The Bang

By Jeremy Warneke

His two-year-old, curly-haired daughter—who was as cute as could be—came up to him, patted him on the thigh and said, “Doing, daddy? Doing?” 
“Working, chunky monks. Working,” he said and tried to smile without looking at her. 
She stared at him a little before walking away. 
Daddy, a middle-aged man with glasses, was sitting at the dining room table, trying to write. He was stuck on his old muse again: Robinson, the dead twenty-three-year-old. 
“It started with a bang,” he typed and closed his laptop screen. He stared upward at the ranch-style, raised ceiling, tapping his right-hand fingers on the lap top. He had written much more prior to today. But now, he couldn’t seem to get past that first line. He was challenging himself to write a whole piece with only a single period mark. It was a prompt he had given his students earlier in the year, and he felt that he had a really good start. But he was a perfectionist, who hadn’t written fiction in a very long while. 
He turned his laptop back on and pulled up the old piece he had written months ago, when he paused class for students to compose a free write, which many of them didn’t seem to appreciate. Not that day. Some of his students never really understood daddy's writing prompts. They wanted too much hand holding, he felt. Like they wanted to be told what to write about. Daddy thought there was always plenty of subject matter naturally available to his students, so he always gave them limited guidance, telling them that they could write about whatever they wanted. Most importantly, he provided the structure. In other words, the boundaries for which he expected his students to play with and bend, if not break. 
For this particular assignment, one student complained that a single period mark, lengthy story was impossible, despite the example they had just read, a four-pager called “Final Music of the Titanic.” 
“This is very much possible, Jose,” daddy matter of factly said to the older, foreign-born, American-citizen over Zoom. “And to prove it, I’m going to do the writing prompt with you.” 
Daddy gave his students twenty minutes. He didn’t expect much. Something however. A start. Something longer than a normal-sized paragraph. But when the time was up (he actually gave them more than twenty minutes), Jose still complained. He didn’t get it.
Paul, a bald, white man who was quite possibly older than Jose (though it was very hard to tell based on looks alone), did. Paul generally had a hard time comprehending daddy’s writing prompts, but for this particular assignment, he said that while he disliked it initially, he did appreciate it by time’s end because it was definitely a challenge. Paul, a talented writer, produced a marvelous piece of fiction about the time they were all living in currently, the COVID-19 pandemic. 
Daddy, on the other hand, couldn’t seem to move past his past and wrote about the dead muse. Like the rest of his students, daddy read the piece out loud, in front of everyone: 
It started with a bang, and it always starts with a bang, that day, a warm, sunny almost summer like day, the day in which we, my company and I, received a blow, a real, solid, everlasting—not our first necessarily but definitely our first permanent—blow, which can be called stupid, unfortunate…many things, just not happy or worth remembering, especially when I’m down and start to drink to drown out my feelings, fears, remembrances of blood splattered along the wooden-constructed walls, blood that dripped down in dark, little, red drops against the smooth, glossy, concrete floor as the body was rushed out of our living area on one or more of those nasty, drab brown- or green-woolen, Army blankets, which should have been burned afterwards and probably did get burned in one of those cancerous and now infamous pits that I—thank God—never had the fortune to experience, but in some ways, it doesn’t matter because what could be worse than being in that now infamous prison, where I had been resting peacefully on my cot only to wake up to what I had assumed was just a mortar attack because that was the expectation before we arrived, i.e. nine days earlier to the now infamous day, the day of my current plight, the day after the week in which there was a highly publicized attack that killed twenty-two people, making my comrades and I think that we had skated through the past year but now, we were all going to die because those twenty-two people—detainees, hajjis, sand niggers—were still people, despite our treatment of them otherwise, despite the fact that they weren’t and never would be good, smart, honest, purebred Americans like my blonde-haired friend Jim, the one and only, the volunteer firefighter, the short twenty-three-year-old with glasses who always proudly sported cowboy boots, matching hat and belt buckle when he wore civilian attire, the guy who despite his stature told everyone he joined the military so that he could be a cop, like his father, because he wanted to help people, the guy who ended up being my greatest friend because there is no real nice way of saying this: he was a stupid motherfucker who exceeded mortality by trying to elicit a few, cheap laughs from fellow soldiers by playing with something he should not have, by putting his unthinking hands on my one-round-chambered, nine-millimeter pistol while failing to check the chamber, by putting the nozzle of the pistol up to the right side of his head with the manual safety mechanism off, by giving me the gift of everlasting guilt and nightmares, by pulling the trigger.
Daddy called his piece fiction, but he—and most of his students by now—knew it wasn’t.  
Not really. Sure, it wasn’t daddy’s pistol and daddy most certainly didn’t see any blood splattered against any wooden-constructed wall, but still, daddy remembered Robinson’s blood on the floor, among other unpleasant details.
Lenny, a Vietnam veteran, said, “Wow, that’s an important start. You should keep working on it.”
Daddy looked up from his computer screen. He was in a daze, which is how he often felt after reading his work out loud. On the day of the prompt, his students called out his name, but he couldn’t hear them. Not initially. Much like today, he just stared off into space briefly, which to any observant probably felt like a lifetime.
Today, however, daddy’s only audience was his daughter, who wasn’t watching him or his performance. She had become inured. She was instead peacefully playing with her colorfully-bright, plastic toys at the end of the living room near the TV set, well within earshot of her father.

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Jeremy Warneke's publication credits include Task & Purpose, Why We Write: Craft Essays on Writing War, and others. In 2017, he was a War Horse Writing Seminar Fellow and a second place poetry finalist for the Col. Darron L. Wright Award. He received an honorable mention for photography in Proud to Be: Writing by American Warriors, Volume 4. An Illinois native, he currently teaches an online workshop for the New York-based, not-for-profit Voices From War.