Summer's Bloom, 1919...

An ambulance brakes before the Salem County Memorial Hospital late in the day. Market Street is bustling with pedestrians, tired horses and black automobiles. Market Street bustles with people enjoying the warmth of the sun. The ambulance is all business, a long strongbox on spindly wheels. The hospital is a broad Italianate brick marvel of many windows, its front juts outward to add an artistic touch to otherwise flat geometry. The sign above the darkened doorstep blatantly states HOSPITAL. It currently services the battered and bloody, the castaways of savaged Europe.

They carry in a big man on a cot, griping about his weight, long legs dangling off the side. Two pretty yet spindly nurses in reverent white jog down the stone steps to assist them. Their tiny bodies miraculously offer strength on demand. Down the hall and up a flight of stairs they go, the big man groaning, grasping at bandages on his weighty head.

"Got a man here!" one of the drivers screams. "Eh, Haskins is the name! Benjamin Haskins, one of the Aero Squadron boys!"

"War ended last year year, didn't it?" a disgruntled nurse asks. She doesn't offer aid. Perhaps she's seen one broken young man too many.

A doctor with too many things on his mind and too little time to collate them casts a sly eye at this new admittance. "Why is he so bad off? Didn't anyone take care of him on the ship?" He kneels down to check pulse, observe the pupils, sneer at crooked bandages with the floppy brown hair jutting out.

"This guy came over on the Callao, took a crash in a Spad flying over a German prison camp a few weeks back. Banged up but good! Lips were tight on the details, paperwork too. Only this guy knows what really happened. Anyway, on the voyage here, he tries to get up and play normal, but tumbles head first down the stairs and..."

"I understand. You've quite the resilient nature, Mister Haskins. And, a deeply ingrained stubborn streak." The doctor posits a grin.

Benny smiles, but looks just off the doctor's position.

"I'm over here, ah--"

"Doctor, I uh, can't see so good. It seems to come and go." Benny's eyes rove like uncaged animals.

The doctor waves to another nurse. She brings along a table lamp to give the doctor a better view of the irises. "Mm-hmm. Comes and goes, you say? Side effect of the crash, and the fall. That will be temporary. Take him into the main infirmary with the other boys. Don't worry Mister...Haskins." Doctor glances at the clipboard handed to him by one of the drivers. "We'll take excellent care of you here in Salem. Nurse, call the man's family, and tend to his wounds."

                                                                                                     ***

The infirmary opens up in soft brown, wood paneled comfort. It's a quiet place, a wide space with nine beds on either side, four of them occupied. In silence they lay, men lacking an arm, eyes covered in cotton bandages, wheelchairs resting at bedsides. One is unresponsive, his left arm bonded to an intravenous tube. Benny sees none of it. Pain and dizziness are his primary occupations.

Time sneaks behind him after he's transferred to a bed, wounds redressed. While nurses tend to him, they speak about him, not to him.

"One inch gash along the right temporal lobe," says one.

"Deep too. Left pinky and ring finger are broken. His sheet says the wrist as well, but there's no tape on it. No splint? Honey, did you have a splint for your wrist before you took a tumble?"

"No ma'am."

The nurses cough up puzzled looks.

They gently remove his khaki uniform, a dusty thing decorated in medals of dried blood, burn marks and German soil. Only the winged patch in black borders on the left breast stands unblemished. Benny whimpers, fidgets. The nurses find they have a fighter on their hands.

"Another big baby. Send you off to war, fill the skies with smoke only to come home and cry on our little girl shoulders!"

"Vera!"

"What?" Vera rolls Benny over, both participants grunting along the way. He from agony, she from the Brown Bear's mass. Vera's tiny, but ornery. "Gotta tell 'em like it is. Get this baby boy soaped up and quiet before night falls. You and I know how Nurse Lyle likes the infirmary quiet."

"And in order!" they exclaim at once.

Benny can barely take the undressing. He's not embarrassed one bit. Girls like their men tall. It's the injuries. In his short lifespan, Benny has been bruised, shaken, garnered the occasional broken bone (a.k.a 'male initiation'), but only now has he experienced what it's like to be battered. He can't feel his toes. The ceiling is either a blur, or all black, he can't determine. He wants to scratch an old itch on his left hand (running through thorn bushes at age eight left some spectacular tiny scars), but the slightest twitch sends rusted barbed wire pangs up the arm. His neck is numb, then swollen it seems. Whatever it is, he can't turn his head. And the head! Dogfights take place in the unseen region between the eardrums. Big Bertha sets off explosive rounds in the trenches of consciousness. There's no rest. There's no satisfaction. There's only pain shards and flopping on the bed, fish out of water, soldier out of battle.

"Good grief! Grace, get this kid some morphine, or we'll never finish!"

Nurse Grace makes for the medicine cabinet down the hall while Vera again plays wrestler. She manages to get Benny in the nude and washed head to toe. Grace returns, bearing a brass syringe full of liquid armistice. She hesitates to put it into the patient's vein. Instead, she eyes Vera in between combat maneuvers.

"It's like riding a wild bull!" Vera screams. She sees Grace's expression and rolls her eyes. "Don't just stand there! Stick it in!"

Grace sits on Benny's arm, and slides in the needle. It enters as soft as her name. Benny feels the burn in his arm. It removes the itch, but brings on a blood fever. He bucks.

Vera and Grace go up and down. Benny grinds his teeth while the nurses retake their positions. Vera slips on the white hospital gown in the blink of an eye. Then, tuckered out and praying for shift's end, they give each other the nod. They retreat back.

Benny's body begins to soften. Morphine shoots down the nagging airplanes, fills in the trenches. Big Bertha melts into Munch's the Scream. The war is over, and Haskins loses by a knockout.

The nurses tie up the gown and turn Benny on his big back.

"I flew...I flew over a castle...they had things in it...strange..." the Brown Bear begins hibernation.

"Sleep tight kid," says Vera. "When you wake up, do not get out of bed. Believe me, you'll be better off."

The nurses check on the other boys before leaving the infirmary.

Benjamin Haskins flies sky high. He doesn't hear a word the nurse says.

                                                                                                       ***

The ceiling is blackness. In slow turns, it changes as sunrise from dark to weak amber light. Benjamin Haskins has two thoughts at odds.

"Water?" and, "Gotta pee."

His right hand drifts up, scanning the area. Sense of touch finds a small table, light fingers feel for a glass and find one. Seconds or minutes recede as he tries to remember how to get up, how he ever got in a bed with a foreign ceiling.

The hand softly picks up the glass. It moves to Benny's mouth in a ponderous slide, more from drug haze than any form of caution. The water parts dry lips, enters his mouth as a blessing. Trouble swallowing makes him attempt to raise his head. Dizziness follows. But he manages and continues on, eating water wholesale.

Naturally, the second thought begins to dominate. Every body part hums a cello solo of apathy, but his private roars as if Niagara Falls is locked up behind the scrotum.

"Gotta...get up." A year seems to pass just to get his fingers wrapped around the mattress to provide a push. Another year moves by sitting upright. Benny's elderly in the time it takes to reach the side of the bed. The floor seems to move in and out. At the end of the infirmary electric light shines. His own breathing echoes like cannon fire.

"Hey buddy, use the bedpan. Whatever you do, don't get up."

Benny looks around, but sees only guys lying motionless in this wood and cotton crypt. "Who's that?" He hears his own voice. Slurry, raspy.

"Salvador Terillo, Hundred and Fourth Engineers, guy. Over here, with the useless eyes."

Benny manages to find the voice, over to his left. He finds a man dead still, half his head wrapped up.

"Use the bedpan, guy. Stay in bed."

Haskins looks at the little table. Sure enough, there's a round metal pan, tiny and shiny to waking eyes, minding its own business.

"Nah. I gotta go a lot. I need the water closet." He stands, falls on the bed. Smiles. Stands again. Blood plummets from his head to the toes. Now they have feeling while the room spins! He takes a wobbly, infantile step. The floor creaks. Down the way, the rectangular shape of a door beckons. "That's it, right?"

Legs held tight, hand over his private as if it will stop Nature, Benny wobbles down the aisle between the beds for the door. A few more dissenting voices whisper protests.

"Don't!"

"You'll get in trouble!"

He proceeds. Fuzzy fingers grapple with the doorknob. It opens, and he stumbles in. Without lifting the lid, he shoves the gown to the side, and releases. All of life's dramas fall away. He has no other awareness but this one.

Finished after eternity's end, he turns to find the door. Click!

A swinging electric light activates before his face, offering a hard illumination. The brilliance of relief surrenders to the awe of surprise, the burn of blindness. A feminine hand wearing a white glove waves in Benny's face.

"Haskins, isn't it? Benjamin Haskins?" the voice is domineering, old but authoritative.

"Yeah...who...?" For a hair's breadth of time, he's glad vision is normal.

The woman moves forward. Personal space is gone. "Did you miss the bedpan my nurses set out for you, Mister Haskins?" Benny sees she's a nurse, a middle-aged one with tightly wrapped blond hair (a pinch of gray) and a pair of black metal spectacles. Her nose is hooked some, a fair looking woman, better if the face wasn't so stern. She has a straight shape that blossoms out to square hips. She seems to be all right angles. Maybe it's the medication.

Benny feels uncomfortable. This lady sounds like his mother when she's angry. "No ma'am. I saw it. But I had more to offer...than that pan would've held so..."

"My patients use the bedpans provided."

"But..."

"My patients. Use. The bedpans. Provided."

He suddenly feels inadequate for no reason. "Ah, yes ma'am."

She smiles. Her eyes stare into his soul and tear it to shreds but the corners of the lips do curve upward. "Very well. I'm Nurse Lyle, I run the infirmary during the late hours. I practically control the whole hospital at night to be fair. Are you fit?"

"Yes..I mean...no. I crashed..."

The smile falls flat. "Well then. back to bed with you."

Lyle doesn't budge, so Benny has to sidestep her. It's a tough move, what with his drug addled body and the puny gap between her shoulder and the door frame. No matter the struggle, she never flinches. He grinds along the frame, back and arm swelling from the return of the pain. The aisle stretches out as he walks. Reaching the bed takes more years off his life.

In the instant he lays on his back, Nurse Lyle sits next to his left arm. She studies the bandages, his head, the gown. From her right pocket she produces a syringe. "Has the pain returned?" Her tone offers loving smoothness while she maintains the cold observation.

Benny nods his head, firing up the pain in the neck. He winces.

"It's okay. Soon you won't feel a thing, and sleep will be, inevitable."

The needle goes in with more emphasis in the hands of Lyle. Benny vaguely recalls another lady with better bedside manner, but there's too much fog to remember her. The blood burns, an inline engine up the vein to his heart and head.

He's going down to absence of being again. Nurse Lyle fades out. As she goes, Benny accosts one final sensation.

Sickness, followed by pain. A deep rooted hurt that makes him want to hack, but the morphine sings a louder harmony. He feels fingers, warm fingers gripping his testicles, squeezing them. But, no nurse would do that. The pressure reaches fever pitch, then subsides as he whelps before drifting away.

"Don't get out of bed again. I run a tight ship."

A tight ship...

                                                                                                         ***

"Nobody does it like Nurse Janice Lyle," says Vera. Her pretty features are the first thing Benny sees each morning. The second is daylight, resplendent rays of promise through the windows of the hospital. Three days in Salem have gone by in medicated blurs.

"No dust."

"What's that, honey?" Vera seems a bit more passive today.

"You ever...look at sunlight and...how it shows how much dust is in the air? There's none here."

"We keep things sterile around here, honey. Do you need anything."

Benny shakes his head. "Bandages are nice and fit perfect this time."

Vera loses her passivity for a second. "Like I said, Nurse Lyle does it right. She redressed everything last night while you slept."

Sure enough, pain is practically gone. The left wrist and fingers are splinted well. Benny even waves the arm a bit to test it out. No loose movement, not a twinge of spasm. Benny's big head only throbs a minor drum solo this morning. There's but one problem.

"I'm hurtin' downstairs."

"Weren't messing with any of those French dames overseas, were we?" Vera removes herself from Benny's area, skips over to the other boys.

He reaches behind him to lift up the pillow and angle his upper body into a lazy man's excuse for sitting up. Grace and Vera rove soft as butterflies to the flowery beds of each veteran. They give them the  man-made nectar of pharmaceuticals, tender touches and whispered nothings. Home front wisdom says pretend the war never happened. it was all a bad dream. Benny realizes he doesn't seem to warrant the butterfly care. Sure, it's only been three days, but...

Why are these ladies so cold to me?

He watches them practically avoid Salvador. Vera changes the dressing over the engineer's eyes, but says not a word to him. Hundred and Fourth Engineers...

"Hey, Salvador."

"Mister Haskins!" Vera whispers like a cobra. "Mister Terillo needs his sleep.

"I'm awake," says Terillo. "Whaddaya know, Haskins?" 

"I seem to remember you and your guys were on the same job as me recently."

Terillo swallows. "You don't say?"

"You guys went to Neuffen a few weeks ago. I was told on my two flights my only allies were the Hundred and Fourth, trying to enter Hohenneuffen Castle from the--"

"Sir!" Vera snaps. "This infirmary demand quiet. There will be plenty of time for talk when we help you gentlemen outside later for a cigarette. You do smoke, yes?"

Benny nods. He blinks a lot, trying to figure out what Vera's problem is.

"Okay nurse. When's smoking time?

                                                                                                        ***

Aided by soft hands, Benny is guided out to the rear of the hospital, a tranquil world of bushes with an iron table and chairs from the age of Victoria. Benny slams himself into one. It's a mistake, for the hard landing reminds him of the discomfort in his lower region, shakes up his pained physique.  He's offered a Lucky Strike, not his favorite (Camel), but it does the trick after days without.

"You don't look as relieved as the other fellas when they get their drags," says Vera. Her observations are beginning to drag Benny into a foul mood.

"Ad says 'it's toasted'. Most accurate ad ever, 'cuz it tastes like Corn Flakes. Hot Corn Flakes. But what are you gonna do?" He inhales deeper. Deeper makes the cigarette taste less like breakfast cereal, so he downs the first cigarette in less than a minute and demands a second.

"Pushy, aren't we?"

He ignores Vera while sticking out his hand for the next stick. Grace comes walking out back, pushing Salvador in a slim wheelchair with a wicker seat. Salvador has his head up on high, feeling the sun he can't see.

Benny starts using his brain again. "Nobody else in the infirmary smokes?" Such a realization seems more fantastic than Martians invading the Earth.

"Just you two. We'll let you boys enjoy the day on your own. We'll be back in twenty minutes."

Her emphasis of the time gives him goose bumps. The nurses depart for the interior.

Silence wastes four minutes, but not because Benny stays quiet. His first set of questions receive no answers from Salvador.

"So, did you guys make it inside? Boy, did I see some stuff behind the walls. Black metal boxes, but unlike, you know, regular boxes. The opened in a lot of, I don't know, fingers I guess. Bunch of Krauts and other guys watching it plain as day, like it was natural. maybe they found some unused weapon? You see any of that?"

Salvador sunbathes.

"Not one of them Germans opened fire. Sure, the war was over for a long time. But I saw Krauts dressed for war and armed. I mean, no big guns, but they had Mausers."

Silence.

"Took me two flights to get there. The first was a directive. I had to land in some clearing outside of Neuffen and meet a man named Schernberg. Nice enough guy. Had the worst breath, like he ate rotten deli meats in between words. I'm fuzzy on why I had to meet him, other than a waste of my time. He didn't say anything of value, said he was from Committee on Public Information. I admit, that was the oddest bit of the whole setup. But anyway, he pointed to a castle I'd already seen from the air, told me you guys were trying a ground approach--"

"Benjamin."

"Call me Benny." Benny sees Salvador twitching in the fingers, first the thumbs before all ten quake like San Francisco. He finds it silly, a grown man with shaky hands. What's the worst an engineer could have gotten into, especially here, where the sun is vivid and the town casts a pretty shade of the home front on a man's face?

Salvador gives it a go, sort of. "These nurses, all but Lyle..." He gulps a lot after Lyle's name. "They came over here with me. The other nurses who are regulars were moved away, to Bridgeton or Camden or wherever." Just those few comments make Salvador shiver.

Benny's a bright bulb, but one usually slow to fully illuminate. "So? Military trained to take care of military wounds. Makes sense to me. They've seen it all."

"All the boys here...are from the Neuffen assignment."

"You mean the mission? Heck, what was the mission? 'Haskins, fly over the castle, see what you can see'?" Were the Krauts making a comeback? Was the Armistice gonna be ruined over what happened inside those old walls? Black boxes don't make much of a threat, no matter how they open and close."

"We can't talk about it."

Benny's taken aback. "Why not? And if they're here to watch us because of some quack assignment that lead to nothing, how did Lyle sneak in?" Saying her name makes his lower abdomen heave. Queasy. He's unsure why.

"We got inside..."

"And?" Benny's on the edge of his seat, muscles bulging, bruises flaming.

"..."

"C'mon Salvador! If you got a close visual, that makes whatever we did worthwhile. What'd you see?"

"Government keeps things from us for their own reasons, Benny. Best not to ask. Lyle, she requested to come here, knows all the top Army doctors."

"It's who you know, huh? Who cares about her anyway? What about--"

"It's more than she knows them. She and they ah...well, you're young."

Salvador has eyes in the back and sides of his head. He can feel the youth oozing out of Haskins, the limp facial muscles as Benny tries to fathom what he means but the mind grasps at air.

"You, never spent time with any of the ladies in France?"

Benny covers half his face, fakes it as taking an even bigger drag off the dead cigarette. "Well uh, see...I blush ah, easy. Don't get me wrong. I love the attention, but on the intimate stuff I get kinda nervous and...girls got to ah, laughing. I'd get sore and leave."

"Then we should discuss things you can understand, my friend. Neuffen was, is, no longer our concern. Keep quiet. Stay in your bed. Obey. You'll be fine."

Vera and Grace wander out. Their idea of twenty minutes is much shorter than the men's.

"Mister Terillo, you've had too much sun. Let's get you in bed." Vera takes the handles of the wheelchair, offers Benny a stern smile, and turns Salvador away from the light.

Grace offers her shoulders for Benny. He waves her away. "Can I enjoy the day a little longer?"

"Sure, Honey." Grace departs.

"Hey Salvador!" Benny yells, "What was in the boxes? One word'll do." His asking gets the evil eye from Vera. She makes to turn around and begin a good round of verbal abuse when--

"Arms." Salvador whispers it loudly enough to be heard, and enough to hear the terror. As soon as the words hit Benny's ears, the engineer is out of sight.

Benny rubs his gut. Slow to process, he finds the answer more confusing than helpful.

Arms? What's so bad about that? It was a war, after all.

                                                                                                       ***

Two more days of dope. Men from the CPI stop by to say hello, shake Benny's hand, and depart.

He's in and out. Out and in.

Morphine subsides in the blood. Benjamin wipes drool from his lips and returns to the waking world. The infirmary is dark. Medication kills the pain, but dulls the reflexes.

Benny sits up. All the boys are still, except one.

"Where's ah..." C'mon--wake up! "Where's Terillo?"

"Discharged while you snored us to death," one of the boys whispers. "Be quiet!"

"Discharged? He's still blind. Who got him?"

The infirmary plays deaf.

Well, Nature calls in a hurry. Benny forgets the strangeness of his stay here when Niagara calls. He sits up and stares at the metal bedpan. Okay. Fine!

He moves in the bed like a lopsided penguin, completely unsure of how this is supposed to work. Sit on it? Stand and release into it?

He opts for getting up on his knees, the pan between the thighs. Gapping the legs open is more painful than he remembers. Man! Bruised everything in the crash, or the fall, whatever! He's halfway into that thought when the dam bursts. The relief is so wonderful, he almost doesn't notice the fallout.

"Why's the bed so warm?" he mumbles aloud.

Weary eyes see a full bedpan, and the Brown Bear still going strong. He's never urinated so much, even as a kid holding it in in Miss Johnson's schoolhouse. The white sheets bare golden puddles. His knees are wet. Furious, Benny storms up of the bed, snatches the bedpan (then remembering what he has, forces a more genteel approach), and stumbles for the water closet.

"Benny!" The boys whisper shout as Haskins marches on.

Images of Lyle's militant gaze come to his mind, but this is a crisis he can easily clean up. Would she want me to lay in dirty sheets?

The door is opened. The light flicks on. Benny dumps the bedpan, rinses it clean in the sink. He finds he has to pee some more, does his duty, and departs. On the way back, he grabs some clean sheets from the shelf by the water closet door. Hobbling and hurting, he nonetheless makes the bed. Old sheets are tossed into the laundry cart. The pain makes every inch of movement seem to extend time, but he gets it done and lays back down.

Nurse Lyle enters two minutes later, making a beeline for an armless doughboy named Sulley. She strokes his ginger hair. He lays like a mannequin, never looking at her. He appears tense to Benny, who lays faking sleep. He can't think of anything except any second, Lyle will smell urine in the air like a bloodhound and give him the mommy stare.

But no. She continues whispering into Sulley's ear while he eyes the black ceiling waiting for God to strike him. Benny realizes that's his look. Fear. She's saying all the right things. you could hear a flea eat oxygen in the infirmary right then. Benny hears her.

"Only you have been a calm in my storm, little Johnny. Every word I said, you took to heart. Are you stressed?"

Johnny Sulley doesn't answer.

"Are you?"

Sulley maintains his crypt composure.

"Are you?" Her voice gets the tone, the one from the previous evening. Benny feels a slight chill. Sulley stiffens more than a petrified tree.

He nods his head.

Lyle reaches her hand under the bed sheet. Benny watches from one blurry eyeball, still faking sleep. He thinks she's checking an injury by the way Sulley lets out a groan. But the arm goes up and down. Benny finds it weird, but the eyelids are too heavy to figure it out now. Like everything else without resolve, answers will have to wait until tomorrow.

                                                                                                      ***

In his dream, Benny is crashing into the spinning earth. The Spad's motor dies in a whimper while his body screams out from the legs down. Going down! Going down...

He's up and moaning. Breathing in short, repetitive spurts, he wonders where he is, why the pain is still tangible. The infirmary is pitch dark. Boys snore, one moans. Benny's groin burns, stings and swells. He figures he must have to pee something fierce.

So, why is it so drafty.

A hard slap wakes up the infirmary, a cutting strike sending raw embers up his body. The embers fire at the speed of light, colliding into Benny's eyes to push out soft, warm tears. Where are the sheets? Why is his gown lifted up? What hit--?

"Did you think I wouldn't know what goes on in my own house?" the sergeant drone of Nurse Lyle asks. Benny can hear her voice at the end of the bed.

But he's too busy clutching his private, rolling around slowly, gnashing teeth and crying. He rolls over on his back to hide the jewels. The unseen nightmare called Lyle doesn't discriminate.

The lash cuts Benny's backside, right across the lower end of his right side. It's edge leaves a straight razor line going down. The sear is unbearable. Benny curls up, petrified fetus. He bites the blood right out of the bottom lip while the nurse marks her territory.

"Pissing the sheets like a five-year old? Grown men fight war, but come home to be babies? Not here. Not ever." The belt comes down on the backside again, making Benny flip over on to his back. Lyle tears into his hide: crotch, inner thighs, lower abdomen. Benny tries to curse her out but the teeth won't stop clenching. All that comes out is blood-dribble mumbling. On her eighth invisible swing, Benny finds his inner soldier, and lunges for the end of the bed.

He finds dark air, a right knee colliding with the brass frame in bad fashion, and a cold hand shoving him face first toward the floor. hands reach out to brace for impact, just in time to save his jaw from becoming wreckage. He's clumsy on the drugs and taped up tight. Too tight to defend, too weary for combat. The knee flares loud enough to get Benny screaming. His thighs are warm, sweat and blood trickle freely. He braces with the broken wrist, and cries aloud.

Lyle isn't done.

"Attack me? I care for you, keep you disciplined. First you get up without permission, night after night, pee on my sheets. And now. Attack me!"

Benny rolls on the floor, slow to get up. New wounds marry the old, and the newlyweds won't allow Benny to feel at ease on the wedding night.

"Just get back in bed," one of the boys whispers. "She'll stop if you say sorry and get in bed."

Embarrassment makes the face hot with flushing blood. Pain makes him unsure what body part to cradle. Before Benny can decide, he's scratching the varnish off the wood floor, sobbing more. A weight presses down between the legs. It pushes down hard, a second before corkscrewing to the right.

Benny splays out , arms and legs stretch near to tearing from the sockets. He can't take it, so words most foul roar out of his mouth. He finds the freedom to cuss like a sailor in between whimpering.

"Benny!" the boys softly yell, their sole effort at collective strength.

"Quiet." One word from the nurse ends the uprising.

Nurse Lyle digs in her heel, feeling a grown man squirm beneath her tiny foot. "What do you say?"

Benny can't even speak anymore. He's in and out of consciousness. His eyes feel swollen, freight trains are ramming against the optic nerves, stomach boils. He chokes on vomit, feels acid burns scar the throat. Inside matches outside.

"S-s-s-s......."

He thinks the heel is gone, though he's too hurt to confirm it, too whooped to move.

"Did I hear something?"

"S-s-sssrrreee." Benny rests his temple on the floor. For some reason, its cool solidity feels good against the backdrop of the fire. The body radiates outward, an unpleasant hum vibrates his legs.

"Good for you. You are trainable. Back in bed."

He barely notices the click of heels step away from him. Benny's mind utters failure from front to back. His body groans. His feelings are a moth in a spider's web, twisting every direction, finding more entanglement than escape. He can push up from the floor on the one good arm. The legs take much more coaxing, waiting. Wiggling, trembling, Benjamin Haskins stands to a crouch, head down. Lyle takes him by the arm. He jumps and lets out a frightened gulp. next to him, Benny hears the nurse inhale. He knows that sound, for he made it after every successful flight. Satisfaction.

He breathes in and out in stuttered, skipped steps. Hurt too bad front and rear, he lays on his right side and shivers. Is it from cold, or agony? He can't think about it. He can't think. A whirlpool of anxiety, white water of weakness, tidal waves of uncertainty smash reason against the rocks.

He doesn't even notice the syringe enter the vein. He flinches as Lyle applies every bandage to the new injuries, more so as thicker blankets cover his bare flesh. Many times, his breath stops dead when she touches him, when she caresses his face.

"Men get my care, Benjamin. Boys need discipline. You need to decide whether, during your time here, you'll be a man, or a boy." She rubs his bandaged head like his mother used to after reading Robert Louis Stevenson before bedtime. Benny's skin crawls from the comfort, humbled by the control.

She consoles him until the morphine incites blackness.

                                                                                                      ***

In the middle of the night, or right before dawn (he can't tell), squeaking partially alerts Benny to wake up. In the small light of a dying candle, he sees a female figure sitting up on the bed next to his. The bed makes noise. He thinks...he thinks the boy that was in the bed is still lying there. What's...? The drugs call him back home.

                                                                                                       ***

Days and nights are robotic. Benny wakes up to perfectly cooked meals of scrapple and asparagus so tender he forgets home. Sometimes he gets bacon and sunny-side-up eggs. He can barely walk. Ice is applied to his crotch every few hours. The doctor warns Benny not to get up at night again.

"The dark plays tricks on the eyes. Very easy to stumble and hit the toilet. We had that happen to a few men at our old hospital in Philadelphia. Bad move. Could ruin a man for life, and surely you'll be wanting to take on a wife one day soon. Nurse Lyle was smart years ago in insisting the boys remain in bed. You're in good hands with her."

During the checkup, he wanted to tell, to yell, to the doctor what happened. Each time, he imagined the doctor responding the same way:

Laughter. "Why didn't you fight her off, or give her what for?" More laughter. Then the boys would laugh. Worse! Nurses might overhear, an then they'd laugh at his emasculation. He felt like his limbs were getting smaller just thinking about it, the people in the infirmary growing while he shrank away to nobody.

Best to keep it bottled up, and throw that bottle into the ocean of the mind to wash up on Denial Island. Preserve what manhood remains. Yes. Solid plan.

Benny tells himself that every night Lyle comes on duty. He never speaks, never resists. Get the bandages redone. Silence. Lyle empties out his bedpan. Silence. Go out during the day, choke on tobacco Corn Flakes in silence. Get morphine. Enter Dreamland, where planes crash, Doughboys die and fight and die. Mom reads stories while baking a chicken pot pie. Dad talks about the ball game. A giant hand compresses his groin to nothing.

Eighteen days pass without issue. Aside from men in spiffy uniforms from CPI coming to ask what he saw at Neuffen, life is quiet. The question is always the same.

"Are you sure you didn't see anything out of the ordinary? We've heard about odd things from other soldiers."

Benny shakes his head no each time. The black boxes were strange, sure. But they didn't mean anything to him. And lately, he's had more personal concerns.

"Nothing? Some engineers pierced the wall. Said something rather...inconclusive. The boxes opened and closed on their own, moved in funny ways. Possibly hallucination, leftover German gas, parlor tricks. You see anything like what I'm describing?"

Head shakes no. Benny stares at his big feet, like he doesn't know them. Sure, CPI did propaganda, and should be on its way out the door with the war being over. It's insane. Madness. Madness and agony pulled from a black bottle into a wicked syringe.

Keep it quiet.

"Perfect. I think this man is going to be alright. How much longer does he have."

Doctor gives him four more weeks to confirm head injury hasn't caused memory problems, and the complete healing of the broken left wrist and fingers. The brass come and go, ask their usual questions, and leave satisfied.

Satisfaction never knocks on Benny's door.

                                                                                                      ***

In three days, Benjamin Haskins goes home. By now, Mom and Dad have driven from Pleasantville's sunny back roads to see their son quieted 'by the war', as Dad sees it. Mom suspects otherwise, but can't get Benny to crack. In three days, they'll return to pick him up. He can go to the Shore, watch ring-billed gulls in flight, oystercatchers drilling into the wet salty sand, hear baseball bats crack over home plate. Mustard seeds of renewal sprout in his heart.

Night comes, and the morphine (now in smaller doses) wears off. Benny wakes up on his back, his body convulsing lightly up and down. He panics. It must be happening again. He rubs his eyes to see the dark better. Then, he moves his hands to the sides of the bed to get up and run. The left arm hurts, but can use it now. This time, he fights back hard.

But no. His hands find no edges. They feel legs. Warm, smooth, pulsating legs. He slides his hands up and finds they're not his legs turned around and over him. Their hairless. They connect to a waist, solid and plush, that goes up and down. Each movement makes him groan. He's hot, annoyed and ecstatic all at once.

"You've been a good man of late, Benjamin." Nurse Lyle serenades Benny with her tone, and more.

He rockets up, shoving without thinking. Lyle holds on, digging nails into Benny's waist. By now, the infirmary has lost all of its boys. Only Benny remains. His body is abruptly seized by violence, numbed by a conflicting pleasure. Haskins is completely unsure what's going on, but he isn't taking it without a fight.

"Why you stupid, worthless idiot!"

"What are you doing?" He asks it in a whisper, still too scared to speak up.

"Shutup. This is what men receive for being good! Lay back and enjoy it."

Benny is smacked hard across his left cheek, more of a rending from a rabid eagle. His face heats up like sunburn. The fight in him dwindles. War trickles down to skirmish.

Lyle moves on him, over him, more like a cougar with a carcass than a woman of passion. She claws his chest, his arms. She flexes repeatedly over his groin, giving him as much angst as ecstasy.

"No..no I--"

Lyle lays her temple on Benny's, and proceeds to bite his bottom lip. She licks his chin. Before he can think, she pours on the pressure.

Benny reels, marlin on the hook. His brain thrusts one double-edged sword after another:

Never hit a woman! Give a woman what she wants.

Let the lady have her way. Defend your rights.

Be giving. Don't let anybody take anything from you you don't want taken.

The hallowed words of loving parents, of society, do more to confound than to aide. A stronger idea, a more potent adviser, knocks aside the others on the inside while Lyle rips/pleasures the outside.

Exhausted.

Benjamin turns his head to the right. He lies as still as a corpse, trying to recall happier times. But Lyle dominates there too. Lyle walks the beach, with Benny behind, smaller, ignored. Lyle ducks out of Pleasantville High School to join the war effort, a giant fourteen-year old passing for eighteen. Lyle flies a plane into battle, while Benny helplessly tells those boys around that it was really him. No one hears him. The boys die. Lyle endures. The boys. They die in the sir, on the ground. Royce Ruckman, Walter Pike, Davey Summers...

The next thing he knows, she's done. A sick, satisfied feeling strikes his gut and spreads across his body. He hears Lyle dressing. She lights a lantern, and wipes blood from Benny's skin. Bandages are placed. She washes his genitals with the care of a mother, talking the entire time.

"Despite your initial response, I suppose you performed rather well. I mean, surely I'm not your first, what with you stationed in France of all places." She's out of breath. In between the heavy panting, she makes some sort of sound. Benny convinces himself it isn't chortling.

Minutes pass while she tends to him. "I've never...I've ah..."

"You can't be serious. Tall buck like you, no takers? Amazing, especially considering your stature. Oh well. Just as well you had a real woman like me to straighten you out than those young doe-eyed trollops. Did you a favor."

She leaves him with a half a glass of water, and an aspirin on the table. Lights out.

Benny waits long into the night, certain she'll be back, regurgitated from some shadowy corner to vomit all over his emotions. As he gives in to sleep, he surrenders to sobbing. Somewhere in his head, he's sure Lyle stole something from him.

He just can't figure out what.