The Long Way Home
Author’s note: Today’s two Tuesday stories are designed to be read together, in the order published. This is story one of two. Enjoy!
I wake up drowning.
Not in water, but in sweat, in noise, in memories—too many, too fast, too loud. The ceiling fan above me is a rotor wash, the sheets are desert sand, and for a second, I’m back in the wreckage. The dust, the blood, the screams. The smell of burning hair.
My hands shake as I shove them under the pillow—and I reach for the brick I brought back from the war with me. That’s what we called them— the radios we used to communicate— “bricks.” Sometimes that’s all they were really good for. This one was Jack’s. It doesn’t work anymore. But I can’t let it go.
Breathe in. Count. One. Two. Three. The walls of my hotel room flicker, shifting between past and present, the mind and the body. The walls are cracked. The walls are gone.
I close my eyes, and I am there again.
The convoy was supposed to be routine. They always say that. Routine. But nothing in war is routine. We were moving through the village when the first explosion hit. Fire, metal, blood—searing into my skull, tearing apart time. I hear the voices. I hear his voice.
“Odell, stay with me, man!”
I tried.
But I didn’t.
I open my eyes, and the room comes back, pixelated at first, like bad reception on an old TV. The apartment is still a wreck. I should clean. I should shower. I should call my wife. I should…
My phone is on the bedside table, buzzing. Her name on the screen: Penny.
I hesitate. My thumb hovers over the green button. But what would I even say? Hey, babe, sorry I missed dinner again. I was busy time-traveling to the worst night of my life.
The phone stops buzzing. I let out a breath and sit up. The lamp in the corner is still on, casting long, twisted shadows. Shadows that move.
No. No. Not now.
I rub my eyes, but when I look up again, the shadows have taken shape. A massive form, a single eye glowing in the dark. A low growl rumbles through the room.
I scramble back, my breath sharp. “You’re not real.”
The thing in the shadows grins. You said that last time.
I squeeze my eyes shut. The doctors call them hallucinations. My mind calls them something else. Demons. Monsters. Curses.
I tell myself I’ll be okay. I tell myself I’ll make it home. But Ithaca keeps drifting further and further away. Ithaca New York— where I grew up— the last time I felt safe. The last place I felt safe—tho I guess maybe Penny is my true “Ithaca.” Or maybe she was. I don’t even know how to love her now. Or if she could ever love me again. Why would she? I feel like Odysseus. I never understood him in school. I mean who takes ten years to come home? I get it now. Except I doubt I’m gonna make it. Good for him.
The VA office smells like antiseptic and burnt coffee. The walls are beige, the kind of color that makes you feel like you’ve already died.
Dr. Mendez watches me from behind her desk, tapping her pen.
“You’re still not sleeping.”
I shrug. “Sleeping’s overrated.”
She doesn’t laugh. I don’t blame her. I stare at the window instead, where the sun bleeds into the sky like an open wound.
“Have you been seeing them again?”
The shadows. The monsters. The ghosts. I rub my temples. “They’re getting worse.”
She writes something down. I wonder if it’s unraveling further.
“Have you talked to Penny?”
The pen stops moving. I clench my jaw.
“Leave her out of this,” I say. The words barely make a sound.
“She understands,” the doctor presses. “She knows that wasn’t you. She forgives you.”
I don’t speak. I can’t even forgive myself. How on earth could Penny?
“I told you. Leave her out of this,” I manage to say. Those are the only words I can find—-and I hear them come out of me—menacing. Like a threat.
Dr. Mendez nods like she gets it. She lowers her tone and changes the subject.
She points to the brick. “I see you’re still carrying Jack’s radio.”
“I feel better when I have it.”
“Why do you think that is?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “It’s stupid. I know. I can’t explain it. I guess it just makes me—-“
I stop. I don’t know how to go on.
“It’s okay,” she says. “You’re okay.”
“You need to let yourself heal, Odell.”
“Yeah,” I whisper. “That’d be nice.”
“Have you heard of radical acceptance?”
The streets at night are a maze. I walk without knowing where I’m going, but that’s nothing new.
A bar. A fight. A bruise I barely feel. The brick is still attached to my belt. I should have used it to crush that guy’s head. He deserved it. But I guess we gave each other enough.
“Go home,” the bouncer had said, “before I call the police.”
“Home. Whatever the fuck that means anymore.” I used to think home was a place. A warm bed. The woman who loved me.
But home is a war I never left.
A monster I can’t outrun.
A one-eyed shadow that waits for me in the dark.
And I don’t think I’ll ever find my way back. For the moment, I find my way back to the hotel—the fleabag motel I used to call it—back when I would never stay in a place like this in a million years. Now it’s too good for me. I don’t even know why they let me stay here.
Money. I know. But still…
I wake up to the sound of waves crashing.
But there is no ocean.
Only the ceiling in the hotel room, cracked like dry earth, and the pounding inside my skull. My mouth tastes like copper and whiskey. My ribs ache—probably from where the guy at the bar got a lucky shot in.
The bottle on the nightstand is empty. The pills beside it, untouched.
I sit up too fast, and the room tilts. For a moment, I’m back at sea, the deck rolling beneath my feet, the salt stinging my eyes. My hands grip the mattress like it’s a lifeline, like it’ll keep me from slipping beneath the surface.
Focus.
I reach for my phone. No messages.
Penny hasn’t called again. No text. No voicemails. I used to be someone worth messaging. Worth reaching for. Now, I’m just another ghost in her rearview mirror. How could she possibly forgive me?
I tried to explain it wasn’t her I was attacking that night—not really. I wasn’t even there. “Trauma induce psychosis,” Dr Mendez had called it. A fancy word for beating the shit out of your wife in the middle of the night with no fucking clue what you’re doing because your stupid brain has convinced you you’re back there. Back in the war—being attacked.
Tears form at the corner of my eyes.
The radio on the dresser crackles. Static at first, then a voice.
“Odell. Come in, Odell.”
I freeze.
The radio is off. It hasn’t worked in months. But the voice—it’s familiar.
“…Jack?”
My own voice sounds hoarse, unsure.
More static. Then, “Don’t let them take you.”
I lunge for the radio, twisting the dial. “Jack?”
Silence.
I stare at my brick—Jack’s brick. It can’t be working—but still it squawks.
I heard him.
Jack. The guy who pulled me out of the wreckage. The guy who didn’t make it—just so that I would. Who does that. Fuck him for that! Fuck me. How can I be so ungrateful. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.
I punch myself in the face. It feels good. Worth it. I do it again. Again. I do it until I’m exhausted. I collapse in what would probably be tears, but I don’t even know how to find them. Spit spills out of my mouth like a silent scream as I fall into a fitful sleep.
The diner is empty when I walk in. A bell jingles overhead, sharp and jarring. The waitress behind the counter gives me a look—half pity, half exasperation. She sees the swelling on my face. Some from the fight. Some from the hotel room—the lumps I gave myself.
I lick my busted bottom lip and taste blood. That one was me.
“Jesus. You look like hell, Odell.”
“Thanks, Trish. Coffee.”
She pours without asking. Black, no sugar, the way I used to drink it before my insides turned to rust.
I stir it anyway. Watch the ripples. A whirlpool dragging me under.
“You still seeing them?” she asks.
I glance at her. She knows. Maybe not everything, but enough.
I nod.
She doesn’t say that I’m crazy or tell me i need help or that maybe I should try those pills again.
“I saw the shrink yesterday,” I say, as if defending myself from an assault that’s just not there.
She just refills my cup and says, “Sometimes the only way out is through.”
I let out a slow breath.
Through what? The wreckage? The ghosts? The endless fucking war inside my skull?
Outside, the streetlights flicker.
And in the glass of the diner window, I see it.
Tall. Hulking. A single, glowing eye burning in the dark.
Waiting.
Hunting.
“Don’t let them take you,” Jack had said.
But maybe they already have.
I don’t go home.
I walk.
Mile after mile, the roads stretching like open wounds. Businesses blur past. The neon lights of motels, the endless gas stations, the nothingness of it all.
I’m not going anywhere. I just can’t stay still.
Because when I do—when I stop moving—they find me.
I finally make my way back to Chateau fleabag late in the evening. I’ve been walking all day.
It’s quiet. Too quiet.
Then—
A knock.
Not on the window. On the inside of my skull.
I see movement in the rearview mirror. But I’m not even in a car. A shadow shifting in the backseat.
No.
I squeeze my eyes shut.
I open them. I’m back in the hotel room. Shit.
I hear a pop—like a gun shot. I jerk around. Nothing. No one.
Nothing but the duffel bag on table, the gun underneath it, the pile of old VA appointment slips.
I exhale. A long, shaking breath.
I’m losing it.
I rub my face and grab my phone. Penny’s number. My thumb hovers over it.
Just call. Say something. Anything.
But what if she doesn’t pick up?
Worse—what if she does?
What if I hear the exhaustion in her voice, the quiet disappointment, the way she’s already moved on?
I close the phone and drop it in on the floor.
Outside, the wind howls. It almost sounds like my name.
I dream of the ocean again.
Waves crashing against jagged rocks.
The wind pulling at me, trying to drag me under.
And Jack, standing at the edge of the cliff, staring out at the horizon.
“You’re almost there,” he says.
I shake my head. “I don’t even know where there is.”
Jack turns. His face is wrong. Melted. Twisted. Burned—one eye gone—a gaping hole.
He smiles.
And I wake up gasping.
The room smells like mildew and cheap cleaner. I don’t turn on the lights.
I sit on the edge of the bed and listen to the silence.
Maybe this is it.
Maybe this is where the road ends.
The gun is still in the duffel.
I retrieve it and return to the bed—my fingers wrapping around cold steel.
Then—
A knock at the door.
Soft. Careful. Like Penny used to knock when she didn’t want to wake me.
I freeze.
Another knock.
I stand. Move toward the door.
Hand on the handle.
I know what’s waiting for me.
The eye. The shadow. The thing that’s been hunting me since I left the war but never really left the war at all.
A voice through the door, low and familiar.
“Odell. Let’s go home.”
Jack.
My fingers tighten on the handle.
I could open it. I could let him in. Let the war in. Let it take me.
Or—
I could walk away.
One choice. That’s all.
I squeeze my eyes shut. The handle is cold. My breath is shaking.
And I let go.
I step back.
And I don’t open the door.
I don’t sleep.
I sit on the bed, the gun still in my lap, and watch the door. The knocks don’t come again. But I feel him. I feel it. The thing that has been waiting.
I should leave. I should keep moving.
But my body is made of sandbags, weighted and slow. The exhaustion seeps into my bones, and for the first time in years, I don’t fight it.
The past comes in waves. The sand, the heat, the static of a radio that hasn’t worked in years.
“Odell. Come in, Odell.”
I was pinned under the wreckage. Jack was above me, firing into the dust, yelling for support that wouldn’t come.
“Stay with me, man!”
I tried. But my head was heavy, my blood too thick. My body wasn’t mine anymore.
Then the blast.
Then silence.
Jack never got out.
And I—
I did.
The sunrise crawls through the curtains. I haven’t moved.
My hands are stiff, like they’ve been frozen around the gun all night. Maybe they have.
I set it down on the nightstand. Stand. Stretch. My knees pop. I feel like I’m ninety.
The coffee in the motel lobby is awful. I drink it anyway.
The girl behind the desk gives me a nod. Not friendly, not unfriendly. Just a nod that says, you exist, and I exist, and that’s enough.
I take my cup outside. The sky is pink, the road stretching ahead like an open wound.
A car pulls into the lot. A woman gets out.
Penny.
My throat tightens. She looks the same. Tired, but the same. She sees me and stops. For a second, I think she’ll turn around. Leave. Pretend she never saw me.
But she doesn’t.
She walks over, arms crossed. “I got a call.”
I blink. “From who?”
“Dr. Mendez.”
Of course.
I nod. “You didn’t have to come.”
“Yeah,” she says. “I did.”
The silence between us is thick. She sighs, rubbing her temple. I look into her eyes. The bruises are nearly healed now. It’s been weeks. But my shame feels like the weight of the whole world. The doctor was right though. She’s not blaming me. Her eyes are concerned—for me—not fear. Not anger. Not hatred. Concern—for me. She loves me. How?
“You still seeing them?” She asks softly.
I look past her, toward the highway, where the shadows flicker at the edges of my vision.
“Not as much.”
It’s a lie.
She knows it.
But she just exhales. “Get in the car, Odell.”
I hesitate. Look back at the motel door. At the road.
At the thing that’s been chasing me for years.
The war. The guilt. The ghosts.
I could keep running.
Or I could try.
Try to make it home.
Try to get better.
Try to live.
I open the passenger door.
And get in.
I cannot even begin to imagine that kind of trauma......excellent writing my friend