Brussel Sprouts

part vii:

“Oh, you must think me an old fool,” he says as the tears roll down his cheeks. She thinks nothing of the sort, but she is so moved by his stories, she doesn’t know what to say. 

They are riding the back roads of Lake Winnipeg’s western shores, on their return to Jack’s cabin in Matlock. Writing his autobiography has returned times long gone, times sadly forgotten by too many. And in the coming months she would wonder if he had felt death approaching. 

Jack’s tears follow his retelling of his time in England, where the military pilot waited for the green light on the planned attack on Germany. But Jack gets sick and is quarantined in London. He stares out the windows of his ward, unsure of what he sees, feels. How does one explain what suspect senses an approaching bomb carries with it? His bed mate is screaming and scared, and Jack, in an instinctual desire to help, reaches out. But his world becomes a vacuum; slivers of glass race toward him.

He wakes up three months later. He returns to Canada without performing his duty, as he sees it. Soon after, he moves into the Brussel Sprouts with his new bride.

She doesn’t say so, but she is glad that Jack turned west instead of east.