By Brett Pribble

This is Sal, strapped to a bed to keep from falling. This diapered war veteran whose words drip onto a napkin while feeding, who used to have savings, a wife, memories, who now finds himself in a room with a stranger who howls all night on the cot next to him. 

The VA wouldn’t pay for a private room, his home already sold to pay for his wife’s chemo. After three military tours and fifty years of work at the factory, here lies our hero, the nurses putting a tiny flag in a vase to commemorate him. They float up to him dressed as elves for the holiday, force food into his mouth, and change him, their faces the apparitions that haunt his days, their arms the cranes that lift him off the floor—following hours unattended and face down after falling off the sack. Merry Christmas! Happy Veteran’s Day! Please don’t make me hurt you when I change your dirty diaper! 

Here is our hero blinking in and out of existence as the TV meant to subdue him flashes with football teams he doesn’t remember, scores he loses track of—young men in uniforms grunting and growling in the mud as he once did across the ocean—himself a young man. 

When Sal departs this earth, he’ll be cremated and unclaimed, his ashes dumped in a collective grave, mixing with the ashes of many who lived the same, somewhere in the distance a flag waving.

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Brett Pribble’s work has appeared in Aquifer: The Florida Review Online, decomP, Stirring: A Literary Collection, Saw Palm, The Molotov Cocktail, Five on the Fifth, Maudlin House, Bending Genres, Bright Flash Literary Review, and other places. He is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Ghost Parachute. Follow him on Instagram/X/Bluesky @brettpribble.