Short Stories/One-Shots

Civil War Short Story [title tbd]

 She sits down at her computer and stares at a white screen with a thin blinking line on the side. Music plays from a radio across the room and she taps her bare toes to the beat, humming along to the words she knows well. Her fingertips are poised over the keyboard, but she doesn't lower them. She chews on her lower lip, types a word, deletes it as soon as she reads it. The words are not spilling over the screen with barely contained phantasmagorical properties. Isn't that how writing is supposed to work? She sighs, leans back, brow furrowing as she stares at her computer in confusion. Why aren't the words coming when they're always there? The words are always there, the words and the characters and ideas that are always screaming at her from within her skull, never letting her get any rest, that keep her tossing and turning at night because they refuse to rest until they're acknowledged, written down, turned into something semi-material that can exist in a space outside of her exhausted mind. She pinches the bridge of her nose, trying to stifle down her frustration. She wants to break something, kill something, but she can't and she taps her foot with increased speed, no longer matching the song, she hates everything, hates herself and her mind for not working like she wants it to. In the background, the song changes to a slow, lilting tune; one of those songs with strange abilities to instantly calm you down the moment the first note rings out. Silently, she thanks the band for producing such incredible music, and leans forward again, prepared to start this story. She can see the characters clearly, and all that is left is to take them out of the frozen tableaus in her mind and project them into a situation, any situation, it could be dragons and wizards or a crumbling dystopia or time-travelers or cliché high school outcast protagonists who naturally get everything they ever wanted in the end, or soldiers. Yes, soldiers. Civil War era. Even better, minor soldiers who secretly entered the war illegally.

            The year will be 1863, in the middle of the war when the end is nowhere near being seen. His name will be Edwin, she decides, but they'll call him Ed. He will be fifteen years old, posing as an eighteen-year-old. He lost his little brother and father to illness within a year of each other, and his mother barely stays out of the factories by serving as a teacher at their local schoolhouse. He has two best friends, and their names are Oscar and Jasper, and Jasper is the oldest at sixteen. They are all leaving things behind; Oscar is leaving behind just a dog as he lives by himself, an orphan at age eleven. Jasper has his whole family— two sisters and parents who work in factories to leave behind, but he can't imagine letting his best friends going to war without him there as well. Ed, Oscar, and Jasper will sneak out after dinner one night to the recruitment office, where they enlist easily; the recruiters looked the other way when approached with the three clearly underage boys.

            The three boys will find themselves in an army camp. They will miss home more than anything, and fear for their futures as soldiers. They will suffer through the grim experiences they will encounter with valor, never once even letting themselves question the choice they have made. They will train in harsh conditions, eating insufficient food, sleeping in tents not big enough to keep them completely dry from the rainstorms at night. Jasper will miss his family in the kind of way that leaves a huge, gaping tear in your heart that never stops aching. Ed will exchange letters with his mother, helping ease the pain a bit, and he will encourage Jasper to do the same. "Write to them," he will urge as he writes a letter to his own mother, pausing from the words on the paper to look at his friend, "It will help you feel better."

            But Jasper will shake his head sadly and go back to wiping off his muddy boots. "What if they don't respond?" he will ask, even the thought of that possibility giving his voice a hollow quality.

            Oscar will laugh and the sound will be sarcastic and sad. "Why wouldn't they?"

            Jasper will shrug. He has no response or reasoning to back himself up, but the fear will still be there, the fear that his family would never forgive him for leaving without so much as a wave goodbye.