![\"Glo-Buddha\"](\"http:\/\/farm1.static.flickr.com\/209\/453420638_985fcf1579_m.jpg\" "\\"Glo-Buddha\\"")
<\/p>\nThis week I’m posting my first ever fiction story to appear on this blog. It also happens to be the first short story that I have ever written to fit the \u00a0140-character Twitter format, and was published via @pancakebooks (stupid name, I know) earlier this week.<\/p>\n
My inspiration for this form comes from Jennifer Egan’s short story \u201cBlack Box,\u201d originally published on Twitter and then in The New Yorker.<\/i><\/p>\n
Voila. Hope you enjoy.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Shrapnel<\/strong><\/p>\n The day before my grandfather\u2019s entire platoon was wiped out\u2014all except for him\u2014they spent the afternoon digging trenches in a Korean graveyard.<\/p>\n A man from a nearby village had begged them to stop. It was bad luck, he told them. No good would come of it. They would be cursed.<\/p>\n But the Chinese were on the other side of the hill. It was war. They did what they had to do, and my grandfather was the Lieutenant.<\/p>\n He told them to keep digging.<\/p>\n In all likelihood, they unearthed bodies as they dug. Yellowed bones, human hair. But my grandfather didn\u2019t talk to us about those things.<\/p>\n He was a storyteller. He told us instead of another discovery: a jade Buddha, sea green and the size of his hand.<\/p>\n When the Korean man from the village saw it, he started crying.<\/p>\n Who knows how long the Buddha lived there, under the earth\u2014centuries? My grandfather was the Lieutenant. He put it in his knapsack.<\/p>\n A souvenir.<\/p>\n That night the men used the grave stones for washboards. They ate from their mess kits, joked about home\u2014how they’d never eat rice again.<\/p>\n A private in my grandfather\u2019s unit, Eddie from Kentucky, stayed up one night to finish a book. Get some sleep, the guys told him.<\/p>\n It was a damn good book, though, and he\u2019d wanted to finish it. Eddie read the last chapters by the beam of his military-issue flashlight.<\/p>\n The next morning, the Americans were overrun. Bullets strafed the air. Smoke rose in plumes, then clung to the ground in low, dark clouds.<\/p>\n A bullet slid through Eddie\u2019s chest and pierced his lung. He died choking for breath, unable to speak.<\/p>\n But he finished it, my grandfather said. What was the book? I asked. The Call of the Wild, my grandfather said.<\/p>\n The rest of my grandfather\u2019s unit died around him.<\/p>\n My grandfather was lucky. He heard the grenade as it dropped over the wall of the trench, as it danced down the concrete steps.<\/p>\n One, two\u2014and he lunged sideways\u2014three.<\/p>\n When I was young I ran my finger across the scars, over the jagged shrapnel that racked his body and crawled like spiders under his skin.<\/p>\n By the time he died\u201462 of cancer\u2014he\u2019d had 12 operations. At 58, the metal still wriggled inside his leg, searching out an artery.<\/p>\n After the war, my grandfather came home and went back to college. He met my grandmother, they married, and life happened.<\/p>\n They had three girls. One, two\u2014and a gap of six years\u2014three.<\/p>\n My grandmother still tells the stories my grandfather told her about the war, about his childhood.<\/p>\n I try to pay attention to how they warp and bend over time. How her memory matches up against mine, against my aunts\u2019, against my mother\u2019s.<\/p>\n Who\u2019s to say who\u2019s right?<\/p>\n Memory works like shrapnel. Long after a callus has grown over a wound, memory still cuts inside you. Drawing up new pain or lying dormant\u2014for a time.<\/p>\n Often, my mind goes back to that jade Buddha. My grandmother says it was stolen from my grandfather on his way home from war.<\/p>\n And yet I can’t believe this.<\/p>\n Did I not see it as a child? That soft, green belly, that laughing mouth? Winking at me from some high shelf, or the back of a dark cabinet?<\/p>\n The last few days he was in the hospital, he hallucinated that he was back in Korea.<\/p>\n I was only six at the time, but still. Hadn\u2019t I seen the Buddha, clenched in the grip of his sweating hand?<\/p>\n Begging for one last miracle, all the while still crouched in the trenches, the ping of the grenade hitting against the concrete steps.<\/p>\n One, two\u2014yes, hadn\u2019t I seen it then?\u2014three.<\/p>\n This week I’m posting my first ever fiction story to appear on this blog. It also happens to be the first short story that I have ever written to fit the \u00a0140-character Twitter format, and was published via @pancakebooks (stupid name, I know) earlier this week. My inspiration for this form comes from Jennifer Egan’s […]![\"\"](\"http:\/\/pixel.wp.com\/b.gif?host=writedrunkandeditsober.wordpress.com&blog=37194364&%23038;post=685&%23038;subd=writedrunkandeditsober&%23038;ref=&%23038;feed=1\")
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