Corpsman by Michael P. McManus The shrink at the VA hospital in Shreveport calls me capillary because I carry blood. I call her my hit-and-run mistress who sees me once a month, at which time I like to undress her with my eyes until glasses are all that’s left. This was the invisible man’s downfall when he was hiding from the world. Mine is the headless PFC whose wife was eight months pregnant with twins, or the wide-eyed disbelief on the face of the Irish kid from Jersey, who knelt clutching the front of his throat inches above his Kevlar. He tried to dam the bleeding, but the blood kept leaping through his fingers like salmon on their way to spawn. It’s PTSD and IEDs and collateral damage. It’s remembering how you jerked off in your rack three weeks into your deployment the night before the morning you treated your first sucking chest wound. And don’t forgot the laser-guided smart bomb, which earned an F-minus on the afternoon the Gunny called you over to the rubble. Hey, Doc, what’s this? he asked and pointed— That night in dreams the girl’s body was my little sister, her bloody grin thankful for democracy, while we snuggled on the couch watching SpongeBob. Now my sister the shrink asks what I’m thinking and I want to tell her about earlier this morning in physical therapy, how beautiful it was with so much sunlight streaming through the windows when I took my prosthetic leg in for its tune-up. Two tables down were two men—one old and one young— sitting opposite each other. And everything mortal seemed a passage between them; that awakening in our lives when we realize we are born to die. Sixtyish, moustached, the older man wore a gray ponytail down his back like a poor man’s version of David Crosby. The younger one’s head was shaved clean like a Zen Master, and his Koan was the pink jagged scar behind the ear. Soon it turned into a garish exclamation point theMeadow 67
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