A Story of 68

A short story on the theme of "A Story of 1968..." written in the 1pm writers workshop.

When she thought about the year that changed her life, she remembered the smell of patchouli. Curls and twists of incense swirling from her homemade altar. She prayed a lot in ‘68. It wasn’t for the war to end or for the demonstrations to stop or even for the cousin who’d signed up for the Marine Corps behind his parents’ back to get home safely from Vietnam. It was for the unforgiving joint of her knee.

All she had ever wanted was to be a dancer. She’d won a scholarship with a ballet teacher who’d turned out scores of professional dancers. A Berliner who’d danced for Hitler.

She sat in the living room, slumped, staring at the flickering TV. Every night the same words blaring out. Westmoreland. Ho Chi Minh. Viet Cong. Body bags. Johnson, McNamara. Tet Offensive. Pictures of green jungles dark as monkey meat.

She sat watching the smoking, crumpled bodies of helicopters and remembered her own crash landing. Coming out of a big jump, her knee collapsing, wrenching 180˚. It was like her father twisting off the leg of a roast chicken. The sound her knee had made was the sound of a gun going off. That nightmare was screened every night, just like Walter Cronkite.

She was supposed to perform her first solo in The Nutcracker and her knee looked like it had mumps. So she prayed. She bought wands of patchouli and prayed for her knee to get better. Wept a perfumed river of tears as she stank up the house. 1968 was the year of patchouli.

She hobbled to school on crutches, feeling sorry for herself, and sided with Mr Snow, her Civics teacher, in debates about the war. She parrotted her father’s politics. Domino theory. America: Love It or Leave It. The boys were unanimously against Vietnam. They didn’t want to be maimed or killed in an immoral war. The girls didn’t care. They hardly knew a war was going on. It was so far away, a long-running soap opera no one knew how to end. A tiny, foreign war inside a television screen.

So she prayed and wept and prayed. There were things that shocked her out of her misery. Kent State. The girl who looked like a cheerleader, her hands raised, screaming.

Then news closer to home. Her cousin, Dale, handsome Dale, was wounded in a filthy rice paddy, his spinal cord severed. In 1968 he became a paraplegic. His war only ended in 1998 when he died as a result of his injuries and his name was added to that jagged, glassy, black wall.

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