About the Author David A. Bright has published stories in The Rose & Thorn, Cafe Irreal, Artisan, The Iconoclast, The Cimmerian Journal and other journals. He lives in Onset, near Cape Cod. Day Three Hundred Sixty-Six and Presidential Suite, Five Star Hotel are his first stories in Nuvein.

Finally. Three hundred sixty-six days and at last he was going home. Should’ve been three hundred sixty-five but something had gone wrong with the plane and the flight got bumped into the next day.

“I bet it was the landing gear,” he had said to no one in particular from his bunk in the barracks near the airfield. Seemed like whenever there was a problem with a plane it most always had something to do with the landing gear.

“Don’t need no fuckin landing gear,” snorted a farm boy a few bunks away. “I don’t care if that Freedom Bird lands on its fuckin belly so long as it don’t land back here. I’ll jump out the fuckin window if’n I have to.”

“The windows don’t open, you fuckin idiot!” yelled a grizzled looking guy smoking on the floor beside his bunk. He was from Louisiana and had a thin scar running diagonally across his forehead—a pre-war scar that said don’t fuck with me.

“You know what I mean, fuckface. All I wanna do is get the fuck outta here.”

“Fuckface, huh?” He slowly rose to his feet and headed towards the offender. The offender plopped off his bunk.

There was going to be a fight, a bad fight, and Dacey felt responsible. He jumped between them and held out his hands like a referee to keep them apart.

“Cool down!” he ordered, sounding like a twenty-year man instead of a simple draftee. “Both a ya! Just cool down!”

Louisiana took a drag from his cigarette and calmly blew a column of smoke at the farm boy.

“I’ll break ya in two,” muttered the hayseed, leaving off fuckface this time.

“Yeah? When’s that gonna be—right now?”

“It’s over,” Dacey said to Louisiana, ignoring the farm boy because he just plain didn’t like him. “The war’s over—for us anyhow.”

Louisiana blew more smoke at the other would-be combatant and slowly sauntered away, danger in every step.



This time all systems are go. An airman holds the terminal door open and all Dacey can see is bright hazy light. He has the notion that it is a time machine: as soon as he steps into that haze he will immediately be transported Back To The World with no recollection whatsoever of the journey. He sees himself striding through the terminal door back home to a giant celebration—a celebration which he does not want or feel he deserves, but one which he can accept—friends and family and half his entire neighborhood letting out a big cheer underneath a Christmas-y red and green banner that says Welcome Home and it feels like Christmas, yes it does.

Two pretty, round eyed stewardesses smile at him as he enters the plane. They are wearing red lipstick and are dressed in blue and white uniforms. They do not look real. They look like muted American flags in the shape of the girl next door. He sits at a window seat halfway down waiting for takeoff so he can watch that nasty, unearthly little country fade into the distance.
Louisiana is sitting in front of him. He turns and looks at Dacey sideways. “When we get airborne, man,” he drawls, “I’ll buy ya’ll a beer.”

Just then a high pitched crack-crack-crack pierces the air at the front of the plane, accompanied by shouting. Dacey instinctively ducks. If he were still a New Kid he might have thought it was firecrackers for the celebration but this is not fireworks—this is the all too familiar sound of the AK-47. More crack-crack-cracks. More shouting. Is it a tape recording? A dream? This can’t be, can’t be. He quickly peeks out into the aisle and catches a glimpse of a pretty stewardess slumping to the floor, bright red blood on her blue and white uniform. Louisiana slides into the aisle and low crawls forward. Dacey follows, scared as hell but something has to be done or they’ll all be dead. In the commotion they have somehow come across M-16s. Maybe they were under the seats, he doesn’t remember, but now he is slithering up the aisle with his rifle locked and loaded, black plastic toylike steel but deadly. He hears others in the aisle behind him. Can’t shoot, can’t shoot yet because might hit another stewardess or the pilot if they’re not already dead, or another GI. The muzzle of an AK—so thin and quiet that it might not be real—pokes around the corner near the front exit It is quickly followed by a small VC with a dirty green bandanna. Pop pop! Timing it perfectly, Louisiana fires off a couple of rounds and the VC is down. Another muzzle appears and then disappears. They are on their feet now, running past the dead VC, past both stewardesses, bloody and mannequinlike on the floor. Past the captain laying on his back part way out the cockpit door, dark red hole in his forehead, mouth gaping open. A half dozen VC are backing towards the nearby buildings, firing as they go. Louisiana and Dacey clank down the rollaway metal stairs and spray M-16 fire at them. Two of them crumple to the pavement. More clanking behind them. Thank God. Finish them off, finish them off so things can return to normal. If they do it quickly it will seem like this never happened. The stewardesses and the captain will be okay. It will all have been just a little daymare. He must have nodded off a little. Do not nod off. Do not nod off until the plane is in the clouds. Blood spreads on the shoulder of Louisiana’s jungle fatigues but he keeps charging. Someone coming up beside Dacey grunts and falls. Dacey has no idea whether or not he himself has been hit. He and Louisiana and one or two others chase the remaining VC across the airfield and spread out between the low wooden buildings. He hears the pop-pop-pop of an M-16 beside him so he knows he will not be fighting the gooks alone. Windows break and M-16 fire spits out. The AK fire intensifies. More VC! yells a voice in his head. More VC! He worries that the GIs firing from the building will hit him by mistake. He frantically ejects the magazine, jams another one in and fires at the corner that a VC just disappeared behind. AK and M-16 fire is all around now. He is in hell. This is a dirty trick. Will he ever wake up? Any second now a round eyed stewardess will sweetly ask if he wants a coke or a beer and he will roll his head against the comfortable seatback cushion and look into her eyes and…


The fighting escalates and there is no clear victor yet. Dacey becomes separated from the GI who was at his shoulder and finds himself against the inside corner of an L-shaped building. A squad of NVA rushes directly in front of him clutching AKs and yelling at one another in their harsh, evil tongue as if not sure what to do. In the commotion and in their haste, they do not see him. He raises his rifle and points it at their backs. Should he fire? Should he fire? There is not much time. If he shoots them in the back will it be the honorable thing to do? If he shoots but misses some the remaining ones will surely kill him. If he doesn’t shoot he will live, at least for now. He wills his finger to pull the trigger but the finger does not obey.

Years later he sits in a healing circle at a psychiatric hospital. It is one of those semi-plush, insurance scam facilities that are more hotel than hospital, where the food is good and the groups are poor. But this is a new group led by a Native American woman with long black ponytail who does not know that the place is a sham. She has brought a large gray and white eagle feather with her and according to custom it is being passed counterclockwise around the circle. Two dozen people sit patiently in the circle. The person holding the feather speaks of healing, or good things, of bad things, and no one else speaks until the feather is passed to the next person.

There are rope burns on his neck. He does not cover them up so they are there for all to see. The feather is three people to his left and he has no idea what he is going to say. There are so many things he could talk about. He could talk about why he is here. He could talk about the pain his wife has caused him. He could talk about wartime. He could talk about the absence of feeling.

The feather is passed to a promiscuous nineteen-year-old girl who immediately begins crying. Her face contorts and her words come out as squeaks. She says she is promiscuous because her mother died and left her when she was twelve. A woman passes a tissue down to her. She dabs her eyes, wipes her nose. “But I forgive you Mom,” she cries, shaking. “I forgive you.”

She passes the feather to Nick, a precise, soft spoken Italian who concisely tells his story: after selling a computer graphics program to Microsoft for half a million dollars, he walked out the front door of his big suburban house one fine morning, looked at the bright blue sky and declared: “This is a good day to die.”

He goes on and on about his medications, how one works with another to correct the chemical imbalance in his brain, about the advantages and disadvantages of one compared to another. He spends much more time on the medications that on the problem itself.

He passes the feather to Dacey. Dacey twirls it five or six times, then taps it against the index finger of his left hand.

“A good day to die,” he repeats, as if thinking out loud.

He thinks of Day Number Three Hundred Sixty-Six and chuckles wryly inside: Maybe the gooks should’ve been medicated. Maybe I should’ve been medicated. He tells the story of that day. It is the first time he has ever told the full story to anyone.


He is explaining how his finger would not move. It was supposed to move without hesitation but had been frozen in an Ice Age right there in the unforgiving hundred degree heat, had been broken splintered petrified so that it was impossible for it to move.

“I had been trained to pull the trigger,” he says to the faces in the circle. “It was my duty to pull the trigger. I told myself to do it. I imagined I was someone else but still couldn’t do it. And then they were gone. Around the corner.”

He rubs his unshaven jaw. It feels like sandpaper.

“A few bursts of those crack-crack-cracks and pop-pop-pops came from where they had run,” he says slowly, looking at the floor now. “It sounded like it came from a movie.”

He rubs his hands together, interlocks his fingers and cracks his knuckles. “When the shooting stopped, I got down into low crawl position, edged to the corner and peeked around.”

He twirls the feather some more. The circle waits.

“The NVA were gone, except for one, laying on his back, dead.”

There is a sharp intake of breath from a middleaged woman across the circle.

“Two GIs lay a little ways away. They were frozen dead in low crawl position.”

He pauses, toys with the feather. “One of them still had his rifle in his hands. I stared and stared. I wanted to die. I wanted to wake up. I wanted to go back in the time machine.”

He rubs his whiskers some more, then holds his hand still on his jaw. “The two GIs were Louisiana and the farm boy,” he says in a monotone.

“Oh!” exclaims the middleaged woman. She covers her mouth.

“If I had pulled the trigger they’d be alive today.”

Tears are rolling down his cheeks. He cannot stop them. He has not cried since he was in Kindergarten. Someone to his right hands him a tissue but he does not take it.

“What am I supposed to do?” he suddenly shouts. “What the hell am I supposed to do?”


After the last person speaks, the Native American woman says she will take the feather out to the woods and bury it according to tradition. She asks everyone to stand, hold hands and close their eyes while she sings a closing prayer. The prayer is in her native tongue. Her voice has been transformed into that of an ancient medicine man standing on an echo-y mountaintop centuries and centuries ago. Though Dacey cannot understand a single word, the sound reverberates inside his flesh and his bones and fills his soul. Each time the voice pauses he hopes it is not the end, and is cheered when it continues. He wants this song to go on forever and ever.

He smiles gently to himself at the irony of it all: on the one hand he feels a little embarrassed to be holding hands in a circle with a bunch of mental patients in a mental hospital while an Indian woman sings God-knows-what, but on the other hand he feels weightless.