Sergeant Corey Jakes had seen a lot of shit overseas and
still saw it during the cab ride to her apartment. Still dressed in camouflage
fatigues with her raven hair in a bun, she stared blankly out of the shotgun
window with visions of war cycling through her head. Every bullet she fired,
every mine her squad mates stepped on, every drone bombing marked as “friendly
fire”, she couldn’t wait to have this horrible shit erased from her memory.
A long process it may be, she knew she had the support of
her green-haired boyfriend “Froggy” McKee. From all the times they Skyped
together, his eyelids were baggy and his face was longer than the Nile River
She stared into space for so long that the taxi driver had
to snap his fingers several times to wake her up. “We’re here, Miss Jakes.
That’ll be twenty dollars and sixty cents,” he said as he stopped the meter.
Corey pulled a twenty and ten out of her wallet and
languidly said, “Keep the change.” The cab driver thanked her with a
shit-eating grin on his face before popping the trunk and allowing his
passenger to get her duffle bag. The
marine absentmindedly waved goodbye and the taxi drove away.
She stared at the apartment complex for a while and took
several deep breaths before ascending the stairs to room B22. Would Froggy even
recognize her after everything she went through? Would she open the door and
find him with another woman? Would he even be alive? On one hand, the
excitement of seeing her supportive boyfriend again sent chills through her
scalp. On the other, her heart raced for reasons other than traumatic visions.
Sergeant Jakes wiped the cold sweat from her forehead and
entered the unlocked apartment declaring, “Honey, I’m home!” The next words out
of her mouth were anything but loving: “What the fuck?!”
Froggy recognized Corey just fine, but Corey didn’t
recognize him in return. One tour of duty later and Froggy’s newly round
stomach bulged out of his sweatpants and T-shirt. His chubby cheeks sagged and
his spiky green hair was all over the place. In one hand was a big ass brick of
cheddar cheese and in the other was a Diet Mountain Dew (as if the so-called
zero calories was going to save him now).
His breathing was labored and intense, like he was trying to
suck down a whirlwind full of air. BO radiated off of his armpits like a
plutonium rod. The state of the apartment wasn’t any better with pizza boxes
and chip wrappers scattered about. There was even an ash try on the coffee
table when Froggy didn’t even consider smoking before.
Corey scrunched her face into a warrior’s mug when she
angrily whispered, “What the hell happened to you, Froggy? I go away for a few
months and this is what you do to yourself?! Weren’t you the one who encouraged
me to lose weight before I signed up for the marines? Huh?! Does that shit mean
nothing to you now?!”
Froggy struggled to get up from the couch and grunted in
pain when he made it to his feet, stretching his back in the process. “It’s
nice to see you too, Corey. It would have been nice to see you more often, but
you know…Murica and all that.”
“So that’s it, huh?” said Corey as she dropped her duffle
bag on the ground. “You ate all this disgusting food and gained all this weight
because you were lonely? How do you think I felt?! After a while of losing my
friends in combat, I got a little lonely too! That’s kind of what happens when
terrorists are firing bullets at you!”
“Nobody forced you to go over there, Corey!” shouted Froggy
before coughing and wheezing. A few more labored breaths later, he said,
“You’re damn right I got depressed without you. You think I’m in bad shape now,
imagine what the fuck would have happened if you came home in a casket.”
“So you want to be in a casket too?” snapped Corey. “You
want to take away the one person I have to come home to because you’re too lazy
to go to a gym? That’s the dumbest shit I’ve ever heard in my life! I hope that
brick of cheese was tasty! I hope it was damn good! I hope chewing on that lump
of fat made you happy! You don’t look so happy now, do you?! You look like a
giant sack of protoplasm! You look like three hundred pounds of chewed bubblegum!”
“Cut the drill sergeant shit, that’s not going to work!”
shouted Froggy, again coughing after his outburst. “You want to body shame me?
You want to make me feel guilty? Fine! Then go back overseas and shoot some
more brown people! Apparently, those squad mates of yours are better friends to
you than I ever was! Never mind the fact that I paid your bills and bought you
groceries when you were down on your luck without ever once raising my voice!
Now you’re going to pull rank on me with that macho marine crops BS?! After
everything I’ve done for you?! You’re a hypocrite! You’re a fucking hypocrite,
Corey!”
The marine marched up to her boyfriend, flipped the coffee
table over, and knocked the cheese and soda out of his hand with brute force.
“Do I have your attention now?! Huh?!” No answer, only jitters. “You think this
is body shaming?! I could have said a lot worse to you right now! Hell, I’ve
said worse shit to the guys I trained in boot camp! If they can take it, you
can too! Don’t like it?! Tough shit! I’m not going to stand here and watch you
waste away just because you went without me for a little bit of time! I fight
like a motherfucker for that reason, Froggy! Every bullet I fire on that
battlefield is so I can come home to you in one piece and hopefully spend the
rest of my life with you! But now…I don’t even recognize you anymore!”
Froggy pulled Corey closer with her shirt firmly
death-gripped in his sausage fingers. He gazed angrily into her soul, as if his
chubby belly was full of fire and venom instead of cheddar cheese and soda.
Corey’s own stoic gaze refused to change at the threat of this newfound
aggression. The marine had left one war and came home to another, neither time
would she relent or cower. In fact, she coldly said to her boyfriend, “Take
your fucking hands off of me right now or you’re a dead son of a bitch.”
Froggy would release his grip, but only because his hands
found a new place: his chest. He coughed and wheezed some more, but this time
he plopped backwards onto the couch and had glassy eyes. “Froggy, are you
okay?!” asked Corey with genuine concern instead of macho marine BS as her
boyfriend called it earlier. He wouldn’t answer her question, only cough
violently again. And again. And again, until he had slipped into unconsciousness
and fell off the couch with a thud. Corey went back into war mode and scrambled
to find her cell phone to call 9-1-1.
Corey Jakes’s recollection of the ambulance ride to the
hospital was as blurry as the taxi ride home. The visions of war tormented her
even further, now with visions of her aggression towards Froggy piled on top.
She kept imagining pulling the trigger at the enemy, but Froggy’s ghost always
got in the line of fire and his blood smeared the desert ground. A tear rolled
down her stony face as she contemplated why she ever thought it was a good idea
to push Froggy over the edge. Why did she push all of her students over the
edge as well? Why did she survive when others didn’t? Another tear rolled down,
but she wouldn’t acknowledge it, not even to the paramedics pointing it out to
her.
The marine sat in the hospital lobby with her head tucked in
her hands wondering where the hell it all went wrong. Was she selfish for going
overseas? Would it matter where she went in the first place? Could she save
everybody with her marine training alone? So many questions swirled through her
mind along with images of blood and gore from her tour of duty. Every time she
thought she had the answers, a leg would blow apart, a head would burst open, a
marine would scream in agony, and Froggy would be left behind all the same.
Corey once again had to be snapped out of her trance to
receive the news from the blood-covered surgeon. “I’m sorry, Miss Jakes. Your
boyfriend didn’t make it.” Tears flooded her eyes like a river of sorrow no
matter how hard she tried to remain stoic and strong. The tears poured even
harder when the surgeon gave her a small velvet box and said, “I found this in
his pants pocket. I thought you might want to have it.”
The marine’s heart beat like a war drum as she slowly opened
the velvet box to find the greatest treasure of them all inside: a diamond ring
with a golden band. It sparkled as brightly as stars in the night. Corey
clutched the wedding ring in her hand and completely lost any last ounce of
stoicism she had left. She plopped back on the bench and allowed her tears to
rain down with heavy force.
Froggy had shown her kindness and love in the past and she
believed she had repaid him with harshness and evil. Being at war overseas was
very different from being at war with a lover. Corey couldn’t separate the two
and it killed her deep inside like she had taken the bullets herself. How
liberating would a bullet be for her at this point? Maybe the next tour of duty
she had would be her last. She had nothing else to fight for and nobody else to
fight with. But if she was going down in a suicide mission, she would go down
swinging. Once a marine, always a marine. Once a lover, now an empty shell.
