Bound 1
Story Vignettes
Twilight
Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that.
– Black Elk
Twilight
Blocked
When I first met Jay, I thought he was an asshole—but that’s just because he was everything I wasn’t: outgoing and loud; 6’3” with a beefy build; a terrible Boston accent that defied his intelligence; had all the right things to say, especially to girls; and eventually found the right woman and settled down and had a baby girl. It was during SFQC (Special Forces Qualification Course) that I found out how very not true the whole asshole-thing was—that he really was a brother.
So, what do you when a mission goes bad and your brother is injured with burns over most of his body, and he’s lying on a stretcher writhing in pain, with charred skin peeling and collapsing, and a face that’s unrecognizable ‘cause it’s blistered and swollen...
Twilight
Mirage
Behind the removable closet walls in my bedroom as a child there was a whole other magnificent world, one with endless amounts of ice cream and a pool that had a slide—at least that’s what I told myself when I lay in bed at night. It’s funny what the mind can do to make life different than how it is, how you want it to be.
I wanted it to be just as it was on Christmas day 2004—when I hadn’t yet boarded the plane in Phuket to head to Manhattan for an “emergency” meeting with my editor the following morning, back when my husband and seven-year-old daughter hadn’t yet been swallowed up by the towering “black wave” that decimated the west coast of northern Sumatra in the wake of a 9.1 magnitude earthquake...
Twilight
Hollow
I decided to go to Africa because I wanted to make a difference. I guess that’s what you do when you’re young and idealistic. Money didn’t matter to me; neither did power. If they had, I would have taken my elite international relations degree and gotten a consulting job in DC or London. Instead, I joined a humanitarian organization as a relief worker and set off for one of the regions being ravaged by genocide.
Nothing can prepare you for seeing mass slaughter or mass starvation. Bodies so distorted that they no longer look recognizable. Famine so widespread that people eat bark from the trees and worms from the ground. Desperation so devastating that women, rather than men, go out into the woods to collect firewood, because sexual assault by roaming gangs is preferable to death...
Twilight
Impotent
I remember as a little girl, staring at the dark, walnut urn that held my father’s ashes, thinking, “I want to save lives too.” He was a fighter pilot in the Vietnam War—shot down on his last trip back to the base after flying all day through enemy fire to recover soldiers who had been wounded.
I opted for medical school instead of the military. I guess I didn’t think the hospital would be a combat zone. Only it is—or, more recently, it has become one.
Every day I go into battle… Like with the wife of a man who had complex ALS, who was grasping for air, after years of being mute and immobile, clearly scared, and unable to control his functions...