Memories
The old man sat on the rocking chair on his front porch. The sun shone on him as he sipped on his iced drink, looked across the road and into the fields beyond. His memories travelled back in time to when he was a young man in his late teens. He could smell the cordite, the rot of the jungle and faintly sense the unwashed bodies of his platoon members.
The humidity and the heat reached to him over the decades. He heard in his mind the explosions, gunshots, screams and yelling. A helicopter flew overhead, and for just that brief second, the sound blended past and present together.
Looking up, he spotted the police helicopter flying overhead. No one believed he could tell the difference between the older two bladed helicopters and the more modern four bladed ones.
His memory and thoughts drifted through time until he came across the day he met the women who would later become the mother of his children. He saw in his mind’s eye the different special occasions; birthdays, Christmas trees and finally, he thought about the day he lost her. Because he had always been quiet and set in his ways, he had not formed tight emotional bonds with his children. She had always instinctively known about the demons he fought nightly, but the children had been spared that knowledge.
So the old man sat alone on his porch, in his rocking chair and sipped on his iced drink.
