambling about Judas Iscariot and the Yankees. He got perhaps five minutes into it before the shock wore off and the deacons took him back to his office and poured him another drink while his assistant minister or whatever they were called gave a talk on Judas that didn’t involve baseball. By the end of that talk some twenty minutes later the deacons had decided that Ward was no longer the Reverend for that church, a job he had done well for ten years. Ward had replaced one congregation with the shattered wrecks at the VA.
Billy came out of the war without the use of his legs, the result of a Jeep accident on a Vietnamese road that was barely a donkey tail. He was driving with a couple of grunts to relieve a couple other grunts when the front right tire hit a mine sending the whole side of the Jeep in the air, throwing the grunts out but coming down on Billy shattering his spine and leaving him in the VA. His pre-war fiancé was gone after two post-war visits to become grandmother to a bunch of screaming brats. Billy took the money he received from the government and became a wheelchair intellectual, learning theories and philosophies that seemed at first as foreign as Chinese. The chance to learn such things was novel and he took every chance to bore and annoy and teach his fellow cripples, addicts, hypercondriactes, terminal cases, and all the other fine folks who wound up in the VA. Billy had been spending more time there the more time separated him and the war, some thirty plus years leaving him weak and rich from inheritance and the VA hospital’s resident professor of that motherfucker, Life.
During the time Billy was a grunt, Randall had been killing people on a regular basis, each death from a distance of at least thirty yards. Through the scope of his hand made rifle, he would find those individuals his superiors told him to kill, some they didn’t, and paint the jungle green a nice gray and red. They’d give him nice little fictitious back stories on each official target. General Such-and-such was fond of pre-pubescent girls, Captain Blah-Blah was a legendary rapist, Lieutenant Whatever liked to eat kittens with a cup of tea every morning. Being a good, Christian boy, Randall would take every shot he was supposed to, for God and country.


“Hey there, Ward. How’re you doing?” Randall asked with a tone that didn’t hide the reluctance, though Ward didn’t seem to notice.
“Oh, I’m doing pretty well. As well as the good ol’ Lord will let me be,” he said in that same manner he always does when he starts about the Lord, a quiet tone comes over his voice and he gets this distant, glassy look in his eyes. That’s just the beginning. When he really gets going, that’s something different. “Now tell me this,” he said, breaking out of his momentary meditation, “what brings a man like you, Randy, to a place like this? I mean, really, the greeting card aisle?”
“Why do you have to be an ass? It’s Valentine’s Day, and I’m just trying to get a card for my wife. I don’t get a decent one for her, she’ll have my balls.”
“If you don’t mind me saying, it seems she’s already got them,” he joked with a sick smile. The desire to hit the man was strong, a quick punch to the throat to silence the whiskey preacher, but Randall choked it down with the rest of his emotions, no love or hate at the moment.
“If you don’t mind, I’ve got some more stores to hit, the picking are slim here.” He held up a particularly garish card to emphasize his point. Randall took a quick glimpse at his wristwatch as another means to display his impatience, but Ward still didn’t notice. When he looked up to see the distant glaze in Ward’s eyes he saw the black deep dark of that kid, standing there at the elbow of the Reverend.
“I can’t just sit here, Randy, I can’t just watch this heresy and not say anything. The man who allows blasphemy is just as responsible as the man who commits it.” The quiet had left his voice, which had risen in volume to the point that the rest of the scavengers had noticed, were looking over with eyes hungry for the disaster that was assured to happen. The kid kept staring.
“Blasphemy? Come on, Ward, I need to go.”
“You and all these people, I can’t sit and watch the sin without saying something.” The kid was still there as he had been for decades.
“It’s just a holiday man, just something the greeting card companies thought up.”
“It is not ‘just a holiday.’ Valentine’s Day is based on the festival of Lupercalia, meant to pay homage to the gods Lupercus and Faunus and the two mutts Remus and Romulus, who supposedly founded Rome. Roman men would randomly pick the name of some girl and they’d be their sex buddy for the year. That sound Christian to you?” he asked to an older woman, about sixty, whose mouth was left open by the foul smelling Ward who had come close and put his arm around her, the disgust plastered across her face rather funny. “They’d pick a name from a hat and f*** each other. Is that something to honor the Lord by remembering? Damn near all the holidays we practice today are from these same heretic roots.
“We’ve taken this heathen orgy and replaced it with some bullshit martyr’s story, some saint they thought up to replace Faunus and Lupercus to build a Christian holiday on top of the blasphemy, dressed it up with dinner and flowers and candy and frilly card’s with poems that would make Emily Dickenson want to eat a bullet, and we’ve got ourselves some bullshit covered with bullshit that you all are laying your money for, tributes on the shrine of heresy.”
The kid was standing still, stoic, close to Ward’s side. No one saw him not even when he finally moved his arm out stretched and pointing a small finger at the soul of Randall Smith his thin lips open silently mouthing words from a foreign tongue dark eyes disrupted with a flash of fear and hatred and his head jerked back like it was grabbed by an unseen hand the kid’s neck exposed while the other phantom hand slices across the wound open a second mouth screaming blood pouring out down his body and covering the floor and Randall looked down to his hands and saw the blood still there after forty years sticky and warm the knife still there glistening in the light the Drug store gone and he’s outside that village back in Vietnam the NKG leader dead from a sniper shot at fifty yards and Randall’s position is compromised and the Vietcong combing the jungle looking for the motherfucker who did this and oh when they find him such fun and Randall’s taken flight the rifle on his back his gilly suit covered in leaves and the flora of the jungle his face camouflaged with greasepaint and when he comes by the kid six years old it looks walking through the forest from the river with buckets of water Randall’s a monster the evil of the jungle the kid starts to scream the NKG is too close the kid’s screaming will bring them here until Randall cuts it off grabbing his hair with one hand slicing quickly with the other then buries the blade in mother’s breast to the hilt and a quick radio for EVAC and then running five kilometers through the jungle the NKG screaming curses Randall can barely hear over the pounding of his pulse pumping adrenaline through his body shots in anger ripping through the sky the beloved pedophile leader dead brains painting the ground and his young lover and Smith just barely gets to the EVAC zone lets off the red smoke to indicate a minute later the chopper gets there the pilot and gunner smiling and laughing and that motherfucker is one bad ass mother f***er they take him back to the base where his veins full of amber to replace the adrenaline and forty odd years pass just like that, Gloria, Billy, Tom Ward, three kids seven grandkids and entire career ain’t nothing but the heroin talking Baby sometimes you’ve got to do sh** you don’t want to it’s them or you and you don’t have to feel bad you had to you had to and when Randall tried he couldn’t confess to the Priest whose face he couldn’t see but whose heavy breathing was so close Randall’s lips couldn’t form the right words the cries and screams and he could never speak of them that would crack and break apart what he’d built and what he’d accomplished and it’s the past what’s done is done what would Gloria think God what would she think?
Randall pushed past Ward, past the kid, leaving the Drug store as fast as he could. It wasn’t until he made it to his car with his cheeks sopping wet he felt what he thought was the blade still in his hand not buried in that woman’s breast still there. He threw it down on the passenger seat and he saw it wasn’t the blade it was that garish, ugly card with its bullshit pair of rhyming couplets. It wasn’t good enough, not for Gloria, but as he tried to wipe away the tears he knew it’d work. It’d have to do.