The miracle drug I was given was called streptomycin. I took other forms of medication, too, but I do not remember their names. In the drowsy warmth of the breeze on an August afternoon, I would sleep the sleep of the dead, with no desire to wake up.I had no dreams of the war, as though it had been airbrushed from my memory. I wrote in my notebook, If I allow myself to feel, I will drop through a hole in the bottom of my stomach and begin to fall into a place from which I will not return. If I dreamed at all, it was of my boyhood home, where I had lived with my mother and grandfather. Sometimes I dreamed of the pets we had owned, and the windmill creaking in the breeze at night, and the way the rains had returned in the form of gulley washers, our pastures blooming with bluebonnets and Indian paintbrush after years of drought.But I did not dream of the war or hear the sounds that always accompany dreams about war. Perhaps this was due to the narcotics humming in my bloodstream along with the streptomycin, although I never asked what was being put into my system.
What do You think about Wayfaring Stranger: A Novel?
