Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers

please don’t let the world be always slipping from me,” and leaving the bright fires and laughter, leaving the rings of cars in fields, passing through the center of the circles that the headlights made, stumbling into the underbrush where they’d feel the balled fist of their loneliness grip some bone inside their chest like it was the slightest and most brittle bone God ever made, after all this, I dropped into a drunken sleep. I dreamed of the wood planks on my mother’s porch, the warmth of the sun they held long after sunset, lying there on the warm wood in the cool air thinking only of the sound of the bullfrogs and cicadas on the water, hoping I would dream only of that sound.
    And then I was there, simply and without qualification. I sat with my cheeks in my hands out by the smoking area, distracting myself by counting the wads of chewing gum that dotted the concrete, when the sound of a motor approached. I did not raise my eyes. It took her hands on my face to rouse me from my preoccupations.
    She pressed hard into the hollows of my cheeks and then stepped back. “Oh, John,” she said. Again she advanced and grabbed me hard around my waist. Her hands pushed and rubbed my body. She patted down the front of my uniform and brought her hands back to my face and she pressed down again. I could see that her hands were a little more wrinkled than I recalled, thin bones seen even from the palm side. Had it only been a year? Her grasp was firm, and she touched me hard as if to prove I was not a fleeting apparition. She touched me as though it was the last time she might.
    I pulled her hands from my face and held them together out in front of me. “I’m fine, Ma,” I said. “Don’t make a scene.”
    She began to cry. She didn’t keen or bellow, she just said my name over and over again, “Oh John, oh John, oh John, oh John.” When I took her hands from against my cheeks she wrenched one loose and slapped me hard across the mouth and tears welled up in my eyes and I laid my head on her chest. I had to reach down to do it because she was small. She held me there and kept repeating my name, saying, “Oh, John, you’re home now.”
    I don’t know how long we stood there like that, with me hunching down to be embraced, but I forgot the sounds of the motor and the people walking past, I forgot the travelers who called out their thanks to me. I was aware of my mother and of her alone. I felt as if I’d somehow been returned to the singular safety of the womb, untouched and untouchable to the world outside her arms around my slouching neck. I was aware of all this, though I am not sure how. Yet when she said, “Oh, John, you’re home,” I did not believe her.
    It wasn’t a particularly long ride home in her old Chrysler over the interstate. Half an hour or so. In that time I found myself making strange adjustments to the landscape. We passed over the World War II Veterans Memorial Bridge, which spanned the James, and I stared out at the broad valley below. The sun coming up and a light the color of unripe oranges fell and broke up the mist that hung in the bottomland.
    I pictured myself there. Not as I could be in a few months swimming along the banks beneath the low-slung trunks and branches of walnut and black alder trees, but as I had been. It seemed as if I watched myself patrol through the fields along the river in the yellow light, like I had transposed the happenings of that world onto the contours of this one. I looked for where I might find cover in the field. A slight depression between a narrow dirt track and the water’s edge became a rut where a truck must have spun its wheels for a good long while after a rain and I saw that it would grant good cover and concealment from two directions until a base of fire could be laid down which would allow us to fall back.
    “You all right, hon?” my mother said. No one was in the field. Certainly I was not. Her voice gave me a start, and I fell back into