The Return

The soldier’s boots kicked up small clouds of dust as they crunched down the clay gravel surface of the road. Threads had long since succumbed to the stress of friction leaving the right sole flapping with each step taken.

With a grimace, the soldier glanced toward the sun shining unmercifully toward him, and once again wiped the sweat from his forehead with a dirty shirtsleeve. He was almost home. He unconsciously favored his left leg as he traveled forward. Pain brought vague recollections of the time spent recovering in the prisoner of war camp from the injury caused by a mortar explosion. Reaching into his pocket, he withdrew a tattered blood stained piece of paper. Carefully unfolding the letter to keep the worn edges from disintegrating, he read the faded handwriting, "Your daughter was born today." Most of the letter was faded away leaving only that phrase. It did not matter though; he knew every unreadable word by heart. The letter, vigilantly hidden from his captors, was his only surviving possession from his past.

Familiar sights began stirring memories of another life. A life relived moment by moment in his mind as he survived each day in the camp. Now years later he was free. Free to return to his wife, the only reason he was still alive after all these years. Each time he had been ready to give up, he would retreat deep into his memory and exist there until the torture disappeared and only the tranquil past remained.

As a well-known bend in the road appeared, he began to run. Around that bend was the house. He was home. The journey was mercifully over.

His feet slowed first to a walk and then a dead stop. He could see the front porch with the old swing he had sat in with his wife on long ago summer nights. The unforgettable sound of chains creaking reached his ears. She was sitting in the swing, beautiful, exactly as he had remembered her. She had not aged at all. The vision was interrupted as he noticed a man beside her. As he watched she lifted her face to the man and smiled as he kissed her. "No," he cried, and hot pain flooded his chest. Flashes of the years in the camp came to his mind as he fell to the ground. "I could have died years ago and avoided all the pain", he whispered.

The woman turned when she heard him cry out and rushed to his side as he fell. He was dead before she knelt beside him. The well-known squeak and then bang of the screen door drew the woman’s gaze to the house and the older woman hurrying across the grass, wiping her hands on the hem of her apron. Her mother gasped when she saw the soldier and fell to her knees beside him. "No, not after all those of years waiting for you to come home."