One-Sentence Story: Homecoming

Manhattan by Georgia O'Keeffe

Before you returned to the U.S. from Europe, your battalion was ordered to turn in all your live rounds of ammunition, but one of the gun crew soldiers saved a single bullet, loaded it into his carbine, put the barrel in his mouth, and pulled the trigger, and you were detailed to investigate the suicide—

the chaplain said the soldier was a religious Catholic, the company commander, who censored the soldier’s outgoing letters, said that he was engaged to a girl back home, and the medic told you the soldier repeatedly asked for Wasserman tests but came up free from venereal disease—

and then, at last, after four years in North Africa and Europe, you saw Manhattan again from the deck of the troop transport—

there it all was, the Statue of Liberty, the Empire State building, the Hudson River, even the buildings of your old neighborhood, Morningside Heights, where your parents still lived—there was nothing of the beauty of Paris there—oh, how you loved Paris—but it was New York City, damn it, magnificent and thrilling—

but first there was an overnight stop at the reception center in Jersey, where you were served an enormous, all-American meal featuring huge steaks and endless ice cream, and finally, finally the next morning you crossed over to the city, and still in your uniform you stepped onto the dock, inhaling the familiar smells of wet asphalt and car exhaust, of hot dogs, pizza, and roasted nuts, of damp earth and mildewed bricks, hailed a taxi, and then jumped into the back seat and gave the driver your address in Morningside Heights, but the cabby said—

“Sorry, bud, I don’t go that far uptown.”

by Nina Zolotow

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