Mainly Fiction, Partly Fact

These stories that he tells to these kids (who think that his words are merely history book fodder, not an actual life that he has lived) help him to relive those temporal snapshots. He likes recounting stories from the war, talking about Frankie and Johnny and all those good old boys alongside which he fought. He remembers chasing after those dames who tried so hard to look like Ingrid Bergman and June Haver, with their lips red like cherries and their skin as pure as silk. He remembers when curvaceous, full-bodied women were more attractive than thin, ghastly-looking girls (he still doesn't really understand this cockamamie trend). He remembers working in the lumber yard when he had returned home from Germany and how hard he had to try to forget the horrors he saw as they infiltrated Buchenwald. He saw the wretched faces and mangled, skeletal wires that were once breathing, living bodies as he tied up those chopped and sheared logs, once living trees. He remembers wondering why they had waited so long to do anything about it; how many could they have saved if they had acted upon it at first knowledge?

But his life went on, as it usually does, and he remembers falling in love with his wife. Well, back then, it was more convenience than love, but it ended up being love as time went on. He's not sure when that exact moment was or when he finally saw her as his soulmate, but he knows that it happened. He figures it was sometime around the birth of his first child, nine months after their first anniversary. Perhaps, he thinks, that's unfair to say; perhaps he has always loved her, from the moment they met at the diner and he kept watching the way her hair fell into her eyes as she laughed. She was beautiful back then; she's just as beautiful now, with her hair silver like freshly fallen snow and her deep eyes like onyx.

He lets out a laugh as he hears a kid talk about the "good old days," and he wonders if those days were when he was still in his mother's womb (because he certainly doesn't have enough years under his belt to have any sort of golden age). He wonders what the future has in the store for the world. He wonders if there's ever going to be an end to war and to death and destruction. He wonders what he's going to eat for supper.

He wonders.