Free Tide King by Jen Michalski

soldiers on the ward, a pretty nurse or two.
    But he felt like a mistake; a healthy, shiftless mistake sleeping in a clean, firm bed. A mistake that drank hot coffee and ate scrambled eggs and not cold canned rations. The others didn’t ask him about his wounds, or lack thereof. They looked at him with a knowing glance; in private, perhaps, they speculated: shell shock, suicide attempt. The more generous, maybe, pegged him with infection, influenza.
    â€œWe’re rubbing down your rough edges before we send you back,” the nurse from the counseling service explained as she took his blood pressure, listened to his heart. The staff doctors administered the same psychiatric tests they administered to him before the war. He passed. They gave him sodium pentothal and put him under hypnosis, but the same dream, image, whatever it was, waited for him, like a movie that ran on a continuous reel. Polensky was in front of him. It was cold as it had ever been and almost impossible to fathom how cold. Snow gusts swirled through the trees, along with an occasional storm of hot splinters, pine needles, shrapnel from the Germans shelling them. Suddenly, the air was sucked away before returning and knocking him off his feet, slamming him onto his back. His ears rung. The sky vibrated above him. He tried to sit up, numb, but could not. He felt his body, his chest and stomach, then he moved his fingers down to his legs. First his right, and then his left. His blood ran cold as he realized there was fabric, wet and sticky, but no leg. He tried to sit up again. Polensky leaned over him. He could see the faded blue of Stanley’s eyes, the whites around them as they widened. Stanley fumbled in his helmet. Johnson tried to tell him what a fool he was— do you want to get shelled in the head, you idiot? —but he put it back on. He then stuffed something dry and fibrous in Johnson’s mouth, taking his hands and moving Johnson’s jaws up and down to simulate chewing. It hit the back of Johnson’s throat, choking him. Someone new then appeared in front of him, a medic. He pinned something on Johnson’s collar.
    The Army psychologist looked at him. He had the same tired lines of the sergeant back at the Graves Registration Service. There was little he probably had not heard, and their directives were similar at all levels—to send men back to the front. For the psych unit, that is, those soldiers whose war existed in their minds, it had taken the form of calling them cowards, soft. But Johnson was not soft—he had landed in Algeria as part of Operation Torch, Operation Husky in Sicily, Normandy, Germany. He had been in almost two years of continuous combat.
    â€œI dreamed that I got shelled in the Hürtgen, that I lost my leg,” Johnson explained. “I remember being in so much pain. And then I wake up, months later, in a pile of soldiers. And they tell me I was tagged as death by amputation. Does that make any sense to you, doc, seeing as I have two perfectly good legs here?”
    â€œIt’s possible that that, while you were moving in and out of consciousness, that you heard other conversations on the battlefield.” The doctor rustled through his papers. The walls of the room also were foam green, as was much of the hospital, a soothing color, some said. It made Johnson think of fatigues, light happy ones—baby fatigues. They had all gone in as babies, he thought, and they left with lines on their faces, eyes that could only see the past, and yet not make any sense of it, to the detriment of the future.
    â€œSo…” Johnson pressed.
    â€œWell,” the doctor coughed. “Say someone else was hurt nearby. Someone else lost their leg. The other soldiers are shouting that Scotty Private has gotten his leg blown off, needs a medic. And the medic that is treating you, that will attend to Scotty Private shortly, accidently writes ‘leg amputation’ on your EMT