This is a short story I am working on for my fiction writing class - there will be more to come, let me know what you think!
His name was Danny Tucker. Most of his buddies called him Tucker, but his best friend, Wilson, had always called him simply, “Tuck”.
But Tucker hadn’t been called “Tuck” in a long time, because Wilson, like all the best boys, had been killed. Tucker had seen Wilson die. Wilson’s wasn’t a particularly gruesome death, but tragic, just the same. Tragic, as all the deaths of bright young men with bright futures are. Tragic, as all such deaths are, when a country’s newest generation is in a foreign country, fighting a politician’s war. Wilson had gone quickly, the bullet slamming into his left temple, and in the next instant, even as his bright red blood bubbled up from the hole and ran down the side of his face onto the ground, staining it, Wilson’s hair, and his suddenly paling skin a bright and ghastly red, his eyes remained calm. He hadn’t felt a thing. At least, that’s what Tucker let himself believe, when he thought about the look on Wilson’s face. Wilson had been faintly smiling, as his last breath sneaked out from between his lips.
Tucker was 21 years old. Too young to watch his best friend’s death, yet too old to escape the draft. 21 years old, and in the prime of his life. He should have been home, courting his sweetheart, Kate. Wilson shouldn’t be dead. Tucker should have been on his father’s farm gathering the harvest, steering the rusty tractor skillfully over rolling Missouri hills.
Tucker was scrappy and broad-shouldered, with supple arms and quick feet, his square jaw set always with a hint of determination in his thin lips, but no one could call Tucker a fighter. Tucker was gentle and easy, the last to pick a fight, and the first to leave when conflict brewed. The problem was, Tucker could not cope in a world where those qualities, qualities his gentle, quiet parents had instilled in him from an early age, were alien. Wilson had been okay, he had always been more adaptable than Tucker. But Wilson was dead, and Tucker couldn’t fill the void he left behind, couldn’t seem to care enough, somehow. He didn’t even care if they won the war.
But these were old problems, problems he had grappled with since before Wilson’s death, since before he had gotten that ugly slip of paper in the mail.
Tucker’s problem, just now, was that he was being discharged from the field hospital. The doctors told him that, congratulations, his wounds were healed, that, thank goodness, all the shrapnel was successfully removed, that good news, the stitches didn’t even leave a scar. Tucker knew it would have been better news if he had been infected by pieces of shrapnel, hiding from the evil doctors behind layers of muscle and soft tissue.
