Free From – Chapter 5 – July 5th

I hope you will join me this month as we JOURNEY each day through our short story. It is about finding FREEDOM in the midst of all the captivating pieces in life that steal our peace which we need FREE FROM!

FREE FROM
July 5, 2021

Psalm 130:7-8, ‘O Israel, keep hoping, keep trusting, and keep waiting on the Lord, for He is tenderhearted, kind, and forgiving. He has a thousand ways to set you free! He Himself will redeem you; He will ransom you from the cruel slavery of your sins!’ (TPT)

Chapter 5

Legend couldn’t quite boast he’d been back a year, but it was so close he fudged sometimes. Now that he thought of it, it was perhaps maybe more a matter of shame. He still couldn’t function properly. You’d think he’d be further along by now. But no; he continued to sleep with the lights on, and even though he wouldn’t ever have the innards to use it, he slept (when he slept) with a machete under his mattress. Mostly, he slept with one eye open, so his rest was fitful and disturbed, and the more exhausted and thinner he became, the harsher he viewed each day. Legend hadn’t a dreamy expression about life ever. He wasn’t accustomed to good things happening and Christmas Morning existences, cotton candy clouds and lottery luck. So it wasn’t like some rich kid who got told ‘No’, you cant have that new Corvette;’ it was just another same-ole, same-ole disappointment.
But this time it was different. He couldn’t shake the bad feeling in the pit of his belly, the one that made him feel like he had eaten something really spoilt, or that he had been dropped off a high-rise on a free fall and the ground was rushing quite fast at him. He felt his heart pumping life through veins affixed to the outside of his chest and the breath he needed to take so shallow it was like a wisp of air. All he could think about were those buddies of his, the only buddies he had ever had. They counted on each other, they were in it to win it, they were in it together, they had wept on each other’s shoulders and vomited in each other’s hands while watching other young men their age being heaped in flesh-rotting doggy piles waiting to be picked up by the morgue mobiles. They never talked one day that could be them. Only two other brothers survived, two of the four he had drug out of the inferno and shrapnel, but they didn’t talk anymore. Their families reached out but it was too much pretense of past tense for deeply scarred boys trying to get on with growing up when they had witnessed more death than life at the age of sixteen and seventeen.
Legend felt so alone, isolated with the repercussions of war rot, images of a stray foot there and an arm over here interrupting his nights. It was like sleeping with the enemy night after restless night. It didn’t help that his little one room flat was settled across the street from the hospital and nestled in between the police station and the fire department. The sirens were constant background music and the smell of death and gunfire hung in the air like flags on Memorial Day.
Thank God for that hospital though! One of those endless, sleepless nights when he walked the streets mulling over what might have been, there he saw her. Like a vision, a mist, an angel dressed in white, she materialized through the door of the hospital’s ER in front of him, and almost on his feet, she puked, repeatedly, but he had jumped out of the way. Horror was imprinted on her face when she eventually stood, and by that time, he had had the sense to retrieve a handful of napkins. Like a child, all ninety pounds of her stood, allowing him to clean her face and wipe her hands and dry her tears.
He looked at her with a question engrained in his eyes. “Let me guess; nursing school?”
She nodded slightly, humility painting her shades of red. Her eyes fell and her shoulders too, both weighted her down, it appeared. Eventually, “I don’t know if I can do this.” She sighed, a sigh so heavy it fell too.
He pointed to who he believed to be a new mother by the way she held so fragilely the tiny blanketed being nested in her arms. She sat in a wheelchair, attended to by a nurse, as they waited, he assumed for the proud dad to arrive, with the minivan and brand new carseat strapped safely inside. “’Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away,” he whispered, reciting a favorite snippet he had heard. She raised her eyes, her brows a question mark.
“Legend,” he held out his hand. “I’d like to claim that, but no, someone more famous than me coined that,” he added.
“The ‘Legend’?” Now her mouth bore a question mark also.
He smiled, barely nodding. Maybe his war would pay off triumphantly after all.
“Annie,” she murmured, handing him her hand like a presentation. And then she smiled, and it was like someone had just snapped on the lights and turned up the music.

To Be Continued…