Broken and Breaking Free: A Novel by Amy Fillion

Author:Amy Fillion [Fillion, Amy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Amazon: B081P4G7GT
Publisher: Independent
Published: 2019-11-17T07:00:00+00:00

FIFTEEN

Gilbert and Henry were exempt from the Vietnam draft as they were in school. Charlie was not.

On this Monday evening in December, Susan sat on the brown carpeted floor in Charlie’s living room, Gilbert and Henry on either side of her brother on the couch. She wished Mother could be here as well.

Eight o’clock marked the start of the live broadcast on CBS. Susan had driven herself to her brother’s house with Father’s car (she’d acquired her licence just a month prior), and upon her arrival, Henry had asked if he could get her something to eat or drink. She refused. Her stomach was roiling so much she didn’t think she’d have the ability to keep anything down.

Three men—all in suits and wearing glasses—stood in front of a microphone. A clear, cylindrical container housing numerous blue capsules rested in front of them. People were introduced, explanations given, but Susan wasn’t listening to any of it. She was anxiously anticipating the pull of the first draft birth date.

Please God, don’t let it be Charlie’s.

The middle man walked a few steps to the clear container and reached in, extracting one blue capsule and handing it off to a man sitting at a desk. He opened it, unwound the paper within.

“September—” he read and paused momentarily. A pause that was long enough to elicit an abundance of panic within Susan. “Fourteenth.”

One down.

One out of 366.

Henry squirmed in his seat.

Susan couldn’t move. She rested her chin on bent knees, wrapped her arms tightly around her shins.

Another man approached the cylinder, pulled forth a blue capsule, and handed it to the waiting palm of the seated man at the desk.

“April twenty-fourth.”

Not Charlie.

“December thirtieth.”

Another pause. Vast. Immense when you’re waiting to see if your brother was going to be drafted to fight a war he didn’t believe in.

“February fourteenth.”

“October eighteenth.”

Thank you, God!

“September—” Oh, dear Lord. September? Please not Charlie. Not her brother! “Sixth.”

She stopped breathing.

A gasp from behind.

Was that Henry? Gilbert? Could it have been Charlie himself as he heard his birth date being called forth?

She looked over her shoulder at her brother. His face had blanched.

Gilbert reached out and took Charlie’s hand. They sat there together staring at the screen as more and more birth dates were pulled forth. Henry looked down at Susan. She placed her hand on his knee. His palm reached to cover it.

The four of them sat there for quite some time. Silent tears were shed: hands were held. Love and fear permeated the room.

“Well, I guess that’s that,” Charlie eventually said.

What do you say in return? What words of wisdom, words of reassurance, could you possibly say to a young man whose life had taken a drastically appalling turn just moments before?

“I don’t want you to go,” Susan said after several more minutes of silence.

“I know you don’t,” Charlie said. “But I have to now. I have to go and fight a war in a place I’ve never been for a cause I don’t believe in. At this point I can only hope that we smarten up and pull out before I get there.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.