The day I learned you once lived in the jungle, I was in your knee-wall attic, looking for envelopes of negatives your wife had asked me to find. “It should say BABY’S FIRST CHRISTMAS,” she hollered from the den, as if such a request would prove easy, should prove easy. As I sorted through towers of cardboard storage boxes, most neither dated nor labeled, I wondered when the last time was that she was up here. Or you. “I don’t see a box with that year, Aunt Audrey.” Though I didn’t hear her respond, I kept opening boxes, rifling through contents for negatives. I found Christmas tree lights. Christmas ornaments. A tree-topper. An envelope. Full of photos. No negatives. Then you. A picture of you. A much younger you. Sand in your hair. Sunscreen on your face. A tricolored beach ball in hand. Your wife next to you. My mother on the other side. A rippling, clear-blue ocean as background. What fun you must’ve had without me. Before me. I felt something stuck to the back of the photo. I turned the picture over, revealing another. You again. An even younger you, though. In olive green. A necklaced ball chain on what must’ve held your dog tags visible. US ARMY above your left patch pocket. Other young men beside you. Also uniformed. Also smile-less. Jungle as background. As green as your camos. Patterned like them, too. As I studied the photo, something else in the box caught my eye: on what looked like a small, framed diploma, George Washington’s profile gleamed—gold in color, enclosed in a heart-shaped medal; ribboned with purple; above printed text: TO PRIVATE FIRST CLASS MACKENZIE H. AMBROSE, UNITED STATES ARMY FOR WOUNDS RECEIVED IN ACTION. Below the citation, wrapped in yellowed newspaper, was your Purple Heart, mounted in a presentation case. As I gently pulled back the crumpled newsprint, fingered grainy images of B-52s, anti-aircraft guns, and aerial maps, I read the front-page headline: CHRISTMAS BOMBING: NIXON ORDERS OPERATION LINEBACKER. Now I could see the whole picture. Now things started to make sense: your laconic responses, your gruff demeanor, your hearing loss, your refusal to dine at Vietnamese-American restaurants. With your Purple Heart in my hands, I grew somewhat resentful at your wife and my mother. Why hadn’t they told me? Didn’t they trust me? Yes, I was still a freshman, as much the activist against Bush’s War as those against Johnson’s and Nixon’s. But I wouldn’t have said anything. I wouldn’t have asked you about what you saw, heard, or smelled. I knew better. So enwrapped in my own thoughts was I that I did not hear your wife calling me from below. Only when I felt the vibrations of your heavy footsteps on the stairs did I scramble, quickly but carefully putting back your pictures, citation, and medal, closing the lid to the box and shoving it behind the others. As you opened the door to the attic, I tried not to glance at your secrets, now boxed together again, letting on that I was snooping. “Have you found the negatives yet?” you asked, standing inside the doorway. I frowned and shook my head. Not the ones that you mean, uncle.
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Photo by Sixteen Miles Out on Unsplash Heavy folds of Sherpa blanket sag down her arm, cold air rushing into the pocket of warmth. Watching the ripples of her breath gently crash through ginger and lemon tea, she hopes the draping makes her look like Meg Ryan in Sleepless in Seattle. Maybe Sandra Bullock in Practical Magic. It doesn’t. No kind wind pushing hair back. No full moon to gaze at. Snow hits the window, at least. But no drifting flakes. Just a frenzied swarm of tiny shards. The caretaker commented on the luck yesterday. That burying someone during the warm before the storm was easier than cutting deep into frozen ground. Maybe he didn’t think the young woman running her pale hand against glossy dark casket again--wishing the surface wasn’t so smooth, wanting a splinter or rough patch but feeling nothing but slippery varnish--could hear him. Fair enough. Most would be preoccupied after screaming, yelling sharp words that cut jagged lines in the throat. Words not spoken ten years ago, but left to molder, infecting the mouth. The heart. Finally spewed out over the corpse of a mother. Hoping the venom might pierce the armor of the pressed suit of a father. Hands and fingers aching for something to break against, yearning to feel something other than polished walnut. Settling for mangling a business card offered with soft words, words that would probably work on another woman, other children that weren’t left with rot in their bodies. But the slick card felt too smooth against trembling hands, too much like the coffin. She pulls the torn fragments from her pocket now, the blanket gaping further, her chest more vulnerable to cold. Tea and honey having soothed, the empty cup is set down slowly enough to not sound against a desk. The puzzle of a torn phone number is carefully solved with fingertips skimming the surname she abandoned. She remembers a gift given over a decade ago. Carefully chosen green and blue stripes, the favorite colors of father and daughter matching against each other. The same pattern seen on an old faded tie yesterday. A tie too old and cheap to match well with a fancy suit. But worn anyway. One hand gathers lumpy blanket closed around a shivering chest. The other hand carefully consults a torn number and raises a phone. Two rings, and then an answer.
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