a Short Story By S. Vincent Anthony
The attic smelled of dust and forgotten regrets, a tomb for relics of a life unlived. Harlan Voss slumped in the sagging armchair, his fingers tracing the cold barrel of the old service revolver, a memento from Vietnam’s blood-soaked jungles. At 77, his body was a ruin—scarred flesh from shrapnel, joints that screamed with every move, eyes hollowed by nights where sleep was a traitor. The VA papers called it PTSD, but Harlan knew better: it was the war’s venom, coursing through him since 1969, poisoning every breath, every glance in the mirror.
He’d come home to cheers that faded like smoke, a hero on paper but a ghost in his own skin. The first marriage crumbled under the weight of his silences. Emily, with her bright eyes and hopeful smile, couldn’t pierce the fog of his nightmares. He’d wake screaming, fists clenched against phantoms, and she’d flinch, then cry, then leave. “You’re not here, Harlan,” she’d whispered on that rainy night in ’72, packing her bags while he stared at the wall, Malone’s dying gasp echoing in his ears. Their son, Jacob, was two then—too young to remember the father who vanished into bottles and brawls.
The second try was with Linda, a nurse who thought she could heal him. She lasted longer, five years of tiptoeing around his rages, his absences. They had a daughter, Mia, whose laughter once cut through the static in his mind like sunlight. But the war won. One night, after a firecracker sent him diving under the kitchen table, shattering plates and trust, Linda took Mia and fled. “You scare us, Harlan,” her note read. “We can’t live with your ghosts.” He sent checks when he could, from odd jobs that never stuck—mechanic, trucker, night watchman—but the letters stopped coming. Jacob and Mia grew up strangers to him, faces in faded photos, voices he imagined in the wind.
Now, in the attic of a rented room in some forgotten Indiana town, Harlan sifted through the fragments: a Purple Heart, yellowed divorce papers, birthday cards returned unopened. Jacob was 55 now, a lawyer in Chicago, with kids of his own—grandchildren Harlan had never met. Mia, 48, an artist in Seattle, her work splashed across galleries he’d never visit. They didn’t know him, not the man before the war, the boy who dreamed of farms and family. They knew only the shadow, the absentee etched in their mothers’ warnings: “Your father’s broken, don’t go looking.”
The revolver felt heavy, familiar. Outside, dusk bled into night, stars pricking the sky like distant mortar fire. Harlan closed his eyes, and the jungle rushed back—Hue’s streets slick with rain and blood, the crack of AKs, the wet thud of bodies. Malone, 19, gut-shot and begging for his ma. Reese, laughing madly as his leg turned to pulp. Harlan had carried them out, but who carried him? The war had hollowed him, left a shell that echoed with their screams.
He thought of Jacob and Mia one last time, strangers bound by blood he’d tainted. No note—he had no words left. The shot echoed through the empty house, a final fracture in the silence. Downstairs, the landlady would find him in the morning, another veteran statistic, his story buried with him. Jacob and Mia would hear from a lawyer, inherit nothing but questions, and wonder briefly about the man they never knew, the one the war had claimed long before the bullet.
A Collection of Short Stories