I’m finishing a short story collection called Open Windows: of Worlds and Men. It’s deep and true and, at times, even beautiful.

Right now, it’s sitting on an editor’s desk with an amazing publisher. I can’t say who just yet, but as soon as I get the green light, this Substack is where I’ll let everyone know.

In the meantime, I’ll be sharing updates, early excerpts, and behind-the-scenes reflections here first.

Supporters also get access to my other work—essays, stories, memories, and more.

If “Homecoming” hit you, or if you just want to see where this all goes, subscribe below so I can reach out directly. You’ll be the first to know when the book officially finds its home.

—C.B.

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P.S.—here’s a little bonus flash fiction just for you:

Milk

I held an aged ten-dollar bill between us. He looked nervously toward the grocery store, teeming with shoppers. This was supposed to be good for him. Independence. Agency.

“Why do we need money for milk?” he said, with the haughty air of a grade-school philosopher.

“Because everything costs something, son,” I said.

“Everything?” he said.

“Everything.”

“We could just take the milk,” he said.

“Like stealing?” I said.

“If that’s what you want to call it,” he said.

“It’s not what I call it,” I said. “It’s what the dictionary calls it.” I took a steadying breath, as that’s what I’d been told good fathers do. “Then you’d pay for it with time instead of money—time spent in jail. Get the milk?”

I urged the greasy bill closer.

He looked out the window.

“We could change that law,” he said.

“Then everyone would have to pay for the milk. Safety. Society. Stability. Milk,” I said. He seemed to be thinking, at least. I lowered my outstretched hand, feeling tired and like a failure in more ways than one.

“We could burn it all down. Start over,” he whispered out the window.

My voice came out louder than I’d expected and we both jumped.

“What in the hell are they teaching you at that school of yours?!” I said.

“That your generation broke the world,” he said. “That capitalism is built on theft and oppression. That—”

I cut him off.

“When are you going to start thinking for yourself? You’re twenty-two years old, Danny!” I said. I got out and slammed the car door behind me hard enough that the glass of the half-rolled-down window rattled in its frame. I held the green paper bill between us like a crumpled shield. “Don’t worry, Danny. I’ll get the damned milk!” I said.

I stormed off toward the sliding glass doors—for the first time in my life, I empathized with all those stories of fathers who went to grab a gallon of milk—and never came back.

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Jerry sat and stared unblinkingly at the overhead sun bulb in his little room. His white puffy body poured over the sides of the reclining chair, which doubled as his bed, like folded mayonnaise. His breathing was labored, though he hadn’t so much as stood in hours.

“Angela, what time will lunch be here?” he asked the room.

A voice answered in an imitation of humanity that still sounded cold and artificial around the edges.

“The courier is still fifteen minutes away, Jerry. Would you like me to send another pulse to the driver?”

The men and women employed to deliver all the things wore headsets that alerted them to new pickups and dropoffs, as well as customer reviews and complaints by way of pulses—small subcutaneous jolts that were more annoying than painful. It sounded like a hellish vocation to Jerry, much worse than being an unboxer.

“Absolutely,” he said, “send one every five minutes until they get here.”

Jerry shambled to his feet without a shred of grace in a series of groans and pauses until he stood breathing like the air brakes of a semi-truck. His bare feet thudded on the tiles around the windowless room as he shuffled between leaning stacks of new boxes.

From the back of the chair bed, he pulled on the same white shirt he had worn yesterday—and likely the day before. His legs he left bare, except for the pair of saggy underpants that were at least twice as old as the shirt.

“They don’t see me below the waist anyway, do they, Angela?” he said.

“Not usually, Jerry,” the room said.

He looked at the press-sealed laundry packs by the door. They too were piling up.

“Good enough,” he said. He slid the nearest stack of unopened boxes toward the only other furniture in the white room, a glass desk the color of frozen milk made from the same material as the walls.

Sometimes his room felt like a jail cell. Other times it felt like a sanctuary. Today it just felt small and cramped with the newest towers of unopened bullshit he had awoken to find—twice as much as yesterday.

It was like an unwanted slot machine—free and endlessly spinning. Every lever pull brought a prize. Food, electronics, lotions, toys, and whatever consumables he was given by people that he never saw.

Jerry adjusted both the monocled camera lenses—one facing him, the other centered on the desk overhead—and pulled out the small stool. His ass spilled over the hard wooden top like a fleshy marshmallow pressed flat by a circular thumb.

“Angela, turn on the duel feed,” he said.

On the white glass wall in front of him, directly under one of the unblinking lenses, two side-by-side screens appeared. The left displayed an overview of the empty desk. The right reflected an obese man with deep shadows under a pair of jaundiced eyes.

Jerry blinked and the man on the screen blinked. He tried for a smile, but it came out as more of a snarl when the sallow man on the video mirrored it. What Jerry saw didn’t look like him anymore—not as he had been—but in some ways, it was who he was always meant to become.

For a moment, a part of him was on the verge of screaming again. A familiar voice inside him railed that this wasn’t the way humans were supposed to live. He was nearly overcome by the urge to pick up the hard little stool and use it to shatter the plate glass walls—to escape and run until he was surrounded by trees and wild things, where no one would ever find him again, but he knew better than to listen to that voice. Had listened to it too many times before. A dozen? Twenty?

Each time he had reduced the stool to splinters on the concrete blocks that lay behind the frozen milk veneer, he had gone from smashing and screaming to sweating and dreaming with a suddenness that defied explanation. Then, he would awaken here again—or in a room identical to it—with a splitting headache and another fresh crop of unopened boxes. Jerry tried another smile. This time it came out slightly less insane looking than the first one.

“Angela, another dopamine tablet please,” Jerry said.

“You’ve already reached your quota for the day, Jerry. Would you like me to increase your daily allowance?”

He said yes—he always said yes.

The wall compartment sighed open and Jerry emitted his own batch of pneumatic noises as he labored again to his feet.

“Dispense a pain tablet while you’re at it. My knees and back are fucking killing me.”

“Of course, Jerry. Would you have me request a telehealth consult?”

Ignoring the question, Jerry snatched the two small pills that jingled into the metal basin revealed by the sliding of one of several seamless glass panels located throughout the room. He chewed them eagerly without waiting for the tiny water bottle that would follow and walked back to his desk.

His heart was hammering before he even sat down. The man on the screen’s pupils pushed against the colored rings of his eyes until they reached a bizarre size. Jerry threw back his head and laughed.

“Angela, turn on the filters,” he said between giggles, and the man on the screen transformed. Jerry’s waxen pallor gave way to the glowing tan of a man who had just spent a month on an island instead of years under a sunlamp. Clear eyes—the whites white—and dazzling teeth, devoid of a single brown stain, smiled back at him from a too-handsome Jerry.

He laughed again.

Whistling a songless tune, Jerry pulled the topmost box from the stack beside the stool. He centered it on an otherwise empty desktop, watching the wall screen to frame it precisely in the shot. He found the lone button on the underside of the desk, pressed it, and a small red circle blinked into existence at the bottom of each screen. It flashed slowly three times, then it stayed lit.

“Hi, folks!” the too-handsome Jerry said on the screen. “Unboxer 332 here, but my friends just call me Jerry, bringing you another consumer report as well as the best unboxing videos on the server.”

Jerry laughed as if at some inside joke. He sliced the unopened box’s brown tape expertly down the middle in a smooth swipe of the plastic blade.

“Before we get started, and see what’s on the inside, make sure to leave a like on this video and subscribe to our network, as it helps with the algorithm.”

He chortled again and paused. The screen lit up with the stacking of user comments.

“You guys are the best!” Jerry said, and—thanks to the wall-dispensed pills—he meant it.

A comment flashed over his feed.

“You’re the best, Jerry,” it read.

As he opened the top flaps of the crisp brown box, Jerry held his breath. He assumed the people watching at home did the same.

“Ooh-la-la,” he said, pulling out a lady’s pink neglige speckled with tiny black hearts. He held it over his too-wide chest. There was no way it would ever fit the real Jerry, but video Jerry made it look like it just might. He swayed playfully back and forth, blinking heavily and making kissy faces. The screen was inundated with heart emojis and the rapidly stacking replies.

“Jerry’s the silliest!” one user typed.

“Brings out your eyes,” another joked.

“Matches your purse,” said a different one—that one quickly disappeared.

“You’re the best, Jerry,” someone repeated.

Jerry cackled madly into the camera, his enormous pupils slowly shrinking as the medicine already began to wane.

“We’ll have another box for you in just a few moments, folks,” Jerry said just as there came a knock from the glass wall on the far side of the room. “Or maybe a bag—that sounds like lunch,” he leaned in conspiratorially, close to the lens. “I wonder what we have today!” He flashed a grin that disappeared, along with the red circles on both screens, with the press of a button.

The knock came again.

“Hold the hell on, for Christ’s sake!” Jerry yelled, groaning to his feet.

He double-tapped a blank section on the wall that, except for an army of greasy fingerprints, looked like every other section. A rectangular void appeared, through which a faceless pair of hands pushed several to-go containers double-wrapped in cloudy plastic bags.

“Is that curry again?!” Jerry said as his hand closed around the bags. “I fucking hate curry.”

The panel slid closed and from the other side came the same muffled words as always, though from a different voice.

“Yeah, yeah,” Jerry said irritably, “five stars, coming at ya.”

He framed the unopened bag in the overhead shot and delivered a vicious kick to the nearest box tower while grumbling about the smell that would stay in the room for days. He called out bitchily to Angela. Two more pills went into the tray—then his hand—then his mouth—and a violently trembling finger reached for the button again.

“God, I hate curry almost as much as the idiots that watch me eat it,” he said.

The red balls flashed three more times and his pupils slid nearly to the size of nickels.

“Hi, folks!” the too-handsome Jerry shouted from the screen. “Unboxer 332 here, but my friends just call me Jerry, bringing you another consumer report as well as the best unboxing videos on the server!”

He laughed like a maniac as tears rolled down his face.

“You guys are the best!” Jerry screamed and—thanks to the unending supply of pills—he actually meant it.

…if you liked this story…

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“Keep it moving… keep it moving,” droned the little creature—a gelatinous thing that looked like a pair of eyeballs plopped atop a mound of congealed hand sanitizer. Eyes that were thankfully disinterested enough not to recognize me. It waved flashlights with bright, pointed cone lids at the steadily flowing river of beings that poured into the final corridor of the transport station.

Above the entrance to the corridor was a metal arch with cut-out curved letters that said simply:

THE GARDEN TRANSPORT STATION

“How many times have you been through?” a sing-song voice asked from beside me. I looked over to find a pair of wide, friendly eyes suspended in translucent purple-tinged goo only inches from my own.

“Through?” I said.

“The gateways—life,” she said. I got the feeling that she was, in fact, a she—though here, there weren’t any lady parts or man parts to speak of. Here was transient. “I’ve been through seven times,” she said without blinking. Seven times—one every thousand years or so. Though, of course, there were exceptions.

“I’m not sure,” I said honestly. “I don’t remember all of them. Three or four…”

She looked smug for a moment.

“…hundred.” I finished.

She stared at me, and her eyes reached the roundest they could, and—if she had had a mouth—I got the feeling it would be hanging open. Were it not for the steady current of souls pressing behind us, she may well have stopped moving altogether.

“I’ve been through seven times,” she repeated, quiet and seemingly to herself.

“That’s great,” I said. “Each time’s different—a real adventure.”

She didn’t seem to hear me.

“You’re…one of the old ones,” she said in a wooden voice.

“Yeah, but once we get there, I’m just as lost as everyone else,” I said, looking around to see if anyone had heard her.

“How old?” she said.

“Well, now, that’s not a particularly polite thing to ask,” I said, only half-joking.

“So you know… all of it.” She said it too loudly for my comfort. “Were you there at the beginning?” Her eyes alit with a zealous fever, and I pressed further into the crowded stream of goopy spirits and away from her question.

The gel was crude, but it worked—a holding medium of sorts until souls could be inserted into material bodies. Otherwise, spirits tended to cling together like sticky magnets, and when that happened, they were hell to pull apart. No, the gel worked well enough—for now. I pushed downstream and away from the inquisitive soul.

“Were you in the garden?” she practically yelled after me.

I looked at the arched sign—its cut-out letters backward from this side of the terminal.

“We’re all in the garden now,” I said to myself as I watched her slip away in the flowing crowd like a leaf floating atop a steady river.

“Atum,” a voice called out from an open door that—were it closed—wouldn’t be detectable in the corridor’s bulkhead. I pretended not to hear.

“ATUM!” he yelled, pointing at me. Other souls began to look at me curiously. I made my way toward the loud jelly-man.

“Hey Shu,” I said, as if only just now seeing him. “I’m kind of busy, what do you need?”

Shu looked at me for a long moment. Then he snorted an unpracticed laugh that came out more like a honk.

“Busy?” he said finally. “You remember this—all of this…” he gestured his formless limbs as if to refer to the entire transport station, “… isn’t real—not really real. You can’t be busy without time, and you can’t experience time without going through those damned things.” He pointed at the far end of the corridor to where the crowd was disappearing.

I sighed impatiently.

“Of course, I know that…”

“Because you’re the one that built it,” he interrupted.

“I know that as well…”

“Even though he told you not to,” Shu said.

“I remember. It’s a while, but I remember most of it,” I said, gritting teeth that didn’t exist.

He cocked his shapeless head as if to say, “Do you? Do you really?” but he—like the others—would only push back so far. I still demanded some respect. The transport was a pretty polarizing issue, and it had never officially been approved. Animal skins imbued with souls—spirits melded with body—the union of the ethereal with the material. It was a plan that had almost never gotten off the ground, and it wouldn’t have—had I waited for approval. I was still paying for some of the blowback, though.

I had been in the garden when the idea hit me. Time.

It was a simple enough—if a bit crackpot. Implementing it had turned out to be a whole different story. What was the Earthen expression—distance makes the heart grow fonder? Well, it doesn’t. Not without time. Distance is a proxy for time—for how long it would take to see someone again.

Before the station, distance could be crossed with all the delay of wiggling your little toe. When you live forever and can feel the constant and complete connection of all of existence, you can check in with any part of it whenever you want. There is no sorrow, pain, or loneliness—but there is boredom by the bucketload.

Shu waved his blobby hand in front of my face.

“You still with me, big A?” He sounded amused.

“Yeah,” I shook my head to clear it. “I’m here.” My head continued to wiggle long after I stopped shaking it. This body was like being incarnated as a Jell-O cube.

Shu didn’t think the Garden Transport Station should be allowed to operate, and he wasn’t alone, but too many high-order beings continued pumping their lower-resolution selves through regardless of what others thought. Over and over again, they broke themselves into pieces and sent parts of themselves through to experience love and loss, hope and despair—the reality of duality.

Critics of the Garden felt that it caused more problems than it was worth, and, in some ways, they were right. The presence of time creates the illusion of scarcity. Scarcity breeds resource hoarding, which makes things even more scarce. Then come all the things that accompany fear and envy—hate, war, greed, and so on.

Every dozen millennia or so, souls would start returning twisted and bent, and the entire system had to be shut down and given a hard reset. It was retooled before it could be restarted, and then everything would go smoothly again—for a while. The trick is staying current on the system status, and the only way to do that was to do what those like Shu feared the most—going through one of the portals.

“There is no time here,” Shu repeated to himself, and I got the impression that this was something he reminded himself of often. I followed his gaze downstream to the many archways at the tunnel’s far end.

“I know that too,” I said,” but I’m not entirely sure that’s a good thing.”

“You might need to lay off living for a while,” he said before he could think better of it.

“Lay off life? Are you serious?” I snapped.

Shu looked where his feet would have been, were there feet on this plane.

“Do you have any idea how much work it takes to keep this place going?” My voice was now loud enough to draw glances from souls slipping by. I lowered it.

“How many souls go through this station every day?” I said.

“Hovers around two million.” Shu looked like a scolded child.

“That’s just Earth,” I said. “How many things can go wrong with this one station? That’s just one plane—a single dimension.”

“A lot,” Shu said petulantly.

“Exactly. We’re still shaking out the system—it’s still in its infancy. None of these things run by themselves, and trains can’t stay on tracks that aren’t well maintained.”

“What’s a train?” Shu said.

I pressed jellied fingers against my eyes—a human gesture that I was sure was lost on him.

“Worlds don’t build themselves,” I said, backing slowly into the steady push of souls ambling toward the archways.

“Maybe there’s good reason for that,” he said loudly.

“Your concern is noted,” I shouted over my shoulder without looking back. I knew that if I had, I would see a very judgmental Shu glancing between me and the far end of the destination that I was being pressed toward. We must have had this conversation a hundred times. I navigated through the crowd, setting the largest archway in the center as my target.

As I grew closer, one of the guards recognized me and elbowed his companion. They both stood up smartly.

“My lord?” the one on the right said, gesturing at the rows of spraying fountains—banking either side of the steady procession of souls—from which every traveler was to drink.

I leaned forward and slurped the sweet liquid in a long, cold draught and immediately felt my mind relax. My memories loosened, sliding like raindrops sloughing off the windshield of a speeding car. I shuddered as deep recollections were scraped away from me as easily as mud from an old boot, and, for a glorious while, I became like everyone else.

I felt myself gently nudged forward by the steady pressure of gelatinous forms behind me. We ambled toward a rippling wet membrane that stretched across a sleek metal archway in front of us like the shimmering soap skin clinging to a bubble wand, and for a moment, I was worried and confused.

I didn’t know where I was, who these people were, or even what I was. All I knew was the steady hum and pressure of those around me as I was pushed through the cold silver skin and into a new place. My last thought was great comfort in knowing that at least I wasn’t alone. We entered the world as one.

I held an aged ten dollar bill between us. He looked nervously at the grocery store, teeming with shoppers. This was supposed to be good for him—independence—agency.

“Why do we need money for milk?” he asked with the haughty air of a grade-school philosopher.

“Because everything costs something, son,” I said.

“Everything?” he said.

“Everything.”

“We could just take the milk,” he said.

“Like stealing?”

“If that’s what you want to call it,” he said.

“It’s not what I call it, it’s what the dictionary calls it,” I said. I took a steadying breath, as that’s what I’d been told good fathers do. “Then you’d pay for it with time instead of money—time spent in jail. Get the milk?” I urged the greasy bill closer. He looked out the window.

“We could change that law,” he said.

“Then everyone would have to pay for the milk. Safety. Society. Stability. Milk,” I said. He seemed to be thinking about it. I lowered my outstretched hand, feeling tired and like a failure in more ways than one.

“We could burn it all down. Start over,” he whispered out the window.

My voice came out louder than I expected and we both jumped.

“What in the hell are they teaching you at that school of yours?!” I said.

“That your generation broke the world. That society is built on lies and oppression. That—”

I cut him off.

“When are you going to start thinking for yourself? You’re twenty-two years old, Danny!” I said. I got out and slammed the car door behind me hard enough that the glass of the half-rolled-down window rattled in its frame. I held the green paper bill between us like a shield. “Don’t worry Danny! I’ll get the damned milk!” I said.

I stormed off toward the sliding glass doors—for the first time in my life, I empathized with all those stories of fathers who went to grab a gallon of milk—and never came back.

She had a laugh like an old brokedown car—the staccato of an engine that wouldn’t start. It made me want to take the plastic knife off my paper plate and push it into my eardrums. Instead, I stared at her teeth and smiled.

“We just got a new car,” she said to anyone that would listen, in between big smacks of gum. “Stevie picked it up for my birthday. Ain’t that right Stevie?”

From over by the smoking grill, in a cluster of three men talking about sports scores and performance reports, Steve raised a plastic-cupped salute.

My wife appeared like a wisp and squeezed my shoulder, not without affection. I tried to make my smile more believable.

“It’s way too fancy for me,” the woman with the machine gun laugh said. She let out another three-round burst. I gripped the arms of my chair until the hard white plastic bit into my fingertips. “Brand new. Off the lot. All the bells and whistles,” she offered when I failed to urge her for any details.

“Well, that sounds lovely,” my wife said in a voice that still sounded like Mississippi even after twelve years and four duty stations. “Doesn’t it Jack?”

“Yeah… real fancy,” I said.

I had been back stateside for less than two weeks and was still coming down from deployment. In culture shock after returning to my own country, go figure. Everything was different. My home had become a foreign land to me and it was tearing itself to bits. I looked at the neighbors, littering my backyard like strangers, holding disposable paper plates and red plastic cups.

“Good to have you back,” a man said from behind me. He clapped his hand on my shoulder and electricity shot through my body like a car alarm. I pulled away from him.

“Sorry, Jack,” he said, both hands raised in a universal don’t-want-any-trouble sign. Several people nearby stopped talking and looked over at us. My wife appeared at my side.

“Jack,” she said quietly, placing a hand on my chest. “Should we get some air?”

We were already outside. I nodded.

“Be back in two shakes,” she said to the guests and everyone went back to their conversations.

As she led me by the hand into and through our little house, I breathed like they had taught me—two breaths in, one breath out. It almost always worked, temporarily, but it never fixed the problem.

Fixed implied something was broken.

Two breaths in—one breath out.

Fixed implied that I was broken.

Two breaths—one breath.

Maybe it wasn’t me though. Maybe it was here that was broken, and being away had finally given me the ability to see it.

Two—one.

That wouldn’t account for the meltdowns at places like Costco though, or pulling that guy out of his car after he whipped around my family in the parking lot.

“Jack, Hunny, you doing alright?” my wife said, once we were alone on the front porch.

“Yeah.”

“He didn’t mean anything… he didn’t know…” she said.

“Yeah, I know. He’s a good guy. He can’t know that I have the startle response of one of those fainting goats these days.”

She laughed weakly.

“It’s just… different… everything is different,” I said.

“They said it’ll take some time for you to acclimate again—to get reaccustomed. Just like last time…”

She looked strained and tired, pulled in too many directions with too many concerns, like most military wives. By God, she was beautiful though, like an oak tree—something solid. I looked at her and let out a long breath.

“That’s just it,” I said. “I’m not sure I want to get used to it again. I don’t want to fit into to…” I waved my hands at the little suburban neighborhood we had bought into, “…this.”

The house had been perfect when we moved in. With my last reenlistment bonus, we had finally been able to afford the type of place we had always wanted. It was her dream home. At one time, it had been mine too. That was before I came back to see America with new eyes—the people that lived in it.

I still don’t see how it could have changed so much in nine months, yet here we were. Privilege divorced from gratitude and reattached to guilt. Tolerance became unacceptable, and advocacy was a requirement. Everyone was either an adversary or an ally, with nothing in between.

Meanwhile, idiots like me traveled the world doing bad things to bad people—ridding countries of the type of men that make sure little girls don’t learn to read by stoning them to death. Losing friends for strangers and coming back home to watch people tear down flags and topple monuments.

People thank you for your service and companies still offer discounts, but people don’t go to war to be mislabeled heroes or given ten percent off major appliances. They go to war because others need help, and home is worth protecting—its people are worth protecting.

“This place isn’t worth protecting,” I said quietly to myself. My wife wiped at my face, at tears I hadn’t known were falling, and pressed her forehead to mine.

“Jack Allen Wagner,” she said, the steel of her voice wrapped in velvet. “You don’t go to those places for BOGO culture or cowards that hide behind ideas. You go because that’s what good men do. You go to show our sons that sometimes evil people do evil…shit…”

That got my attention. My wife swore less than a Gideon Bible. A smirk cracked its way across my stone face.

“…until good men kick in their door and jerk a knot in their rear end.” She was breathing heavily, the look in her eye not unlike the men I traveled the world with.

I smiled—deeply—proudly—all teeth and crinkled eyes, like a boy that had just caught a frog in a creek following a stick-gun fight with his friends—back when the stakes were lower but there was a lot more worth fighting for.

“There you are,” she said, stealthily wiping a rogue tear from her cheek. “There you are, you big lug.” She grabbed me by both of my ears and kissed me fully like I was a mirage she was afraid would disappear at any moment. “I knew you were still in there somewhere.”

We sat down on the little white bench, both her hands wrapped around one of mine. She rested her head on my shoulder.

“This country might not be good enough to warrant people like you—not right now, anyhow—but I have hope that it will again. Someday soon.”

I looked at her in disbelief, in awe of the one thing that I couldn’t seem to muster: hope.

“How?” I asked. “Everyone is either so concerned with stuff, with getting theirs—whatever the hell that’s supposed to mean—or they’re at each other’s necks trying to compete for who has it worse. Show me where it’s more fair. Put a pin in a map and let’s go have a look. I’ve been to so many places—so many places—and I haven’t seen a single one of them that has it figured out better, but we can’t see it for our own greed and envy. The whole damned thing is like… It’s like Sodom and Gomorrah all over again.”

My wife’s eyes shone wetly and she squeezed them shut.

“And what if there were just ten righteous men, Jack?” she said.

I didn’t consider myself a believer—not anymore—not yet—but I knew the stories well.

“For the sake of ten, He will not destroy it,” I recited in a whisper.

She nodded. “I think you can find nine more.”

I let out a breath that I felt like I had been holding since stepping onto a homebound C-130. As far gone as America was—greedy, resentful, dishonest, and ungrateful—worse had been brought back from the brink of destruction time and time again. For the first time since stepping off that plane, I felt a glimmer of hope, delivered on the wings of a five-foot-four angel—that only cussed on occasion.

Two old fellas sat at the park. The sun was bright, and the air was crisp, but they complained anyhow—as old men are prone to do—about the weather.

“That’s one hell of a sweater, George,” said the smaller one from under a bushy mustache.

George’s bulging frame was squeezed into an absolute circus of a Christmas sweater that—in Clyde’s opinion—no self-respecting man would have worn.

“The old lady got it for me,” George said, looking over at Ethel, who was chatting with another woman some distance away. “I’d take it off, but you know how she gets if I don’t wear the stuff she buys me.”

His tone was a veneer—a mock annoyance sitting overtop a chasm of deep and enduring love like a manhole cover. George had been with Ethel since he was a kid, and their love was still like something out of a storybook.

George smiled. George was always smiling. Clyde looked at Ethel—who gave a little wink and a wave to George. After all these years, he still pined for her like a puppy chasing its owner, and she still pined for him.

“Got a new medicine,” George said matter-of-factly, his wrinkly jowls quivering as he shook his massive head in feigned disgust.

“We’re not getting any younger, are we?” Clyde said, scratching behind his ear with a toe. “What’d you get this time, new heart pills?”

“Dewormer,” George said, as he scooted his ass across the grass.