Flash Fiction Contest Second Place Winning Entry

Second Place – George Bowden, Third on a Match

Marlboro. Barton lit up another and passed the lighter to Thomas.

Crazy. Smokin’ a Lucky Strike. Chest exploded before he exhaled.

The last whisps from Charlie’s Camel blurred the setting sun.

“Hunter, you waiting for an invitation?” His sergeant, a bulldog who relished the scars of too many fights, growled, “Get your butt over here, or I’m gonna kick it to the goddammed Yalu River.”

Charlie joined his squad; with oversized fatigues and dirty faces, they looked like a grenade-toting Boy Scout troop.

The sergeant pointed to a North Korean prisoner, “Hunter, you guard this asshole.”

The sergeant nodded down the hill toward a slum of three tin-topped shacks and looked at the other Marines. “You boys have work to do. And I promise -- there’s no mama-san waiting for you down there.

“Don’t worry. If you don’t come back, we’ll pick up your bodies in the morning.” Fuckin’ lunatic. Charlie knew he’d be a dead man if the thought reached his lips.

The Marines found the prisoner in a gully. They saw his hands in the air, then watched him stand up, as timid as a zit-faced boy asking a gun-toting prom queen for a dance.

He’s maybe a little older than me. Tall for a Korean. Probably the son of a hooker who took a sailor’s last five yen.

Charlie motioned him toward a downed tree in the brush. He sat on a stump, facing the prisoner.

“That sergeant is a lunatic,” Charlie complained, confident his words were meaningless to the prisoner.

“He enlisted with a high school friend right after Pearl Harbor. Lost it at Iwo Jima when he found his buddy gutted in a cave. Grabbed a flamethrower. Took out three machine guns before the medics caught him, Shot him up with morphine, took him back to the beach.

The prisoner drew random patterns in the dirt.

Charlie pulled an Emma’s Diner menu from his pocket and held it up to the dimming sunlight. He scanned the Black Knights’ football schedule on the back and traced his finger across the calendar.

“We’re playing Forestburg tonight. District champs. We can take ‘em. What am I doing here? My senior year, and I’m stuck in Korea. I go from running over linebackers to running from snipers. A good season this year, and I’d be playing at UVA or West Virginia next year.”

The prisoner chuckled. “Our backs at USC are twice your size. You wouldn’t stand a chance playing college ball.”

Charlie jumped on the comment as it if was a fumble.

“Are you kidding me? I’d blow through … what the hell?”

The prisoner laughed as if he’d just said checkmate. “I was a freshman at USC last year.

The Japanese ruled Korea for decades. A few years ago, they started sending my friends to Tokyo to work in the mines. My parents sent me to live with an uncle in the United States. When the war started, I came back to Pyongyang to find my parents. Two soldiers grabbed me on the street; I ended up in a uniform. Name is Chan-woo. In the States, ‘Johnny W.’”

Charlie shook his head and smiled as if he’d lost his last dollar in a rigged shell game.

“So,” Charlie asked, “USC going to the Rose Bowl this year?”

“I wish. The Golden Bears will be back there again.”

They parried until almost dawn. Elizabeth Taylor or Jayne Mansfield … Sugar Ray against Marciano … Rosemary Clooney or Doris Day … Yankees vs. Phillies … Mitchum or Lancaster … ’49 Mercury convertible or the new Cadillac V-8?

In the dusk, they walked down the hill and stopped for a smoke next to one of the burntout shacks, its embers a warm break from the morning’s finger-numbing chill.

The sergeant walked another prisoner past them, his .45 at the prisoner’s ear, nudging him toward the remaining shack. They disappeared around the corner. “Boom!”

The sergeant stepped back onto the trail, holstering his pistol.

“Gotta smoke, Hunter?”

“I’m out,” Charlie mumbled.

The sergeant stopped, “He was trying to escape.”

“Yeah, with a .45 at the back of his head.”

“Grow up, boy. This ain’t the senior prom and that gook there ain’t your cruisin’ buddy. You keep your mouth shut and take him to headquarters … Or it’ll look like both of you were trying to run.”

Johnny W. looked away, up the hill overlooking the shacks. A quick glint caught his eye. He smiled and pulled three Camels from his shirt pocket and lit one for himself. He handed two cigarettes and the Zippo lighter to Charlie. Charlie lit one and exhaled. Johnny W. nodded, and Charlie passed the Zippo and the last cigarette to his sergeant.

The sergeant placed the cigarette in his mouth, opened the lighter and rolled the flint wheel. The Camel flared.

Charlie stared stone-faced into the sergeant’s eyes. He pulled the bolt back on his M-1, checked the clip and snapped the bolt shut. The sergeant dropped his hand to his pistol.

Charlie spat, “You fuckin’ lun…” – A sharp crack echoed from the top of the hill. The sergeant’s body slammed to the ground, the cigarette smoldering in the blood pooling next to him.

The sniper’s next shot pinged the dirt next to Charlie’s heel. Johnny W. pushed him behind the shack. Johnny W. knew the rules about snipers. Leaning against the wall, he smiled at

Charlie, “Guess that sergeant was unlucky number three.”