Some days, he can forget the invading sight, but most days he is kept inside by the image of a face falling from a body, charred and buckling under an invisible, hot, collapsing weight. He is accustomed to the recurrence of this mental movie, doesn’t get squeamish anymore. He watches it over and over, like he did when he first came home two years ago, but now he doesn’t flinch. And he doesn’t think about how, a week after the body was sent away, his commander sent him home. The moon was waxing then. It was night and the company lights were dim. Stanley sat cross-legged on the dirt road of the camp excavating something with his fingers. He felt like an archeologist but without a tiny trowel or feathery brushes or wide-brimmed hat. His commander pulled up next to him in a company truck. Stanley looked at his watch, etched the time into the earth. The commander spoke his name. Stanley stayed seated, as if he were deaf. He felt the tangentiality of everything that was measurable, recordable, reproduceable. Everything that wasn’t the small, charred body. He drew spirals into the ground, wondered at the tragic anthropology of human existence, felt the uselessness of everyone. His mourning was unconventional. The commander called his name again, Stanley, but he didn’t look up. He scratched at the dirt. He wanted something to stop the small body from collapsing again and again, a moving picture loop, in his mind.

The commander summoned the psychevac. They gathered Stanley by his elbows and guided him into the truck’s backseat. The commander drove him to the hangar and put him on a plane to another world, his old world but different. He became a specimen for blue-gloved researchers, etched with bias and bereft of intuition. They measured his grief against their own pleasures, grounded their interpretations in social determinants that they named, and charted yet another soon-to-be-replaced soldier with codes and assurances. Then they released him to live in a one-bedroom flat with wafer-thin walls. No trees nearby, only a dollar store and gas station grocery. That’s where he is now, standing on the porch, the memory still for a moment. Crickets chirp under the waning moon. The air smells undeniably purple, a confluence of spring rain and lilacs, small, and Stanley, a forgotten illness in a cruel land, steps heavy onto the broken sidewalk.

Bio: Deanna Benjamin