William Peaverton

William Peaverton drove home in the languid summer afternoon, a briefcase filled with newspaper articles that needed editing before the weekend in the passenger's seat beside him. Every day he was forced to pass that ugly tract of dirt where the old oak tree once stood, before it was chopped down for the ring road years earlier. The money for that road, however, never materialized, yet the reminder of Augustine's sin still remained.

When he was a child, William remembered himself and his friends playing outside under its lofty branches in the summer air, the sweat shining under the brightness of daylight in the humid heat. He felt those better times turn to mockery each time he saw that empty lot which desecrated his memories of summers past.

A few blocks away from home, William spotted children playing under a water hose spraying into the sky, diving into the mud beneath them and wrestling with one another as the day sunk to dusk and their parents returned home. Through his open car window, he could hear their play-fighting in the drizzle of garden water in the summer soundscape drenched in the mating cries of cicadae.

Only when immersed in nostalgia would William's memories of the war completely disappear: the crashing of artillery shells, boys punctured by bullet wounds, the deaths of friends standing right beside him. At one time those remembrances would rend at his gut every time he recalled even the slightest about them. However, age and experience had made them tolerable--not because the memories should be tolerable but because he knew men had to bear them or die.

As he finally parked in the driveway, he looked in the car mirror, into his tired dark brown eyes.