The four veterans arrive last at my grandfather's wake. Grandma sends them to the kitchenette.
"They smell like death," she says. As if death isn't already laid out in state on the living room table.
I find the old marines sitting in silence. With watery, timorous eyes, they drink beer from Grandpa's secret stash. They all fought on the "Mircea" destroyer during World War II.
I open the last beer.
"For Grandpa!"
We raise our bottles.
"Do you know how we got torpedoed in '43?" asks one.
Like Grandpa, he changes the number of dead. Survivors are constantly five.
About the Creator
Alina Z
Alina likes psychological thrillers that happen up there, on the orbit. She lives in South California, loves to read and prefers writing in third limited.
Reaching Out
I promise her. I'd do anything for her. She's my mom. Even as Lanie and Deanna are flying home, Mom is scrappy fighting dying. She lays too still in that too-big bed with all the toasty white hospital blankets, in the south tower, at the broad end of a long slow-turning corner that delivers me again to her private room with the view she can't see through, with the beeping that tells us nothing new, and all these ice chips she can't swallow, and a flood of well-intentioned nurses who cannot do a damned thing all the same.
By Christy Munson4 days ago in Fiction
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