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TailwindBy J. Wendell Miller QuailBellMagazine.com I shifted my gaze to the deck, trying hard not to be a little bitch. Smith said if my mother wasn’t sure whether I was a virgin, it meant I was. I’d gotten with plenty of girls, I just never told my mom about it. She never really wanted to hear about other girls. Smith was an asshole. I continued down the dark P-way, eyes to the deck. A few hatches further, Eckhart stopped me and asked, “Where’re you going, faggot?” Another asshole. His words stung like when I picked up Lance Corporal and some guys pinned me, the sharp prongs from my shiny new chevrons leaving four small dots—perfect little pinhole scars—just below my clavicles. I tried to ignore him, a twenty two year-old man ignoring another over hurtful words. Tiny tsunamis slammed into the backs of my eyeballs, but I held steady. “Goddamnit, Franklin, I said where are you going?” I wanted to hit him, wanted to cry. Instead, “To my rack. SIQ.” It was mumbled, obvious that I was trying—unsuccessfully—to keep my tears off the sticky coating of the USS Bataan’s rough Ameron P-ways.
I was a goddamn sissy bitch. My shoulders hurt. It felt like the blades were trying to break free. I wanted to take my SIQ chit and fly away. Medical offered zero help. No Vicodin. Just ibuprofen and water. “Hydrate and get the sand out of your clitoris.” “I don’t have a clitoris,” I said. “Well if you don’t have a clitoris, how’d you get sand in it?” I crawled into my rack and waited for sleep. It never came. The pain intensified and I thought about going back to medical. Instead I took an 800mg ibuprofen and twenty minutes later the bones started slipping through the skin of my shoulder. I screamed, felt blood trickle from two freshly opened three-inch slits. |