DIRTY COPPER PENNY
BY J. HUNTER
A familiar compulsion takes over my body. As my muscles react to what I believe to be an immediate threat, the blinding white light seizes me …
In an instant I’m dead. Then every nerve in me tells me otherwise.
As my sight begins to come back, I can feel tears streaming down my face. It almost feels like ash is burning my eyes, but not.
I’m in shock! Or at least what a teenage child who’s now sitting next to his dead best friend would then consider a form of shock to be.
Confused & paralyzed. I can only sit there. Smelling the charred remains of the single shell. Waiting for my sight to return.
Tasting the new flavor of what I could then only describe as a dirty copper penny.
Knowing now, that it was from the excessive amount of blood I was covered in.
Fast-forward about thirty years & a young child now has become a battle-hardened, self-educated father of two. A man with many regrettable decisions.
Yet I can say that my boys, Damon & Russell, are the one absolute and undeniable perfection in this life!
Even as I wake in a cage of my own creation, their love is what presses me forward. Allows me to continue on through a nightmare, which started when I was a child. So that they may never have to feel such pain or fear imaginary beasts.
For while the world outside busses on, without a second thought to my demons, or me I’m able to now deal with them — to try & shake their grip. | JH