{"id":1332,"date":"2014-09-04T07:30:06","date_gmt":"2014-09-04T07:30:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.perilousadventures.net\/blog\/?p=1332"},"modified":"2014-09-05T09:01:02","modified_gmt":"2014-09-05T09:01:02","slug":"four-pandemic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.perilousadventures.net\/blog\/?p=1332","title":{"rendered":"Four (pandemic)"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Australian<\/a>
Australian troops in the advance trenches, ca. 1917. John Oxley Library. State Library of Queensland. Neg 194809.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

When the war was over, I thought I was done with grieving. Don came home and, though he wasn\u2019t quite the man I\u2019d seen off two years earlier, he was still my Don. I just had to look a little harder to see him sometimes. Or tease him a little more before he\u2019d shuck off his dark mood and sparkle. Once he\u2019d put away his uniform and taken a few showers–once he\u2019d washed with strong soap and eaten a few good meals\u2014he smelled like my Don again. My likely lad. Warm and sweet and good.<\/p>\n

Beth\u2019d climb up on his lap and tuck herself into his embrace. She was just that size, you know; her body fit between his lap and his chin. She\u2019d sit there, frowning at his newspaper as if she knew her letters as good as he did.<\/p>\n

I\u2019d untethered something in myself when he came home. Let myself believe he was immortal. That we all were. That\u2019s how we\u2019d felt before the war; that\u2019s what we returned to afterwards. The world was ours–the future, too–and all its bright offerings.<\/p>\n

When they died\u2014first Beth and then Don\u2014I felt more anger than grief. I wanted to write the war office and tell them they\u2019d done us wrong. It wasn\u2019t right to bring him home only to have him die of flu. Better to have left him in Europe with the others. Better to have been left with the\u00a0idea of him heading home someday\u00a0than have him here, not two streets from our house, buried in such ordinary, unforgiving ground.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When the war was over, I thought I was done with grieving. Don came home and, though he wasn\u2019t quite the man I\u2019d seen off two years earlier, he was still my Don. I just had to look a little harder to see him sometimes. Or tease him a little more before he\u2019d shuck off…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1333,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[167,288],"tags":[722,727,731,728,732,730],"class_list":["post-1332","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-on-writing","category-short-works","tag-200-days","tag-200-words","tag-great-war","tag-microfiction","tag-spanish-influenza","tag-world-war-one"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.perilousadventures.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/09\/Australian-troops-in-the-advance-trenches.jpg?fit=1000%2C643&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4LH1G-lu","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.perilousadventures.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1332","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.perilousadventures.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.perilousadventures.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.perilousadventures.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.perilousadventures.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1332"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.perilousadventures.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1332\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1340,"href":"https:\/\/www.perilousadventures.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1332\/revisions\/1340"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.perilousadventures.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1333"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.perilousadventures.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1332"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.perilousadventures.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1332"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.perilousadventures.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1332"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}