Prompt: On their first day, everyone is assigned a brother, to encourage unity, they say. Your task is to protect one-another, if he goes down, so do you. You take one look at your new brother and consider just giving up right there.
Prompt credit: writing-prompt-s.tumblr.com
I hate him. He has been a jerk for as long as I can remember. He is an ugly stupid piece of shit. I wish he would die.
The last time I saw him was last year, he was in my room. He had a beanie eon his head and he was passed out on my bed with a joint in one hand and a bottle of whiskey in the other. I took both of them away from him, and I put the joint on the ashtray to keep it from burning my fucking house down. He was drunk as hell. I had seen him like this before. He wouldn’t get better. I pity him.
My room had a 70’s vibe to it. It was like a psychedelic band or something. I had a Jimi Hendrix poster on the wall above the bed. There were beads on the wall. Of course, this was weird, because I was born in 1997. I wasn’t alive for any of this. My parents just indulged me in this sort of culture that I had no idea about. I learned that way. That’s what I liked. That’s what I was trained to like. I think that this happens with most people.
I think that this person is going to drag me down more than I can imagine. He is weak in body and mind. He takes every chance he can to take jabs at people, and he is always joking, you can’t take him seriously, even when he is trying to be serious. I don’t want to talk about him much more, but there is so much more to say.
He does drag me down. In my personal experience with him, he has done not much more. It seems as though it might actually be his “primary” function. He doesn’t know it, but he hurts people when he does this. I have been in compromising situations with this man, and he had caused them.
Maybe I’m not giving enough background about this guy. His name is Josh. He grew up right here in Achilles. He sure can be seen as a trouble maker. He always used to be a fun guy to be with because he would always do the weirdest stuff when he was around people. Especially if he was around someone that was unknown to him. He would act the strangest that he could. It seems like he was showing off, but now that I look back, it was probably just that he was nervous. I think that he was a good guy, but he would always just rub me the wrong way.
One time, in grade school, he put a piece of dog shit in my drink, and I realized it was in there when I went to take a drink. I was mad, but he didn’t know that he had done something to make me mad. He thought it was just a joke that should be seen as harmless to me. I took great offense to having dog shit in my glass, though. I find it quite bad to have dog shit in my drink. It is not exactly ideal for me to have dog shit in my glass. I do not very well like to drink dog shit.
Sorry, I was trying to make a joke.
I don’t like the guy too much. He always seems to be pretty hostile, despite the fact that he tries to avoid confrontation. I think he puts on this tough guy persona, just because he’s not comfortable with himself. He tries to not show it, but he is. I know it. Other people know it. He’s unstable and that’s the thing here. You can’t be unstable. If you’re unstable, you’re fucked. You die. You get shot. You try to go. You can’t.
The last time I had a suicidal thought was in my teens. I was an edgelord. I would talk about suicide like it was no big deal, but it was something that affected me on a daily level. When I don’t feel totally sure about something, or someone called me an asshole, or I was told something mean by a family member, I would be depressed for the rest of the day. I would think about suicide excessively. I would avoid friends and family for the rest of that day.
He was still suicidal. The last time he told me he was suicidal was a couple days ago. I think the worst part about it is that he tried to brush it off like it was no big deal. I think he was in a lot of pain, but he was really shitty, so it was probably his fault.
He walked in the room and sat down on his bed. Our boot camp was 3 days long. This was because there was an intensive war going on. They had to call a major draft. I would be lucky if I could make it through the war. They had better weapons that we did and everything. It was terrifying. I was thinking about death. Nothing happens after you die. I don’t want to think
that, but I do.
Josh was not phased by the fact he may die within the next few days, because in some sick and twisted way, that’s what he wanted. He was insane. I don’t know how he passed the psychological test to get in this military. I think that the country stopped caring at some point. They just needed people to die. That’s what we were here for. I knew it. It was always true. We were here to shoot off a couple rounds and die before we were 21.
Josh lit a blunt. I was grateful they were made legal. I needed to ease my mind. I was ready to take anything that would stop me from having to think. I needed to stop thinking.
The smoke was smooth. It felt nice. He talked to me about death, “It doesn’t matter. We were probably going to die back in Achilles anyways.”
“It absolutely does matter, man,” I said after I took a hit, “we would have at least made it to the legal drinking age anyways.”
“Nah man. We were fucked long before now.”
I knew this. Achilles is a shitty city. There were shootings all the fucking time. I guess when the government tries to give you only a few rights, but not as many as other countries, there is bound to be a revolt. I think that I should have started that, but instead, I’m sitting in a room, smoking a “peace pipe” while I think about death.
I was bound to die. I am always bound to die. I can’t live. I can’t live on the battlefield.
We shipped off after boot camp. It was the most rushed thing that I have done in my life. We basically were just taught how to shoot, how to unjam, and how to kill. We were showed how to operate heavy machinery. I learned fast. I had to learn for my job. I was an engineer at my local body shop. I think that I should have stayed at my job or something like that, because I hated this.
The battlefield was relentless. I had a pack of joints in my cap. It was pressing against my skull like a helmet that is way too tight for you to be wearing on your head. I was trying to get myself to a point that I wouldn’t get shot in. They had everyone rush out of the ship like we were getting ready to rush out on normandy beach, but in all actuality it was just Mexico.
We were trying to invade. We wanted the rest of it. The rest of the world. It wasn’t enough to try and get the government to pay for the wall we build. We took it a couple steps further. We had already taken Europe. We wanted all of it. Everything.
America became the biggest superpower in the world when we made a treaty with Canada and Russia, saying that we could all be one country, that we decided to call “The Confederacy.” Little did they know that combined, we were completely unstoppable to take over the rest of the world. The war started with Tijuana, and moved further and further south from there. We kept taking land. It was a total invasion.
We were in Baja, California. We wanted the tail. It would be great, that was one of their only sources of income. It would destroy their economy to lose that. It would devastate them.
I rushed behind a larger rock than most of the other rocks on the desert ground. It was near barren. The perfect battlefield. Josh stayed close to me. I thought he would. He couldn’t try to go on his own. He would get shot faster than he would if he followed literally anyone else. I took a drink from my flask. I wasn’t going to die sober. The whiskey tasted like shit. It was the cheap shit. I paid 12 dollars for the entire bottle. At least it would get me drunk.
When he got next to me, I was sure he would die. It seemed, though, like somehow there was no way for that to happen. They were operating heavy machine guns on top of the hill. It was hard, but they could just barely hit the ship.
We ran closer, to the next cover. Then the next. It seemed like they weren’t shooting any actual troops.
The the foot soldiers came.
We shot and shot and shot, but it wasn’t enough. They were relentless.
I wasn’t taken hostage. I was shot. Both legs. I was getting ready to die. I did die.
I’m dead.