Three Short Stories
by Terry Brinkman

 

 

It Was the Worst of Times

No, not even the close to the best of times; during the Vietnam conflict I was going to a working-class high-school in Utah, Granite High. Almost every day we had announcements about one of our former classmates who were missing in action or had died. We had a prayer bulletin-board with the missing-in-action and dead where we could meditate or pray for them. We did have a free pilot’s class I was attending, until one of my friends, that was in the class with me in the previous year, was shot down and missing in action. One of my girlfriends was wearing a bracelet with his name. There were bracelets you could wear with the missing-in-action name on them until they were recovered, to help pay for the war, like Uncle Sam selling Savings Bonds. I digress.. Needless to say I quit the Pilot’s class, it was like pulling teeth to get out of it.

The War with Iran, is like a bad B movie, hard to follow the plot; if there is one. Seems we are bombing the HELL out of Iran; with no thought of next year, next Decade, next Century. The END is near; Armageddon is being thrown around like confetti on New Years Eve in New York City. Gasoline, and inflation is up; the Stock-Market is down. Let’s all hold on to our shorts; and pray for Peace with Pope Gregeory.

 

 

 

A Thousand Years

It was 1972 or maybe 1973. I was driving home after visiting Dan. I was taking a special bottle of wine I got him at Yellowstone National Park. Back then before Jimmy Carter’s Presidency, the national age limit for buying Alcohol was Eighteen, in many states age was Twenty-One; so, in a national park you could buy wine at Eighteen.

I was driving south on Nine-Hundred East, around Eleven P.M. I remember a Bright light and whirling noise. Then I woke up in my cabin in Old Faithful Lodge, Yellowstone National Park. What? I was already here; as the day went on it was, Déjà vu. I think I was picked up by a U.F.O. and then brought be back one day too soon.  The next night when I left Dan’s I went back home a different way; I went North on Nine-Hundred East to thirty-Nine South then turned east.    

That happened more than fifty years ago, every so often I get flash-backs. Flash-backs of being all over the universe different planets and even different galaxies. I feel like the U.F.O. procreators kept me over one thousand years and brought me back one day early.  

 

 

 

Remember When

Vietnam Prisoner of War Spa; in the distance hearing voices you can’t understand screaming and crying you recognize and remember too well (soon it will be me again).

Eating food that has passed good weeks ago, leaving it on the floor hoping bugs will go on it so I can eat the bugs, problem being they are from nightmare theater, green monster looking bugs. I close my eyes and chomp on them. They taste bad but some improvement on the moldy gruel.  

Sleeping in a room so small you can’t sleep straight only with legs bent. Some fool in the room next to you keeps tapping Morse Code on the floor; my head is throbbing so bad I wish they would stop! This place smells so bad like a mature woman’s way past due needing a cleaning. So hot and mildew if you don’t keep moving the mold starts growing on myself.

Time outside bare-footed gravel so sharp cutting my feet, makes me cry.

 

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