｡･:*:･ﾟ★,｡･:*:･ﾟ☆ ( 𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐥𝐥𝐚 ) chapter nine — SUMMER'S LETHAL LOVE
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─ 🧳🕸📺📀🦟🌪🎞⌛️ PLATOON. 1966 ｡･:*:･ﾟ★,｡･:*:･ﾟ☆
STELLA HAS MET LOTS OF DIFFERENT KINDS OF MEN DURING HER TIME IN THE MILITARY. Tall men, short men, bald men, hairy men, ugly men, pretty men. Dead or alive, they've all made their way through the medical tarpaulins at some point. Some sent home, some sent back into the jungle, back towards certain death. But when Vietnam spits that other lucky bastard out, back to the USA, it was just another way of killing him. Other ways included wasting him, hiding him, flattening him, dusting him, swallowing him. They all meant the same thing: that his hapless heart stopped beating, and that his flesh was likely somehow wrecked, ripped open or pocked with fever, anemic and sallow, dust-reddened, jaundiced, black and blue. Those guys never seemed to go out the color they went in.
When Second Platoon returns from their week-long patrol, they're smothered in all sorts of typical jungle grime. As Stella watches them from the veranda of the women's cabin, they're burning leeches off their arms with cigarettes and picking twigs out of their filthy hair. She does a subconscious headcount of the platoon as it snakes out of the brush and is satisfied by the outcome. At the rear, she spots Elias donning a dirty red bandana wrapped around his forehead, the sleeves of his fatigues torn off at the shoulders.
She's the first familiar thing Elias sees when he reaches the clearing. Cross-armed, weight lolling onto one hip more than the other, cigarette hanging from her mouth. There she is, stood waiting for him to return as their mothers did for their fathers back in the day. It's a small slice of heaven, but heaven nonetheless. Small pleasures.
O'Neil gets his attention by making a loud sniffing noise from over his shoulder. He turns fast enough to catch a smirk and a quirking a ginger eyebrow from the fellow officer. "That cat will run rings round you, Elias."
Elias snorts. "It'll do you good to stay outta my damn business, O'Neil."
"Stella's everyone's business, Elias," O'Neil responds, bouncing on the balls of his feet in a manner that seemed verging on giddy. Yes, they'd been trekking for miles uphill through dense undergrowth, but he was about to give Elias a good ol' wind up about the girl he seemed so sweet on and he wasn't about to drag his feet about it. Besides, his toes were numb from the searing pain of blisters and the fire of lactic acid in his calves only spurred him on more. "I'm sure she'll give that mouth to anyone 'long as they ask real nice."
"Knock it off!"
O'Neil produces a four-day-old cigarette and bites it between his teeth. There's dirt on it. "You're in love, 'Lias, now where's the stupid in that? We can all take turns. She's definitely a one-night-stand typ'a girl."
