Free Days Like Today by Rachel Ingalls

the other way around. And sometimes he’d imagine himself with the name Sherman Oaks because that sounded like something he’d heard before, maybe a kind of tree.
    He began to think that he’d died and gone to a place where you lived on until they decided to move you to some other form of afterlife: from medical to legal, scientific, chemical, horticultural. One day he thought That’s it, we’re going to be put into pots and grown into something else. That’s why they’re studying us.
    When they moved a man named Beech into the ward, the idea of trees and gardens became additionally confused. He told Beech, ‘I think we’re all going to be grown in pots, so we can be planted.’
    Beech said, ‘That’s for sure. That’s what’s waiting for every one of us. They plant us six feet deep and we don’t send up no flowers. We just stay put.’
    At night the war came back: he went through everything again. And then, after a few months, it left him. He couldn’t remember at all for a while. When it began again, the recollections played themselves out in all kinds of different ways. In one version he rescued Franklin instead of the other way around; in the next, a woman called him into the field to help her and then made love to him while the gunfire started up all around them; and in another, his father came into the firing zone to save him and he refused to be moved – he told him to go away and, as he did, his father lifted up his head and was caught by a stray shot. He remembered crawling out to safety by himself, laboriously. And also staying there, burrowing down into the ground.
    He would never have believed that he was making these things up. And to have a doctor hint that he might be engineering fake memories for himself was infuriating. In fact, when a clean-cut numbskull in a white coat suggested as much, he leaned forward and simply told the man: ‘Say that again and I’ll kill you.’ Then he asked, ‘What are you here for, anyway?’ And he followed the question with astring of obscenities that wouldn’t have upset a child – not even a maiden aunt. But the doctor stopped writing notes and Sherman knew that that was because after his outburst, they only needed one word on the paper: violent .
    What wasn’t violent? Men, women, water, fire, earth; all the seasons of the year, even the ones that seemed the sweetest. Anything that had movement had the potential. Whatever was living was bound into the pattern. It was like what the Bible said: there was a time for everything. When the time for violence came around, violence was what you did.
    The doctors and nurses were supposed to be making him well. But what was the point? They were the ones who had the say. He didn’t want to survive unless he could come back as the one in charge. For the rest of his life he wanted to feel the way he felt when he was squeezing the trigger.
    Nothing else was like it: the perfect moment when you hit the target. At first it was tin cans, then groundhogs, which they called whistling pigs; and in the hunting season deer, wild turkey, grouse. He’d thought that when he went into the service, life would be like that. Sometimes it was, but mostly you didn’t see much. You aimed at a place, not a person. Now he had nothing to aim for, not even a place.
    Most of the time, when he was thinking the right way around, memory was like the tide coming back into a stretch of mud flats: stirring everything up again, raising the decaying, rotting material from its bed to where it could flow freely, flooding through every new, clean and cherished place and making it too begin to rot.
    When he wasn’t thinking the right way around, it wasworse. Sometimes he thought that they’d fixed him up the way he should be but they’d put him back into the wrong person. And he wanted to get out.
    He lost a couple of years. It was surprising how fast it could happen; you close your eyes, you blink and there you are: in another place and it’s