lunabee34

This is a series of six drabbles from the perspectives of Ellen, Jo, Bobby, John, Dean and Sam. The fic was inspired by Tim O'Brien's novel of the same name.

The Things They Carried

1 Ellen

Ellen has a scar on her belly, twenty years old and from before doctors made the tiny incisions they do now, before they secreted them away in the dark of a mother’s pubic hair. The scar runs up her middle like a zipper, a toothed line dividing her life into Before and After. Sometimes when Jo stares her down with eyes so like Bill’s, when she worries that damn knife like a rosary, Ellen rests her hand over the scar, needing that tangible reminder that her daughter is fashioned of the same blood and bone and gut that she is.

2 Jo

The knife is hers and not because he’s dead, but because he gave it to her. They sat on the porch and he showed her the right way to sharpen it, dragging it over the whetstone again and again until she could shave the fine hairs from her arm with its edge. Mom watched from the window, mouth drawn down, and later Jo would hear them fighting about the hunt and Dad’s need to draw her in. “You don’t understand, Ellen,” he said. “It’s not about teaching her to hunt; it’s about giving her something to hold when I’m gone.”

3 Bobby

Bobby keeps a bullet in the corner of his wallet. A doctor dug it out of him in the early eighties, just when Bobby was starting to hunt. He’d gone to Merle’s to gas up his Jeep and fill some cans for the lawn mower and the bush hog. He wasn’t packing and a pimple-faced druggie shot Merle dead and Bobby in the shoulder before yanking the till. Bobby’s seen real evil, the kind that smells of sulfur and comes backlit with hellfire, but the bullet reminds him that the most fucked up thing he’ll ever face is another person.

4 John

John holds the edge of the package while Dean tears the paper away. This is Dean’s last Christmas before he’s a Big Brother and they may have gone overboard with the holiday cheer, but John really doesn’t care. “Let’s see what Mommy gave me, little man,” he says. Inside is a brown journal, smelling of leather and the sharp bite of untouched paper.

“I thought maybe you could write down your war stories for Dean and the baby. A legacy for when they’re older,” Mary says.

Later, when John begins to write, he records a very different sort of war.

5 Dean

Like the Impala and most of Dean’s weapons, the jacket was first his dad’s. He remembers Dad wearing it, the collar turned up like he was too cool to live. He saw the way women watched his dad when he wore it, even if Dad never seemed to notice—the way they’d touch their hair and run their thumbs along the edges of their lipstick, the way they’d lean into him with their hips and with their breasts. When Dad first gave it to him, the jacket was too big, but Dean’s grown since, into its shape and its promise.

6 Sam

All Sam’s possessions are brand spanking new—underwear, hair brush, books. He has nothing that belonged to Jess, nothing that belonged to his four years at Stanford. He no longer even has those few things he saved of his family— photos of him with Dean, Dad’s postcards. He has the clothes he escaped with and that’s all. So once they’re on the road, he’s shocked to find bits of himself everywhere—his old sunglasses wedged in the glove box, his shotgun in the trunk, a note in Dean’s wallet that reads, Back from the library in twenty. Don’t wait up.